There’s a scene in Best Worst Movie that marks the beginning of the downturn: Dr. George Hardy—blonde, buff, infinitely popular—sits at his kitchen table surrounded by friends. “I just always thought I had this presence…I always thought I could do it,” he says. Everyone knows George should have been an actor. Why doesn’t he do it now? He could leave dentistry. His children are grown. “It just wouldn’t be practical,” he says, his voice quiet. “It wouldn’t be practical.”
A few minutes later, we see George look on as an actor at a film convention signs autographs for fans. No one wants George’s autograph but he tries to smile, always happy for others. He hovers in the background.
The small audience at Innis Hall is unsure how to react. The subject of Best Worst Movie has thus far been a vehicle for documentary rom-com: George, the cheerful dentist, was once in a movie—and it was the worst movie ever. Hilarious! But now George is recast: a failed actor in a failed film. There’s been a dramatic shift. It’s not funny anymore. Stuffed behind students’ desks in the makeshift cinema, we move uncomfortably in our seats.
Cut from Hardy to actor Robert Ormsby, who sits in his living room on a decaying armchair. Papers and books litter the carpet. Ormsby is bearded, soft-spoken, rosy—the archetypal kindly old man—but his loneliness is palpable. He never had kids or much of a career. He should have left Utah but couldn’t bring himself to do it. “I always thought I had potential, but I never did use it,” he says. He retrieves an old photograph of himself from the clutter, an old-fashioned portrait of a self-assured man. “I’ve wasted my life, mostly.” His tone is matter-of-fact. “Just…frittered it away. But what else is there to do with a life but fritter it away?”
My heart breaks.
* * *
Like all great love stories, Best Worst Movie is also unbearably tragic. Ostensibly about Troll 2, the 1989 baffler turned cult sensation, it is far more compelling as an examination of failure and the creative drive. The cast of Troll 2—including George Hardy, Ormsby, and Best Worst director Michael Paul Stephenson—believed they were making a good film. Director Claudio Fragasso believed he was making a good film. What they ended up making was a film so bad it resurfaced, almost twenty years later, as a web-born cultural phenomenon. Obsessed twenty-somethings pack late-night screenings from New York to Austin; they pen sequels and tattoo themselves with Troll 2 imagery. Dr. Hardy, the lead, is fawned over at appearances like an A-list celebrity.
This is what Stephenson, who starred in Troll 2 at the age of eleven, set out to document in Best Worst Movie. The results, for the first sixty minutes of the film, had me laughing so hard I worried about throwing up. The clips of Troll 2 spliced in to Best Worst Movie reveal a work of utter insanity: premised on man-eating vegetarian goblins, it features the worst costumes (burlap sacks and tape) and most incomprehensible lines (“You can’t piss on hospitality—I won’t allow it!”) possibly ever recorded on celluloid. The star is a bodybuilding dentist from Alabama; the director an Italian who works under the name Drago Floyd. A local mental hospital in-patient plays one of the supporting roles. And the whole thing is sold as a sequel to a movie it has nothing to do with—Troll, the Sonny Bono vehicle released in 1986. It’s not hard to see why Troll 2’s star has risen.
Stephenson capitalizes on all this weirdness with incredible success: When the director, Fragasso, who can barely speak English and who sports a devilish patch of facial hair just below his bottom lip, refers to Troll 2 as a treatise on the grand themes, a “parable”; when his wife, screenwriter Rosella Drudi, says she came up with story after a bunch of her friends went vegetarian and it “pissed [her] off”; when George Hardy goes looking for a copy of Troll 2 in a video store and finds it in the Holy Fucking Shit section—what else is there to do but laugh to the point of nausea?
But Troll 2 was not made as a joke. Fragasso, driven by his repeatedly expressed ‘need’ to make movies, worked earnestly towards his vision. The cast of Troll 2 worked with similar heart, and while some of the film’s alumni can appreciate the humour in the gloriousness of their failure, and relish their sudden status as cult movie icons, Best Worst Movie captures the sad irony of being loved as an object of ridicule. This is an achievement, a testament to Stephenson’s sensitivity—and it makes Best Worst Movie remarkably depressing for a romantic comedy.
I leave the theatre, like the rest of the audience, quiet and confused.
* * *
The next morning, over a tepid buffet breakfast at the Courtyard Marriott hotel, Stephenson and I talk about love. We are joined by Best Worst cinematographer and co-editor Katie Graham, co-producer Brad Klopman, and lead character Dr. Geroge Hardy. Apart from the middle-aged Hardy, the collective age around the table must be less than eighty. And apart from Hardy’s and Stephenson’s turns as actors in Troll 2, Best Worst Movie is everyone’s first film. “I think that really helped this story,” says Stephenson, his faint twang discernible through bites of hash brown. “Everybody was so committed to it. It wasn’t just a job.” He tells me that he always wanted to be a filmmaker; when the Troll 2 phenomenon became apparent, the natural step was to document it. “I became fascinated,” he says. “I got a letter from a kid in Zimbabwe who got the VHS from some garage sale…I got a picture of some Troll 2 fans in Iceland that were throwing this party where they were dressed up. I’d see lists of people’s favourite films on MySpace, and there’d be all these blockbusters or acclaimed movies like the Shawshank Redemption, and then all of a sudden: Troll 2. And it’s like, what?” The others murmur in agreement through mouthfuls of food. “What is this? When I started thinking about the documentary it felt very accessible, like the perfect opportunity. It felt like something I could tackle, and of course it felt very personal and meaningful.”
