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.
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Dangerous Minds interviews Bobcat Goldthwait for his new film ‘God Bless America’