Movie Blog: Q&A With Director Of 'Winnebago Man'

The rantings of Jack Rebney drove filmmaker Ben Steinbauer first to paroxysms of laughter and second, years later, on a quest to find out whatever happened to the man YouTube helped dub "The Angriest Man in the World."

Winnebago Man is the result of his search. With both humor and pathos, Steinbauer's documentary takes a good long look at the psychological effect viral videos have on their usually unwitting subjects by plunging deep into the heart of one of the viral canon's most reclusive stars.

In the 1980s, Rebney was caught suffering what he made look like one of the most grueling days of industrial video-making by a crew working to showcase the newest model Winnebagos. (Winnebagoes?) The crew, quite obviously exasperated by Rebney's profane tirades and abuse (which sometimes spilled over into the realm of surreal incoherence, as when he demanded, "I don't want any more bulls--- from anyone, and that includes me!"), collected a "worst of" reel which lived on first in a series of VHS dubs and later online.

The Minnesota hook is that many members of the video crew were from Minnesota. I mean, how classically "Minnesota Nice" passive-aggressive is it that, rather than confront Rebney on the set, they instead made a montage of his lowest moments?

Anyway, some of those crew members are set to appear in person along with Ben Steinbauer at the 7:20 p.m. showing this Friday evening at the Lagoon Cinema in Minneapolis. On the prelude of this crew reunion, I talked with Steinbauer about the documentary, its enigmatic star and the nature of viral videos.

Eric Henderson is a web producer and film blogger for WCCO.COM.

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What appealed to you about this viral video in particular?

Ben Steinbauer: I found it in 2001. And it was one of those things that just stopped a party cold. Everybody turned and watched it because it was just so funny. It was on VHS tape at the time, and it just felt like this artifact from some forgotten era that you're not supposed to be seeing, like this privileged glance behind the curtain. It also was just so funny that if felt like it was scripted ... My friends and I began quoting it, and we had this one friend who memorized it and could do the entire thing from start to finish. It became part of our vocabulary.

So would you say that it existed as a viral video, socially, before the term "viral video" became popularized?

Steinbauer: Oh absolutely. At the time, this was something that was like a litmus test. If you knew this clip, then chances are you were going to be friends with us and we would hire you for shoots or whatever.

It's sort of the reverse effect from what you get now when you're on Facebook and you see someone link this viral vid that's, like, two years old and you're like, "Clearly you're not in the loop."

Steinbauer: Yeah, totally. Like, "Loser!" ... But, anyway, in 2005, when YouTube and other video sharing websites came along and were playing this thing, I was kind of watching with fascination ... The term "cyber-bullying" was being bandied about, and this idea of unintended notoriety became more and more popular. And so I started to think, "Well, I wonder how the star of my favorite video is dealing with this." And so I started looking into the backstory ... What I was finding was that this kind of attention was negative almost across the board. And then I came across this sailing posting on a yachting website, a message from Jack asking what kind of boat he'd need to sail around the world and off the mainland. So I thought maybe he was doing this because he was embarrassed of his notoriety. And so I set out to find him to show him that his clip in particular was not something that made him look bad, in my opinion or the opinion of my friends. It was kind of the opposite; we had this camaraderie with it. And I wanted to show him that maybe he could find some satisfaction in knowing that this clip brought people joy.

Having said that, though, you saw this evidence online of him living or wanting to live a reclusive life. Did you ever worry that you would never find him as you were setting up the making of this documentary?

Steinbauer: Oh, absolutely. I started to film a very little bit, but it wasn't until I knew that he was alive that I knew I had a film, obviously. Because if he wouldn't have been alive or able to participate, there wouldn't have been much of a movie. And at that point, I was really taken with the idea of this unwanted celebrity or notoriety, and so I was thinking of other viral video stars of the time, like "Star Wars" kid or the cop who shot himself or Aleksey Vayner and the "Numa Numa" guy. And I thought maybe if I can't find Jack, I can do like a Fast, Cheap and Out of Control portrait where I take four individual stories and then weave them together into one overall story.

So you contact him first, you film him in this tranquil environment and he seems to have made his peace with the world, and then you get that phone message where he goes back on it and reverses himself and says, "That wasn't the real me." It's interesting to me that this is opening in Minneapolis just a week after the Joaquin Phoenix documentary (I'm Still Here). It's sort of like, what's the reality, what's faux, what's performance and is the performance actually reach something closer to the truth? I'm curious to know if you thought Jack was giving you a performance even the second time around when he became angry again. Do you think maybe he was playing it up a bit for you?

