The master documentarian Les Blank turned 75 today, and there’s no shortage of his films to recommend, including The Blues Accordin’ to Lightnin’ Hopkins, Hot Pepper and Burden of Dreams.
But one of his most infamous pieces is the 1980 short Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe. It follows the great German director in the San Francisco Bay Area as he makes good on the bet he made that filmmaker Errol Morris couldn’t make and publicly screen his film about pet cemeteries, Gates of Heaven. Morris succeeded, and the ever-charming and rather hilarious Herzog obliged, even stewing the footwear at Alice Waters’s recently opened post-hippie gourmet shack Chez Panisse.