Who Is KK Downey?
Starring Darren Curtis, Matt Silver. Written by Darren Curtis, Matt Silver, Pat Kiely. Directed by Darren Curtis and Pat Kiely. (18A) Oct 25-30. Royal Cinema, 608 College.
Cred. It’s that beautiful, life-giving elixir that allows solipsistic middle-class hipsters to gain the tiniest edge over their identically attired peers. But where to find this precious commodity and how to extract it? In Who Is K.K. Downey?, these questions plague two Montrealers whose years of frequenting Mile End’s coolest establishments have yielded sweet-FA in terms of interest in their artistic endeavours. Though Terrance doesn’t have a clue how to make anyone care about his lousy band, he does figure out how to get a publisher interested in his pal Theo’s book about a charismatic junkie hustler: turn the novel into a memoir, with Terrance adopting the guise and Southern accent of the previously fictional K.K. Downey. Suddenly, this hopeless pair has cred to burn — let the cocaine binges begin!
If the ridiculous premise that fuels the debut feature effort by Montreal comedy crew Kidnapper Films sounds familiar, that’s because it was inspired by the slightly less ridiculous true story of how American writer Laura Albert turned the non-existent JT LeRoy into a literary sensation (see EYE WEEKLY’s Oct. 9 cover story for more on that), a scheme that caused millions of cred-deficient hopefuls to think, “Damn, why didn’t I come up with that first?”
As one of KK Downey’s real-life creators points out in a phone interview last week, Albert’s scam couldn’t have been more successful. “Dave Eggers and Gus Van Sant, people who we look up to and whose work we really admire, totally got wrapped up in this thing,” says Darren Curtis, who plays Terrance and co-wrote, co-produced and co-directed the film along with his Kidnapper comrades. “There are photos of them hanging out with this model dressed up as JT LeRoy. We were definitely envious of his career — he was so young and had such an insane story behind him. So we were attracted to the subject because we got fooled, too.”
“Our idea was to take that story and incorporate it into the ridiculous hipster world that Darren and I live in,” says Pat Kiely, whose many duties on the film include co-writing, co-directing and playing Connor, our heroes’ floppy-haired nemesis. “We take these loser guys who are trying to get somewhere and give them this idea and they become an underground sensation in this community. The two ideas seemed to work together.”
In fact, the combination yields a satire that’s wild and snarky enough to qualify as the freshest Canadian indie comedy since FUBAR. It also marks a very promising feature debut for Kidnapper Films, a 10-strong collective of young Concordia pals who’ve been tickling the fancies of Montrealers with sketch comedy and short films (see ’em at www.kidnapperfilms.com) since 2003. That they managed to finance the project themselves by raising $125,000 is especially impressive and downright inspirational to those of us who’ve seen how the various Canadian film-funding bodies can denude a comedy project of all that makes it crass and/or clever.
“We always thought that they wouldn’t give funding for this movie, so we decided to go a different route,” says Kiely. “We attracted a whole bunch of investors and tried to wine and dine them to the best of our abilities with $5 lunches. But who knows, maybe Telefilm would’ve put money in the movie.”
Says Curtis: “We were really worried that South Park or someone else would do an episode or movie spoofing the JT LeRoy thing. We felt there was a time constraint — we knew that if we weren’t shooting it within six months of coming up with this idea, we might miss our window. With Telefilm and SODEC and how those are all set up, they don’t really facilitate making films this quickly.”
That ripped-from-the-headlines quality gives an additional boost of energy to the Kidnapper boys’ campaign to skewer all and sundry within an exaggerated but still very recognizable milieu of scenesters, wannabes and desperate cases. Indeed, it’s more than a little courageous of them to make satirical targets out of their peers (and, it should be noted, their likeliest viewers). Yet Curtis says that they weren’t explicitly out to skewer their own kind. “We wanted to make sure it wasn’t too much of a scathing indictment or anything,” he says. “It’s more of a free-for-all, fun, absurd ride. We didn’t want to leave people feeling like shit.”
“I think our saving grace is that everything is amplified,” says Kiely, who will soon be seen, along with several Kidnapper players in The Foundation, an upcoming Showcase series by FUBAR writer-director Mike Dowse. “There is a ridiculous element inherent in the whole movie. The characters are big and the costumes take that one step further into the absurd. I don’t think people are looking at being like, ‘Oh my God, that’s me they’re making fun of!’”
“The garage aesthetic of the movie helps too,” says Curtis. “People know it’s made by young people. I think if it had too glossy a feel people might feel they were targeted or that the film wasn’t coming from the right place. But I think when people hear that it’s people who are in their twenties who were doing this, they realize we are in on the joke as well. Theo and Terrence might as well be us pretty much, except with worse hair and uglier clothes.
“I wish we had another $500,000 just to spend on stupid haircuts,” he adds. “We would’ve given everyone in the cast and crew stupid haircuts. We only got a handful of really stupid ones.”