I had a film school professor who had given up his underground/independent filmmaker career to teach full time. He was a nice guy, a bit psycho but I liked that. Very passionate about film and on more than one occasion expressed regret that he hadn't made any movies since he had started teaching. But I guess moving to Rochester, NY from Los Angeles will do that to a guy.

One thing he said I'll never forget is that his greatest dream of being a filmmaker would be to someday make a film that got the audience so angry and upset that they would rush the screen in an uncontrollable fury and rip it down. But of course, he would lament, this scenario wouldn't ever be quite likely. However, it was a nice fantasy he liked to keep around in his head.

I thought it was an admirable fantasy and goal. I think another admirable fantasy and goal would be to make a film so controversial it would get the Feds or the police on my ass. I don't think this was the intended goal of Mike Zieper, but it actually happened to him - Twice!

My third film fantasy would be to make a fake documentary and never, ever have it revealed that it wasn't true. Long time bad lit readers might remember that I've lambasted several fake docs for marketing their films as fictional works. It drives me up the fucking wall! Yet, here we are with Mike Z (as Zieper prefers to be called). There's almost no way I can describe THE CROWDED THEATER OF MIKE Z without telling you first that it's a collection of short fake documentaries.

There's almost also no way to see a fake doc and not evaluate every second of it on its "realness". Or maybe I'm just too harsh when it comes to my favorite genre of film. It's like these movies have to prove something extra to me, which probably isn't very fair to the filmmakers.

Prior to film school, I thought I hated straight documentaries. But then I had a "History & Aesthetics of Documentaries" class that blew my mind when the professor (a different guy than the one mentioned above) showed us what we thought were real docs but turned out to be fake. I might sound like a total dork, but this class was a life-changing experience.

Even though I had bought the CROWDED THEATER video compilation, when Mike Z told me one of the films, "My Left Nut", was going to be screening at the Anthology Film Archives (my favorite NYC hangout) I made sure I was there. I had to see this brilliant film on the big screen with an audience.

A week prior, I did show the flick to my and didn't tell him anything about it. All I said was, "Want to see something really freaky?" He didn't buy it was real and I don't know if the audience at the Anthology did either, but it's such an intense, powerful experience it doesn't matter if you "believe" it or not.

And that's Mike Z's greatest accomplishment in the fake documentary genre. He weaves an air of ambiguity around his subject matter that hints at a world beyond his films that the films are a reaction to. He seems to intuitively know how much information to put into a film so that we can follow the story, but leaves enough unanswered questions to make his subjects that much more believable. How much do we ever know about anybody really? In the real world we tend to know only bits and pieces of the history of the people in our lives.

In addition to "My Left Nut", CROWDED THEATER also contains Mike Z's most infamous piece, "Military Takeover of NYC", a pseudo-training film of a planned race riot instigated by the U.S. military in Times Square on New Year's Eve 2000. Z was a media darling of the underground press last year when the FBI got wind of this short video playing on Z's website. The FBI threatened Z's web provider who briefly took Z's site down until he realized the FBI really had no legal recourse to shut the site down. Z is now in the process of suing the FBI with the help of the ACLU. "Military Takeover" is an interesting video, but I suppose it's lost some of it's impact since New Year's went by without any sort of armed conflict. This was, quite frankly, my least favorite piece in CROWDED THEATER.

My favorite video on the tape is "Don't Watch This Until I'm Dead" a video "suicide note" made by a despondent suburban husband and father. The video is supposedly filmed over a period of a couple days as the depressed man tries to gather enough courage to actually kill himself. Even though this is simply a movie of one man talking to the camera, it features an intense "plot" and one of the most brilliant acting jobs I've seen in underground film in a long time. This film is so realistic that when the cops accidentally got a hold of it, they went to Z's house to make sure everyone was still alive. "Don't Watch This Until I'm Dead" has one of the creepiest endings, without showing a goddamn thing, that any horror film could ever hope to have.

Finally, CROWDED THEATER starts with Z's most ambitious film on the tape, "How to Start a Revolution in America", a how-to video made by three incompetent anarchists. This is a vastly entertaining film, but probably the least convincing and I'm not quite sure why. Z does a minimal amount of editing on these videos and that might actually hurt "Revolution" instead of helping it. The other problem might be that the anarchists are actually making a really horrible how-to video so the film kinda drags in the beginning. When the action finally heats up in the second half, the film really picks up steam and again finishes up with a killer finale.

If you're interested in finding out more about THE CROWDED THEATER OF MIKE Z and watching some clips of the films contained on it, check out his website. There's also info on purchasing the tape, which I highly recommend.

-mikE Everleth