 Garbage Director Peter Byck |
a film writer, it’s all too easy to float the comment that there’s a lot of crap out there these
days, but that doesn’t render it any less a truism. Sure, Macaulay Culkin’s
career is as dead and bloated as a beached manatee and Pauly Shore’s finally
found a worthy home on the idiot box, but of late, even such things as the
highbrow class of Ismael Merchant/James Ivory pictures haven’t nailed me to my
seat.
So what to do about all this cinematic flotsam that assails us? Well, one
place to look these days is the indie film scene, which, not surprisingly, is
offering far more palatable examples of guerrilla filmmaking than its Hollywood
counterparts.
In a ridiculously telling example of the old saying, “one man’s trash is
another man’s treasure,” Los Angeles filmmaker Peter Byck has willfully set out
to create a fake documentary (titled — what else? — Garbage) examining
the American obsession (or non-obsession) with trash. And by trash, we don’t
mean Jean-Claude Van Damme movies, either.
From their mutual hometown of Louisville, Kentucky, Byck and co-writer/actor
Derich Wittliff drove through the dumps of Mississippi to Louisiana’s famed
“cancer alley,” and, after stopping briefly at Austin’s own Black Cat Lounge,
they wound up back in L.A. with enough footage to piece together one of the
most original and socially conscious documentaries since Michael Moore took on
Roger Smith in Roger & Me.
Shot entirely on Canon Hi-8 video (“pretty much for economic reasons,” says
Byck), Garbage follows the meandering tale of Jimmy (Wittliff), a
down-on-his-luck Louisville janitor who decides to pack up his broom and head
to Nashville to pursue a musical career. Accompanying and documenting his
travels is Bob, a young independent filmmaker (the offscreen voice of Kirby
Mitchell) who’s far more interested in sanitation problems along the way than
he is in Jimmy’s musical abilities. According to Byck, Bob’s obsession with
society’s detritus parallels his own.
“Basically, at the very beginning of the film, there’s a little monologue
[about the narrator’s infatuation with trash], and that’s pretty much
autobiographical for me. My mom really would stop the car on these country
roads and we’d get out and pick up the trash. I was raised in the late Sixties,
and they were like, “Littering is bad!” My mom’s a maniac about that
stuff. She currently has this campaign in Louisville to try and ban all
billboards. She hates ’em.”
Byck’s childhood refuse experiences came in handy when devising this original
documentary about America’s collective infatuation with all things trashy. But
the real inspiration for Garbage was the gruntwork Byck performed as
part of his duties in various film industry entry-level production-assistant
jobs.
“I was a PA on a lot of films in the mid-Eighties, and so of course I was
cleaning up a lot of sets. I worked craft services [meal catering] on my very
first film, and that job is really the strangest combination because you’re
putting out food and you’re picking up garbage (and they don’t usually have
sinks to wash your hands).”
Any noteworthy PA/trash collection jobs?
“Well, I was an assistant to the producer on A Fish Called Wanda, but I
didn’t get to pick up any trash for that one….”
One of the most interesting (not to mention innovative) things about Byck’s
film is the fact that both he and Wittliff (nephew of Austin screenwriter Bill
Wittliff) eschewed the notion of a shooting script for Garbage before
starting out. The film was shot entirely on the fly as the two roamed from town
to town without a solid idea of where the storyline would go next.
“Oh yeah,” says Byck. “We would be driving to the next town trying to figure
out how the character of Jimmy had left the last town, you know? We had to
figure out that problem first because we’d have to address it as soon as we
arrived and began shooting in the next town.
“We didn’t have any script, we didn’t know the garbage problem going into any
town. We just got there, and usually it was all on the front page of the paper,
and we’d just call those people involved. That’s how it all came together. It
was really easy, actually. It was serendipity at its best.”
In addition to the film having no set script, it had no actors… or at least
not any who had been contacted in advance. With Garbage, what you see is
what you get.
Byck describes how “people would just come up to us and say, `What are you
guys doing?’ We’d tell them we were making a movie and ask if they wanted to be
in it and pretty much everyone said, `Sure, why not?’
“Everyone’s real in this film,” he continues. “No clones. There are a
couple of people playing for us in a particular scene, but no real
actors were involved other than Derich’s character Jimmy, who was more or less
added in after the fact. For me, the theme of him and the garbage was there all
along, but as we were filming we were also getting better [at the tricks of]
filmmaking, so there aren’t a whole lot of scenes in which Jimmy interacts with
the documentary people. That all occurred in the editing process, making that
illusion happen. People come to me and say, `when Jimmy met so-and-so’ or `when
Jimmy’s talking to so-and-so,’ and he’s not. The audience puts that
together because the narration says so. It worked cool. I was very happy about
that.”
Although the film fits perfectly with today’s sensibilities about the
“greening” of America and everyday practices such as recycling, Garbage,
actually, was begun over six years ago.
“We started in 1989, the initial two-month road trip, and then worked on
piecemeal stuff for the next two years or so. It took six years to get a world
premiere [at SXSW Film Festival 1996, where Byck took home top honors in the
documentary feature category].”
In all, Byck’s labor of love is more of a valentine to the human condition
than garbage, per se. Over the course of Jimmy the Janitor’s peripatetic
travails, the real-life people he meets — from New Mexico’s wildly creative
Dumpster divers to Brit tunesmith Billy Bragg in New Orleans — reiterate the
film’s basic tenets: There’s only so much room left for society’s castoffs.
Deep meanings abound, but what, in the long run, would Byck like his audience
to come away with?
“I’d like them to laugh, and I’d like some of the messages, if there are any,
to sort of seep in. It’s not so much a film that has solutions as it has
awareness-raising capabilities.” Including himself and his film collaborators
as targets of this consciousness-raising, Byck points out, “We’re not innocent
at all, either. I mean, we produced a lot of waste to make this movie. But
really, the most important thing for me was that it be funny and entertaining.”
Garbage opens at the Dobie Theatre on Sunday, March 16.
This article appears in March 14 • 1997 and March 14 • 1997 (Cover).