The Kuchars
- 1965Sins of the Fleshapoids
- 1966Hold Me While I'm Naked
- 1960I Was a Teenage Rumpot
Echoed in
- Pink Flamingos1972
Twins from the Bronx who made lurid Hollywood melodramas on 8mm, starring friends and neighbours, and gave John Waters the nerve to make his own.
George and Mike Kuchar were born in Manhattan on 31 August 1942, George an hour after Mike, and grew up in the Bronx. They got an 8mm camera for their twelfth birthday and began shooting melodramas in their mother's apartment, cast with friends and a neighbour's middle-aged mother. Their surviving 8mm work together runs from The Naked and the Nude (1957) to Lust for Ecstasy (1964).
In the mid-1960s they moved to 16mm and began making films apart. Mike paid for Sins of the Fleshapoids (1965) out of his wages as a photo retoucher. George paid for Hold Me While I'm Naked (1966) with unemployment cheques, and it came 52nd in the Village Voice critics' poll of the century's best films in 2000.
George taught filmmaking at the San Francisco Art Institute from 1971 for four decades, and from 1985 he made dozens of video diaries, including Weather Diaries shot on yearly storm-chasing trips to El Reno, Oklahoma. He died in San Francisco in 2011. Mike moved to the city for good in 2007 and has kept making films and videos. John Waters wrote the introduction to their 1997 memoir, Reflections from a Cinematic Cesspool, and said their films gave him the confidence to believe in his own "tawdry vision".
Films
Where to start with The Kuchars, in the order they were made. Runtimes are approximate.
Still from I Was a Teenage Rumpot to come. I Was a Teenage Rumpot
Billed as a documentary about three ordinary people, Arline, Edie and Harry, played by people the twins knew, Edith Fisher among them. The brothers were eighteen when they made it.
Still from Sins of the Fleshapoids to come. Sins of the Fleshapoids
Mike's film. In a far future where lazy humans leave all work to androids, the robot Xar kills his master and falls for the android Melenka, and the two produce a baby robot. Nobody speaks: the dialogue appears in big comic-strip speech balloons.
Still from Hold Me While I'm Naked to come. Hold Me While I'm Naked
George's film. He plays a lonely, frustrated director whose leading lady walks off over the nude scenes, and the film's centrepiece is a love scene in a shower. He rewrote it after his real lead actress left partway through the shoot, and paid for it with unemployment cheques.
Echoed in
Where the Kuchars' ideas turned up next.