ABSTRACT
George Kuchar grew up in the Bronx, largely at Loews Palace cinema. In the same year Barbara Stanwyck starred in All I Desire, his mom gave him and twin Mike an 8mm camera. They mounted mini-melodramas like The Naked and the Nude and I Was a Teenage Rumpot on the roof of their tenement. Unwittingly, the Kuchars were part of a more extensively documented underground gay scene: Kenneth Anger, Jack Smith, Ron Rice, and Ken Jacobs. But George was the only one who wanted to make high-strung dramas like Douglas Sirk’s. He groomed his high school pals for stardom, switched to 16mm and moved to San Francisco, where he still teaches at the Art Institute. His 1976 classic, A Reason to Live, is a tribute to the movies he was raised on as much as a melodrama about his then-lover and star Curt McDowell. His films are giddy, thoughtful accounts of how dangerously distraught women and largely unappealing men cope with the problems of love and of the lower intestine; many also have a meteorological theme. Today his favorite movies are Making Love and Maurice, and he mostly makes videos—virtually reinventing the diary form with his Sony 8 scrapbook. He does not identify himself as a gay filmmaker, and he frowns upon the intolerance of some gay audiences. His work (which includes writing and painting) can’t be called camp—he’s too engaged with popular culture to enjoy the distance camp requires. He is the epitome of charm and of ingenuousness. He loves America and only reads one newspaper, The National Enquirer: “The Enquirer asks people which stars they like, and which they don’t like. Then they run more of what people want, and trash the others. It’s kind of human, you know. It’s got all the good parts of being human, and all the lousy parts too.” He was born in 1942.
FILM/VIDEOGRAPHY
8mm film by George and Mike Kuchar:
THE WET DESTRUCTION OF THE ATLANTIC EMPIRE (1954)
SCREWBALL (1957)
THE NAKED AND THE NUDE (1957)
THE SLASHER (1958)
THE THIEF AND THE STRIPPER (1959)
A TUB NAMED DESIRE (1960)
I WAS A TEENAGE RUMPOT (1960)
PUSSY ON A HOT TIN ROOF (1961)
BORN OF THE WIND (1961)
A WOMAN DISTRESSED (1962)
A TOWN CALLED TEMPEST (1962)
NIGHT OF THE BOMB (1962)
LUST FOR ECSTASY (1963)
THE CONFESSIONS OF BABETTE (1963)
OOTSIES IN AUTUMN (1963)
ANITA NEEDS ME (1963)
THE LOVERS OF ETERNITY (1963)
MOM (1983—By GK only)