Steinbauer: I've seen I'm Still Here twice and I'm planning to see it again, because I find it one of the most fascinating character portraits of our generation. Without irony. What I find so interesting about people's reaction to it is this desire to understand whether or not it's authentic. And for me, I feel like that's part of the story and also completely beside the point. I feel like there's so much emotional truth in what they've created and so much character complexity and commentary and questions raised, the storytelling that's going on is fascinating. And so whether or not it's a documentary, to me, doesn't matter. But that doesn't necessarily pertain to our film, because I was just getting to know Jack at that point. I think what you see over the course of our film is our relationship growing. That's really at the heart of the film. I certainly didn't realize when I set out to make it ... I was never supposed to be a character in this film. I've made lots of other documentary works and never even used voiceovers. ... I think the reason that happened is that I was trying to get Jack to come to terms with his audience. By doing that, I became a surrogate. I was the audience that he was wrestling with. I think that helped me become tony, in some way. I needed to be the fall guy. This is somebody who had really taken the fall publicly, and I needed to be willing to do the same thing.

I think what happens by the end is that you have a synthesis of the two Jacks. You have somebody who is cantankerous and acerbic, but also someone who deeply desires a connection with the audience he didn't choose, but an audience nonetheless.

Steinbauer: His friend Keith in the film said that Jack's a dichotomy because of that very thing. He's always wanted to live behind the locked gate and be physically removed from people, but at the same time have a voice that influences people. At the time that Keith is saying Jack wanted that ability, that was before computers and the Internet made that possible. And now we all have that ability, to physically not see another person all day but still reach people via e-mail or blogs. And now Jack seems like this modern ... to say "folk hero" sounds bizarre, but he's certainly someone who desired the Internet before it technologically became available. Which is a weird thing to say about someone who's 80. I think something that makes Jack such a great character is that he's an old-school news personality. He was someone who made media back at a time when it was still shot on film -- there were no outtakes.

He worked at WBBM in Chicago at one point.

Steinbauer: That was where he spent most of his time. He was also in L.A. for quite a bit and spent some time in D.C. and New York.

Jeff Garlin apparently said that Larry David's Curb Your Enthusiasm was inspired by the "Winnebago Man" video?

Steinbauer: That was insane! I have to give you the context. What happened was that Michael Moore introduced the film July 9 at the Landmark Sunshine in New York for our official theatrical premiere and brought with him Jeff Garlin. ... And Michael brought him up to say a few words and Jeff told that story, and I went, "Holy s---!" because there were all these reporters and I'd never heard that. And the Wall Street Journal reprinted it the next day, but after the intro, I was standing in back with Jeff and asked him if it was true. And he says, "Hell, no. But it's funny right?" ... Maybe there's some truth in it, I don't know.

Speaking of Michael Moore ... Were you surprised that the one message Jack seemed to want to return from his exile from society to convey was that Dick Cheney is a very bad man?

Steinbauer: You hear me question him on that very thing. "This might be the last time you're on camera. This is what you want to talk about?" And he says, in classic Rebney-ese, "Abso-f---ing-lutely!" The thing I came to realize about Jack is that he came up with a tone in the media at a time when Ed Murrow and Eric Sevareid were his mentors. It was not about who they were dating or who they were married to or anything about their personal lives. And so me going up there as a documentary filmmaker ... "I'm going to get to the bottom of what makes him the angriest man in the world, find the inciting incident that explains this guy's personality," and he just turned that around on me. "What makes you think that I'm going to give you any personal details? ... I've worked in the media, and I know this can be taken out of context. This clip of me is out in the world that I don't want out there. I'm not going to risk that again." I think all of those things combined led him to want to focus just on politics.

Has he seen the documentary? If so, what was his initial response?

Steinbauer: Well, the morbid joke is that he hasn't seen it because he's blind. Bad joke, I'm sorry. But he has heard it. He heard it with an audience the first time at SXSW in 2009. When we got up for the Q&A I asked what he thought of the film. He responded in his classic way, "Well, I liked the film very much ... And I haven't liked anything in about 25 years." In all seriousness, it's been kind of above and beyond everybody's expectations at this point.

Have you forged a reunion between those crew members from Minnesota and Jack?

Steinbauer: There's not going to be a reunion with Jack, because he can't travel much anymore. He's blind and in poor health and can't make the trip. But every single one of the crew guys will be there on Friday night. I think that's the first time since they've come together to talk about the "Winnebago Man" clip probably since the filming in the late '80s.

And at that point they probably had a much different perspective on the whole thing than they do now.

Steinbauer: Absolutely.