What to Do on the Way Down
How independent theater junkies are changing what it means to be bad
By Brooke Jackson-Glidden
Starr Kendall is doing back flips on a trampoline. Not well, exactly, but he’s falling over with the grace of an out-of-shape independent actor pushing forty, while scratchy punk riffs (ones he wrote and performed, in fact) serenade his belabored jumps. This YouTube video has 33 views. In yellow ‘80s-sitcom-titles font, text screams a quote by comedian Del Close:
“Fall, then figure out what to do on the way down.”
This is a promo for Kendall’s film festival, a collection of self-funded amateur projects screened at comedy clubs scattered across Manhattan and Brooklyn. Kendall and his friend, Shawn Wickens, founded Bad Film Fest three years ago, after the mild success of their original endeavor, Bad Theater Fest. These movies and plays aren’t designed to be bad — they’re made with the comfort of protective humility, blanketed with self-deprecation so every creator can laugh with the crowd if the final product ends up being garbage.
Most of them aren’t, though. Garbage. They’re timid, a little choppily shot and poorly written, but they’re campy. They’re Lena Dunham’s early, pseudo-autobiographical “Tiny Furniture,” not Tommy Wiseau’s famously horrendous cult classic “The Room.”
Bad is having its moment. Mystery Science Theater 3000 is experiencing its minor revival, Everything is Terrible and the Tim and Eric brand continue to grow and hate-watching has become the new American pastime. Kendall and Wickens, intentionally or otherwise, have jumped into a burgeoning market — they would just prefer you treat the artists with respect.
Some of the plays and films are more self-aware than others. Many screened comedies, for instance the 2014 Bad Film Fest feature “The Pill Girls,” satirize genres or trends from the perspective of a movie nerd. Kendall, the enduring optimist, calls these films “homages.” This reporter is not entirely convinced.
According to Wickens and Kendall, bad is complicated. Bad comes from a place of pain, humor, maybe even pride. Bad is something a critic spits, something any artist will try desperately to avoid. It’s human.
Between the Halloween submission launch and Thanksgiving weekend, the 2015 Bad Film Fest FilmFreeway account accumulated 750 films — movies made by first-time screenwriters, film school dropouts, HBO rejects. The festival was created with those artists in mind: The ones on the way down who might just need a little boost — artists like Kendall and Wickens.
Wickens is no stranger to rejection. On the Bad Theater Fest website, the improv veteran boasts that he “had his writing rejected by Troma Films, Blue Man Group and Comedy Central.” I mean, his is a trained thespian.
Wickens went to the competitive Second City Conservatory in Cleveland, a since-closed branch of the famous Chicago comedy institute that brought Tina Fey and Alan Arkin to the stage and screen. When he graduated, Wickens made like any ambitious theater nerd and moved to Manhattan. But Broadway reeks of rotting, abandoned dreams — you can escape the stink down the street, in the small, accepting comedy houses and independent theaters.
Wickens found a home in the improv venues throughout the city, but he wanted to succeed, make something for mass consumption, be it a play or a show or podcast. He sent his work around, he auditioned, but nothing seemed to work out.
In 2012, Wickens entered a Comedy Central pilot project. He had the idea for an improv-based animated show, one he thought was well thought-out and could draw a unique audience. When he was rejected, he “took it hard” — even quitting improv temporarily.
“It just seemed so marketable,” he said, maybe to himself, looking out the window of the Chelsea Market ramen restaurant on a cold Saturday night. Wickens doesn’t seem to like talking about this period of his life.
During his hiatus, he took a class with a woman named Nina Morrison, a theater coach in New York, who encouraged students to move forward with their careers, to produce their own work, even if they didn’t know exactly what would happen next.
“Don’t worry about getting it done,” she told the class. “Pick a date, find a space, and then worry about getting it done.”
Wickens texted Kendall about the theater festival that day.
Starr Kendall lives in an apartment in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, a residential neighborhood just across the river from Staten Island. Kendall refers to his neighborhood as “not cool Brooklyn; shitty Brooklyn.” He resembles a teenage boy who, to his horror, aged thirty years without noticing: He’s balding, somewhat paunch, still rocking the quarter-sleeve band shirt and black high tops. In his apartment, punk rock riffs play off a Scott record player in the corner of the windowless room.
Kendall’s musical taste matches his taste in most things: eclectic, unpretentious. He’s not a Luddite; he balances his analogue artifacts with high-quality video equipment. His bookshelf is stocked with old sci-fi from the ‘70s and ‘80s, and an old Star Wars soundtrack sits on his record player. He doesn’t like things because it’s cool to like them: He likes the weird, off-kilter art he can find in bizarre corners of his life.
Unlike Wickens, Kendall didn’t start off his career optimistic. For most of his life, he wanted to be a science teacher. He discovered his love for theater when he started participating in the one-act competitions at his high school. He decided to go to school for theater and become an acting teacher. After a brief moment of indecision, he chose the University of Oklahoma over University of Texas for its small, inclusive performing arts program.
While Kendall was in college, he attended two programs that helped him develop the skills to become a working actor. First, he spent a summer at Vassar College for the New York Stage and Film apprenticeship.
“Going there, I got to meet these professionals, these working actors, and I thought ‘Wait, so I could actually be a working actor with a theater degree?’” Kendall said. “I came back to OU with a renewed interest in becoming a professional actor.”
Next, Kendall went south to a nine-month journeyman program at the Warehouse Theater in Greenville, S.C. That program, which forced him to find a “day job” and learn all the methods he could, is where he “learned to be an actor.”
