How many times has this happened to you? You’re sitting at home on a weekend evening with your friends, passing the beer-bong around and trying to decide how best to split up that last remaining Rohypnol between the eight of you. Frustrated and groggy, it’s all any of you can do not to drop your stash on the 3-inch-deep Seventies shag carpet alongside Paco the Chihuahua, whose pitiful barking ceased somewhere back around SXSW, thank goodness. Why oh why (you cry) couldn’t someone come up with something more original for stoners to do on a Friday night?
Weep no more, my bleary-eyed friend. Local filmmaker and stony iconographer Bob Ray (Rock Opera) has teamed with the Web site MP4.com (“For those who like to watch!”) in a splendidly synergistic orgy of microbudgeted, hemp-, beer-, and rock & roll-fueled cinematic doobage. For you squares out there, this means that, thanks to an impromptu meeting between Ray and an MP4.com rep during this past festival season, virtually every single one of the director’s short films is now available online, for free, whenever you feel like watching Ray regular Jerry Don Clarke (Rock Opera‘s “Toe”) act the fool or the Fuckemos’ sludgy forays into music-video land.
“We had a party during South by for the roller derby documentary I’m working on,” recounts Ray, “and one of the MP4 guys who happened to be there offered to put the trailer on their site. I told him I had a whole bunch of stuff I wanted to get online and handed him a tape. The next thing you know pretty much everything I’ve ever done is up there!”
The relatively new MP4 site is, apparently, hungry for content, a situation that serves the needs of both the site and Ray equally well. For you, the viewer, this means no more hunting through stacks of dusty old VHS tapes behind the sofa for that lone remaining copy of Nashville Pussy’s “High as Hell” video or Ray’s 1998 Super-8 short “Six-Pack of Whup-Ass.” There’s even the little-seen (by your mom, anyway) Night of the Kung Fu Zombie Bastards From Hell!
The most interesting aspect of Ray’s roundabout deal, however, is that since MP4.com is owned by Vivendi Universal (and they are now owned by the deeply secretive Carlyle Group, well known to have ties to both the Bush and bin Laden families), there’s no telling how much exposure the Austin filmmaker’s work is suddenly in for. And since Vivendi Universal also owns the French entertainment behemoth Canal +, it’s even conceivable that Ray’s Sweet Sweetroll’s Baaadasssss Spin could turn up on late-night Parisian TV, sandwiched between an atrociously dubbed Visit to a Small Planet and Cousin, Cousine. Now who’s stoned out of their ever-loving mind?
This article appears in April 11 • 2003.