Daniel Johnston is an enigma, and a living breathing folk legend. Ever since Simpsons creator and preeminent Daniel Johnston fan Matt Groening mused in his LA Weekly column years ago that “someone should make the Daniel Johnston documentary,†and Kurt Cobain declared him the greatest living songwriter, Daniel has long been considered as the ideal subject for a documentary feature. It has taken director Jeff Feuerzeig, and producer Henry S. Rosenthal to bring it to life. The Devil and Daniel Johnston unravels the persona of Daniel Johnston: songwriter, musician, performer, painter, cartoonist, manic-depressive, visionary, and artist.
Feuerzeig has been fascinated with the legend of Daniel Johnston since the late 1980's and spent over a decade compiling clippings of the events of his life as they appeared in the press. Feuerzeig says, “Word was quickly spreading through the underground in 1988 about this amazing crazy kid from Chester, West Virginia who wrote hundreds of songs of unrequited love about a girl named Laurie who married an undertaker and recorded all of his albums on a cassette recorder in his basement. When I heard these songs for the first time and was exposed to the raw emotion in Daniel's art - it truly touched me on a molecular level – and it has stayed with me since. It seemed that Daniel's mental illness allowed him to tap into a place where the music and art he was creating was truly unfiltered and I found it mesmerizing. To say it caused an obsession would be an understatement.â€
While the music and art were capturing Feuerzeig's imagination, the Daniel Johnston soap opera (real and imagined by Daniel) was being played out in public in a way that was truly riveting. Feuerzeig had a theory that Daniel Johnston was the wizard behind his own curtain and his theory crystallized in 1990 when Daniel appeared on 91.1 FM WFMU in what is now considered to be a legendary radio broadcast rivaling Orson Welles' War of The Worlds.
“Daniel had prepared an elaborate one hour radio special on his two cassette decks which he broadcast to the New York/New Jersey WFMU audience via telephone from the mental hospital in West Virginia. In this broadcast Daniel's full mania was displayed in all its glory. Daniel delivered wicked sharp comedy skits where he did multiple voices of boys and girls, hilariously interviewed himself with more multiple voices, played multi-tracked skits centering on his massive obsession with fame, promoted his new “gospel album†titled 1990, sang live over the telephone with Yo La Tengo for what would become a hit single of his signature song Speeding Motorcycle, and took phone calls from the listening audience.†One of the callers was director Jeff Feuerzeig. “I asked him if his song Funeral Home was taken from Bruce Springsteen's Cadillac Ranch and Daniel admitted that it was. So, even our first exchange fourteen years ago was about deciphering Daniel's art.â€
This broadcast turned out to be the key to Daniel Johnston and truly formed the idea for the film. Feuerzeig says “I believed that if I could visually and through audio make a film as innovative as Daniel's radio show – editing together all facets of Daniel's mania, his life story, as well as showing the beauty and innocence of his art and music--that I would have a movie that was a true reflection of Daniel Johnston as well as myself.â€
Flash forward to a sold out New York City Knitting Factory show in 2000 where Daniel Johnston appears live for the first time in his life outside of his handful of shows in Austin Texas in the mid 1980's. Feuerzeig recounts, “Daniel appears as a prophet. He played a slew of new songs and was truly on fire. He had the entire crowd laughing and crying. Here was this fragile tragic bloated man and he had aged as if he had lived a thousand lives and by some miracle had lived to come back and tell us the secrets of the ages. The voice was unmistakable, every crack and spittle-ridden plosive rendered the last musical decade as a folly of empty filler.â€
Feuerzeig immediately called his longtime friend and Daniel Johnston admirer, producer Henry S. Rosenthal and asked him, “If he wanted to take a ride on the space shuttle.†After they had agreed to undertake this truly high-risk venture the first step was to contact Daniel Johnston. Feuerzeig was in Austin, Texas and called up Daniel's ex-manager Jeff Tartakov, who he had contact with over the years as he had been tracking Daniel's story. As luck would have it Daniel was playing a show in Austin the following night and Tartakov agreed to make the introduction. The following night Feuerzeig and Daniel met backstage for the first time and Feuerzeig laid out his intention of doing a feature-length documentary about Daniel and his life. Daniel quickly agreed as Feuerzeig had directed Half Japanese: The Band That Would Be King, a successful film about longtime collaborator and friend of Daniel's, Jad Fair.
Feuerzeig has also always had an interest in the internal monologue in cinema, feeling that a heightened level of intimacy is achieved and the audience feels closer to the truth. This technique is at its best in films such as Badlands, A Clockwork Orange, Zelig, and Taxi Driver, where the viewer actually feels like they are inside a character's head and he/she is talking directly to the viewer without any filters.