“[The program] turned us into sustainable, responsible adults — well, not so much responsible, but at least in terms of work ethic,” he said. “I might have a crappy day, but that night I have to give my all for the performance. A lot of people aren’t trained that way; they let their crappy day affect the way they perform. Or the unexpected day! Like, sometimes you’ll get called into work and you’ll only have thirty minutes between the time you perform and the time you get off work. It’s like, ‘Oh no! I won’t have time to do my full vocal warm-up!’ Deal with it! That work really prepared me for the comedy world I fell into. It’s like, ‘I only have five minutes to prepare! Awesome! I love it!’”
That philosophy, the “keep moving and do your best” attitude, is what lies at the core of Bad Theater Fest and Film Fest.
Here’s the tricky part — “Bad” at Bad Theater Fest doesn’t mean bad.
“For the artist, bad means ‘don’t worry about it; do what’s fun for you,’” Wickens said.
Kendall isn’t nearly as economical in his definition. The actor has spent a lot of time thinking about what “bad” means, and it’s still amorphous, an ambiguity he enjoys. It’s not fully-formed because then it becomes exclusionary.
Even so, he has a hierarchy of bad. Something that’s “bad but good” is the highest ranking at either festival. It’s a film that is made by an overly humble filmmaker that is actually well written and well shot. It’s been categorized as bad, maybe, because of the filmmaker’s status as a student or as a reject. But the film itself isn’t poorly made in any way.
The bad-but-good films make the festival.
Something that’s just “bad” is probably flawed in some way, but still entertaining. Kendall thinks audiences can take real value in watching something bad. It makes them more compassionate human beings.
“We’ve grown to be accustomed to entertainment. We expect to be entertained, and when we’re not, we’re so judgmental, we’ll want to destroy someone’s career. You know, say things like, ‘Oh, that was horrible, that was the worst piece of shit.’ Jesus, man, if you don’t like it, just be quiet.” Kendall explained.
The “bad” films make the festival.
Then, there’s the bad that’s actually bad, the bad Kendall calls “the horrible.” Something that’s horrible is ironically bad or not entertaining. It’s lazy or listless.
“Putting your all into something despite whatever level you’re at, despite your limitations… Bad Theater Fest, Bad Film Fest, it’s the same way. You might not have the time or skill to get something done exactly right, but what can you do anyway? What can you do with those limitations? Limitations really make us great. It’s when we have complete freedom that we get lazy. It’s when you have complete freedom that you make something truly bad, truly horrible, something no one wants to see.”
The horrible films don’t make the festival.
It’s a new level of disappointing when you’ve been rejected by the Bad Theater Festival or Bad Film Festival, a new low. Wickens and Kendall recognize that. It’s their least favorite part of the job.
“It sort of kills me, in part, to have to reject people,” Wickens said. “We try to write a more personal form-letter for those rejected, to say, ‘the Bad Theater Fest was born out of our rife rejection, and if this stings a little, please use that to make something great.’”
The theater festival normally presents around 40 plays from 150–200 submissions, all of them running around 5–10 minutes. The two curators normally receive premises, not scripts, which they accept trusting the writers will deliver a full play by showtime. Many times, Wickens won’t read or see the plays before curtain.
“It’s more fun for us,” Wickens said. “We really don’t know what to expect. So far, it’s worked out well.”
Kyle Smith directed and wrote a play for the third-annual Bad Theater Fest, which ended this November. “Squashy” was a children’s play that twisted into a bizarre commentary on fading childhood innocence.
“My play was about children’s television, about the inherent racism and the old television you used to watch as a kid, and also about how when you grow up children’s television is no longer applicable to your real life,” Smith told me over the phone.
Kendall was astounded by how well Smith’s play turned out. In the words of Kendall, “Squashy” was well-performed and introspective, while also being hilariously funny. For Smith, performing at Bad Theater Fest was a step for him into the New York theater community.
“The whole thing was an excellent experience… Sometimes you write a play, and you go ‘okay, I think this is really funny,’ and you’re in rehearsal you go ‘yeah, this is funny,’ but you don’t really know how people are going to react. When my character said the first line of my play, everyone burst out laughing. And that’s confidence.”
Smith will present his next play at the independent-first Adonis Theater Festival in January.
“We’re genuine about what we’re trying to look at, and find the value in it,” Kendall explained. “Maybe you don’t have the best equipment, but you have a really funny story idea and some really funny friends — we want to support that kind of filmmaking. Or if you’re a teenager and your dad got you a camera for Christmas, because you saw a film that really inspired you and you want to be a filmmaker come hell or high water, at the age of twelve, we can pull that off. We’re so caught up trying to be so good, we end up being bad some times.”
This theme emerged in Kevin Ritter’s small pseudo-comedy, “Cat,” a reference to the famous Broadway megahit “Cats.” Much of the play is the main character acting out pieces from Cats. At the end, however, he sits with his friends in a bedroom and performs a monologue in which he acknowledges he will probably never hit Broadway. At this point, he doesn’t seem to mind. He’s sitting with his friends in his bedroom, messing around, and for him, “that’s what theater is — connecting with a few people in a small room.”
“That’s exactly what the bad theater fest is, theater and film connecting with people in a small room, eliciting a response in a good way or a bad way.” Kendall said. “We’re happy to be the guys who decided to call it this and be as inclusive as possible. We get rejected too from things.”
Sometimes, it’s easy to forget. Sometimes, even with their bashful humility and active day-jobs, Kendall and Wickens seem like they’ve actually made it, done something cool. But then, the scars of bad auditions and tedium of daily life come into view, and with them the truth that Kendall and Wickens made the festival for themselves.
These guys might be falling, but they’ve figured out what to do on the way down.