At the time of Best Worst’s genesis Graham was working in LA, a Troll 2 fan making wedding videos and corporate films. In 2006, she and her boyfriend, Best Worst co-editor Andrew Matthews, cobbled together a spoof Troll 2 trailer. They sent the clip to Stephenson with a two-line message: We made this. Hope you like it.
“Immediately, I called my wife—‘Lindsey, you gotta see this!’” Stephenson remembers, laughing. “I had kind of a feeling, and this was right at the beginning of the documentary, that I’d work with [Graham] and Andrew on this. It was just like, OK. It made sense.” As production went on, investors began to pressure Stephenson to choose a different editor. They recommended people with more experience who promised to do the job quickly and well. He stuck with his instincts. “It was the best decision I made in the whole process,” he says.
Graham smiles at this and nods enthusiastically, bobbing up down over her hotel china. I worry that the fabric flower pinned to her sweater will fall into her juice. “He waited for us, too,” she says of Stephenson. “Andrew had just started his Master’s in school and we were about to move to DC for a year. I could still shoot, but Andrew couldn’t start editing. We were like, ‘Oh, god—will they wait for us?’ and Michael did, he waited for us. It was amazing.”
“I didn’t doubt it for a second,” Stephenson replies. “We went through this whole process, Katie and Andrew and I. It was like a love affair…The film’s one thing that has been incredible, but the relationships that have come about—with George, with everybody who’s been involved in the movie, that’s the best thing about this whole thing, really. I mean this guy—” he says, looking at Hardy, “—and all of these people—”
“Best friends,” George pipes in.
“We’ll be friends for life.”
I am grinning like a satisfied baby. Everyone is so enamoured—with the film they’ve made, with Troll 2, with its fans, with each other.
“What the three of them did, it’s amazing,” Hardy continues. “I mean how talented you guys are. Don’t you think Brad? It’s mind blowing, how talented.”
Brad agrees. Graham says “Oh, George.” But despite all the mutual affection, and the brazen, if complicated, adoration of Troll 2 fans in Stephenson’s documentary, the people at this table made a very sad film. Did they mean to do this? Or did they, like Fragasso, mistake the ultimate effect their project would have?
“The main challenge was to reach a general audience,” Graham explains. “Not everybody’s seen Troll 2, and we didn’t want to just make an inside joke for Troll 2 fans. There are themes in the documentary that are universal. Everybody can like that.”
Stephenson seconds this. “That was so important to us, as filmmakers, from the beginning. We wanted to make a film that has universal themes. We had these principles at the beginning that we were intent on—let’s not just tell a fan story, let’s make it very character rooted—but it’s still impossible to see where the story will take you. You’re hanging on to the tail of the dragon. You’re committed to following everything, to doing it justice just by covering everything, and then you get blessed. Things come out of the woodwork…themes come up. There are times when you’re shooting and you’re like, I know this is gonna go in. I remember at [Robert Orsmsby’s] house when he was talking about frittering his life away—I thought, this is great, this is such a nice element here.”
“And we didn’t want to trash anyone for the sake of a joke.”
“It was important that people realize that these are real people we’re talking about, with real problems, real issues, and its not all just laughs.”
“They’re not just those bad [Troll 2] actors that you make fun of.”
Throughout this discussion, George has been quietly working away at his breakfast. His plate clean, he leans towards me.
“We’re in Canada now, and we’re showing this for the first time,” he says. His accent, demeanor, even his ubiquitous sport sunglasses are all very charming. “To me, there’s more of a sense of innocence with the Canadians than with the Americans. They look at things with a little more sensitivity.”
So Best Worst isn’t a heavy film? It’s just me—us—the Canadian audience?
“Last night it was a little more—whoa,” Graham adds. “It seemed a little more serious than it has previously. I don’t know if it was the crowd.”
I’m invited to come to the second screening that night, to be held in Bloor Cinema, where Troll 2 has previously played to hundreds of fans. Everyone at breakfast is sure it will be different, that the muted crowd at Innis Hall was not representative. It wasn’t the right venue, as the Bloor surely is. I agree to go, mostly because I want to see them all again.
* * *
Later that night I walk into the theatre. It’s true—the scene here is wholly from the one in Innis Hall. It’s 11.30pm. The show will start in fifteen minutes and the foyer is mobbed. People sport Troll 2 t-shirts and holler greetings at each other like long-lost brethren. “Hey, you came!” someone says behind me. I turn to see co-producer Brad Klopman, spruced up and smiling broadly. He barely spoke during our breakfast interview earlier. Now he’s enthused. Graham and Stephenson appear; the film’s publicist, Jenny, comes over and says hello. High-fives all around. Everyone is excited. I ask Brad if he’s feeling better about tonight’s screening than last night’s, which everyone has told me was a bit off.
“Definitely. In Austin [at the SXSW festival], we had like 800 people there, so it’s hard not to compare all screenings to that. People were laughing so hard in some sections, like in the Holy Fucking Shit part, they were missing what came after. Lindsey [Rowles, Best Worst’s co-producer] was upset that people were missing things. I said if that’s our biggest problem, we’re doing pretty well.”
We’re herded into the theatre and the lights go down. Within five minutes I can tell that the film’s crew was right. This audience is far more responsive—but not just to the comedy. The discomfort in the theatre at the crucial hour mark is obvious. (By the film’s end, though, the overall atmosphere is boisterous. It ends on a high note, after all.) I don’t think the filmmakers realize what they’ve got here. It wouldn’t be the first time—such mix-ups have been known to happen, every now and then.
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