“As a filmmaker, I have been trying to find a project to utilize an internal monologue in a new and innovative way. This became a reality when I discovered hundreds of hours of audio cassettes that Daniel had recorded of his entire life,†states Feuerzeig. “At my disposal were childhood arguments with his mother, audio verite' of his high school hallways, surreptitious recordings of his crushed college romance, secret telephone conversations, and -- the greatest find of all -- an audio letter campaign with his best friend that went on for years and acted essentially as an audio diary. With literally every key moment of Daniel Johnston's life and every emotion he felt available to me, I was able to assemble a deeply personal and satisfying narrative that displays Daniel's essence in all its naked glory. My journey of discovery was to take a ride on the fragile precipice of madness and genius and Daniel supplied me with the tools to take us there. It was a privilege to have gotten so close to a fire that burns so intensely.â€
From the project's inception, the highest degree of professionalism and sensitivity to the subject was considered. Feuerzeig and his crew began shooting in May 2001 by going to Daniel Johnston's home in Waller, Texas. They spent three weeks there shooting in-depth interviews with Daniel and his parents Mabel and Bill. They filmed Daniel in his garage/studio, in his bedroom, in his backyard, in his church, in his town, and performing with his band, The Nightmares. Daniel's father, Bill, now in his 80's functions as manager and struggles daily with the minutiae of indie rock management. The crew captured definitive accounts of the famous Daniel Johnston stories with Roshomon-like perspectives from his family members. During the three weeks of shooting in Texas they dug deeper, pushed harder, mined more gold, and recorded it more beautifully and with greater fidelity than anyone has before. This shooting formed the bedrock of the project.
The production next shot Daniel in July 2001 in Los Angeles during two important events: a solo art exhibition opening at the legendary Zero One Gallery, and his headline performance at the Key Club in the heart of the Sunset Strip. These events drew Hollywood luminaries like Matt Groening, and Wild Man Fischer. The art exhibition sold out before the doors opened. The filming of the concert at the Key Club was done in high-contrast black and white in conceptual homage to Daniel's spiritual mentor Bob Dylan in Don't Look Back.
In December 2001, the production filmed in New York City amongst various backdrops such as Bellevue hospital, the Statue of Liberty, CBGB's, The Bowery Ballroom, The Sunshine Hotel and the Port Authority, in order to recreate Daniel's infamous trip when he ran amok and disappeared for two weeks, all the while living at the Bowery.
In October 2002, the production next traveled to Austin to film a series of important interviews with people who played crucial roles in the Daniel Johnston saga. Music journalists Ken Lieck and The Austin Chronicle editor Louis Black were among the interviews. Louis took them on a guided tour to the University of Texas campus creek where, in 1986, he helped pull a psychotic Daniel out of the water. They conducted extensive interviews with Daniel's lifelong best friend, David Thornberry, and his wife Kathy McCarty, whose heartfelt interpretations of Daniel's songs were released in 1994 on the album Dead Dogs Eyeball. They filmed musician and producer Brian Beattie in his studio taking the camera through his legendary sessions with Daniel. The final sequence of their efficient and jam-packed three day shoot is an interview with Butthole Surfer Gibby Haines while in his dentist's chair receiving four fillings. Gibby recounts the fateful night of September 11, 1986 when an acid tripping Daniel attended a Butthole Surfer show, freaked out, and ended up hospitalized for the first of many times to follow. Periodically, drilled tooth dust billows from his mouth in what must be one of the most bizarre interviews ever filmed.
The production also filmed extensively in West Virginia, Maryland, Ohio, and Pennsylvania and again in Austin to interview Daniel's former manager Jeff Tartakov, arguably the most pivotal character in the Daniel Johnston saga. They collected archive footage from around the world and feature Daniel leading a sing-along at a huge festival in Sweden. This footage opens the scope of the film by showing the tremendous international reaction to Daniel.
The commitment was made from the beginning to shoot in the luxurious format of Super-16mm film. This decision guaranteed the highest quality result and the most stable archival storage medium. From camera-original negative, the best looking film prints and most beautiful video masters can be produced. The production mixes mediums by incorporating archival footage of Daniel's life and performances to create a multi-layered narrative.
The Daniel Johnston story is multi-faceted and multi-layered, and is charged with hope and betrayal, beauty and grotesquery, pain and love. The Devil and Daniel Johnston promises to be a compelling event picture offering a portrait of a singular artist.
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