One of the great films of the 1990s was American Movie, Chris Smith’s documentary about working class Wisconsin filmmaker Mark Borchardt and his efforts to complete Coven, a short horror movie about an alcoholic writer. Smith’s film was both a hilarious look at the pitfalls of no-budget filmmaking (as in the signature scene of Borchardt shoving an actor’s head through a non-breakaway cabinet door) and a poignant depiction of economically deprived Middle America. A star was born in the person of Borchardt’s gentle burnout sidekick Mike Schank, who stole every scene in which he appeared.
The American Movie DVD featured the completed Coven, which offered the sort of amateurish performances and unintentional laughs you might expect, but also revealed surprising flashes of wit and an eye for bleak compositions and grim, bare-bones settings. Borchardt’s ostensible reason for making the short was to sell 3000 video copies of it, in order to finance his dream feature film project, Northwestern. He sold at least 5000 via the American Movie website, so it wasn’t out of the question that Northwestern would get made sooner than later.
Nine years later, history seems to be repeating itself. On the one hand, things have certainly improved for Borchardt since his days of delivering newspapers and vacuuming crypts. He has an acting career of sorts; you may have seen him as “Skeeter” in The Godfather of Green Bay or “Al the drunk at the bar” in Zombie Island, and he has four roles lined up for 2008, including one in Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever. He’s still hoping to make Northwestern, but in the meantime he’s working on another horror film about an alcoholic writer, this one called Scare Me. And as you may not be surprised to learn, it has been in production for quite some time now.
An entry from Borchardt’s long-since abandoned American Movie diary notes that shooting began in early 2003. An undated Premiere blurb finds Borchardt in the midst of auditions, and reports that “funding is no longer an insurmountable problem. Local businesses have pitched in everything from props to locations, including the Elks Lodge and a former roller-skating rink.” A 2005 release was targeted, according to this profile, but in the interview clip below dated February 2007 he admits, “I don’t know when we last shot it or did anything.” IMDb optimistically claims Scare Me will be released next month; if that happens, we’ll be sure to let you know.
