america's deepest feelings
WARNING: This video contains footage of actual deaths and other extreme violence, and also some pornography.
America's Deepest Feelings is a fake half-hour block of TV, complete with fake commercials, made mostly out of found footage, in particular America's Funniest Home Videos when Bob Sagat was the host, the Traces of Death series, and some typical commercials. I made it 2003-04, and I expected that it would get me in trouble, especially since America's Funniest Home Videos was owned then by Disney (not sure about now). I was looking forward to a law suit or something exciting so maybe I could pull some Negativland type shit, but nothing really happened in that direction. I sold about 20 copies on DVD for $10 each, I had a website for it atwww.google2004.com (no longer active) where it got about 1,500 hits, and a lot of copies circulated online for a while.
I talked about it a lot with a lot of people, started giving it away and leaving it in places, on shelves at stores and stuff, but still no law suit or anything dramatic. I tried to get it screened at underground film festivals, particularly ones claiming to be "edgy" or anti-patriotic, but for the most part nobody wanted to screen it. The typical film festival response was that everyone in the festival staff thought it was brilliant but there was no way they were going to screen it; I guess a law suit didn't sound as exciting to them as it did to me. The only place that had any balls and gave me a screening was The Arlene's Grocery Picture Show in Manhattan, which was cool because some friends from Boston I hadn't seen in years made the trip to check it out, and the festival gave me an award for it. I still think it fuckin rules.
Every once in a while someone tracks me down looking to talk about it. The coolest instance of this was finding out that Bob Sagat had seen it but couldn't make it to the first commercial break (too bad, that's like eating your broccoli and leaving before dessert). There's an interview online somewhere where he talks about it but his facts are all fucked up. Some guy from Vice magazine contacted me about publishing an interview about it, but suddenly stopped responding to my emails, I expected that my replies to his question were not low-brow enough for Vice but I don't know. I'm grateful to Nicola Boari from Spettro for taking interest and giving it a place online where it is publicly accessible again. The video was finished in February of 2004. Feel free to download it, copy it, and do whatever you want with it.