Bobcat Goldthwait’s first comedy album, ‘Meat Bob’

Everyone who is at least my age remembers the time Bobcat Goldthwait lit the set of The Tonight Show with Jay Leno on fire. It was May ‘94, a month after Kurt Cobain’s suicide, which seems significant now not just because Bobcat opened for Nirvana on their last U.S. tour, but because Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, Ace of Base and Jay Leno—enemies, in short, of fun and progress—were then ascendant. Burning NBC’s chair was an act of sacred mayhem that endeared Bobcat to the Johnson Family and made him a folk hero.

So hardly anyone remembers that two years earlier, Bobcat visited The Dick Cavett Show to promote his directorial debut, Shakes the Clown. Then, the pyrotechnics were verbal, and the only thing Bobcat torched was talk show decorum. I.e., it’s good watchin’. Can you guess which of the two men onscreen went to Yale? Do you think it’s the same person who screams (during the introduction, no less) “I’ll drop you like a bad habit, right now!” A hint: no.

Since the topical material in this broadcast is now 25 years old, I will fill in some background, as if I were Dean Stockwell on Quantum Leap and you had just transmigrated into the body of a flabby teenage person sprawled on the family couch. It’s like this: President George H. W. Bush has lately upchucked on Japanese Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa’s pants, Metallica have not yet begun touring the U.S. behind their new LP, the “black album,” and the four police officers charged in the Rodney King beating have not yet been acquitted.

Watch some TV, after the jump…

 
This actually happened: In 1978, when I was 8 years old, we had this little black-and-white TV in the front room of our house, a room nobody ever spent much time in. We had all of 6 channels back then, and on this one day I happened to catch the In Search Of episode about Bigfoot, an episode I was probably a little too young for; it was very scary. I remember the show saying that the Bigfoot had last been sighted in Texas, but this is probably wrong—my sense of U.S. geography wasn’t too developed at the time. It probably said California. After the show was over I guesstimated how long it would take Bigfoot to walk across the country and get to our house in the suburbs of New York City. I decided it would take him about a month, not a bad guess for an 8-year-old I suppose. And so for the next month I wasn’t frightened at all, because obviously Bigfoot couldn’t get me yet, even theoretically. But once that month was up, it would occur to me often that Bigfoot might be like a block away, a couple miles away. Even today it sometimes happens that I wonder whether Bigfoot is about to pounce at me out of nowhere, on a subway platform, at the deli.

Bigfoot fear, man. It’s a powerful, primal thing.

Bobcat Goldthwait’s upcoming movie is about Bigfoot, and it sounds pretty good. It’s called Willow Creek, and it mixes regular narrative moviemaking with documentary elements. It sounds like he investigated the places in northern California where all the Bigfoot enthusiasts hang out—what you might call Bigfoot Country—and then made a regular fictional movie in that setting. He interviewed a bunch of the Bigfoot experts, but didn’t tell them that he wasn’t filming a documentary, rather a fictional feature, which is either an ethical nightmare or smart filmmaking or both.

In case you haven’t been paying attention, Bobcat’s become one of the better directors we have working right now. He may not be the most subtle moviemaker out there, but he’s honest and interested in taboo subjects, and his directness of address ensures a distinctive movie experience. Bobcat’s endlessly quotable, and his scripts all have that Bobcat feel of coming from a smart source and coming from someone who’s tired of bullshit. It takes someone who was in three Police Academy movies, as Bobcat was, to be as tired of bullshit as Bobcat probably is.

You can pinpoint the nationwide origin of interest in Bigfoot almost as precisely as you can with the JFK assassination. Basically all contemporary interest in Bigfoot, Sasquatch, the Yeti and so on begins with the Patterson-Gimlin film, the Bigfoot movement’s Zapruder film. The picture above of poor Mrs. Bigfoot (apparently it is a female) looking back at the camera is from the Patterson-Gimlin film, the footage was shot by Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin in northern California on October 20, 1967, and when you look at the picture it’s easy to see why it captured people’s attention.

The Patterson-Gimlin footage kicked the movement off, as sure as that bullet in Dallas set the JFK conspiracy guys in motion. Bobcat recently appeared on The Dana Gould Hour (he comes in at 4:48), and he explained a little about the new movie. He said that “really what it was was, the 9-year-old me wanted to go to where the footage was shot all those years ago.” He met a guy who wrote a Bigfoot-related coming-of-age book (think Twilight) called Yeti Or Not and he met another guy he called “the Bob Dylan of the Bigfoot community.”

Some people have surmised that John Landis, who would later become a famous movie director with Animal House, The Blues Brothers and Michael Jackson’s longform Thriller video, is the one in the Bigfoot suit in the Patterson-Gimlin film. Landis denies it.
 

 
‘In Search of Bigfoot’ with Leonard Nimoy and the trailer for Bobcat Goldthwait’s ‘Willow Creek’ after the jump…

 
The great French film director Jean-Luc Godard once famously quipped “All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl,” but it’s unlikely that he had anything like Bobcat Goldthwait’s outrageous new satire, God Bless America in mind when he said that.

The most vicious, hilarious and timely takedown of American culture since Network, God Bless America follows the downward trajectory of the dismal life of Frank (Joel Murray), an unemployed sad-sack everyman who is given the sort of medical diagnosis that no one wants to hear. Alone, dejected, depressed and suicidal, Frank opts to put a gun in his mouth and pull the trigger, but is distracted by a monstrously selfish Beverly Hills teenager on a TV reality show. In a flash, Frank decides that if he’s going to go, he’s going to take this pampered brat with him.

Frank’s execution of Chloe is witnessed by one of her classmates, Roxy, played by Tara Lynne Barr in perhaps the single most gleefully nihilistic performances a teenage girl has ever given in all of cinematic history. Roxy’s Tarantino-esque rant about why Alice Cooper is the greatest, most influential rockstar of all time— I mean, she does prove it here beyond all argument— is one of the film’s comic highlights.

Egged on by his curiously homicidal teen accomplice, Frank decides to mow down more rude, selfish people before his disease takes him. Like a Bonnie and Clyde for the YouTube era, Frank and Roxy embark on a wave of carnage and mayhem, eliminating a blowhard TV pundit based on Glenn Beck, religious extremists and in the film’s over-the-top climax, most of the studio audience at an American Idol-type program.

As Frank so earnestly puts it: “I only want to kill people who deserve to die.”

Below, Bobcat Goldthwait talks about his outrageous new comedy God Bless America:

 
God Bless America is the title of an upcoming black comedy from Bobcat Goldthwait:

Loveless, jobless, and possibly terminally ill, Frank has had enough of the downward spiral of America. With nothing left to lose, Frank takes his gun and decides to off the stupidest, cruelest, and most repellent members of society with an unusual accomplice: 16-year-old Roxy, who shares his sense of rage and disenfranchisement.

I haven’t seen it yet, but people, based on this trailer alone, God Bless America is already my favorite film of all time. As Movie Bob says of God Bless America, “It’s not the movie we want, but the movie we need.”

They called his Shakes the Clown the “the Citizen Kane of alcoholic clown movies,” so with this new film, can we declare Bobcat Goldthwait “America’s Godard,” too?

God Bless America hits VOD on April 6th and select theatres on May 5th.
 

 
Thank you Mr. Michael Backes of Sacramento, CA!