Oh TV, up yours!
Animal Charm, Bryan Boyce, and TV Carnage chart the outer limits of piracy

johnny@sfbg.com

Dick Cheney surveys the teeming white crowds at the 2004 Republican National Convention. With their Cheney Rocks! placards and stars-and-stripes Styrofoam hats, these people worship him, but he still looks like he wants to spray them with buckshot. "You're all a bunch of fucking assholes!" he sneers. "You know why? You need people like me — so you can point your fucking fingers and say, 'That's the bad guy.’”

OK, maybe Cheney didn't use those exact words in his convention speech, but we all know he was thinking them, so bless Bryan Boyce's short video America's Biggest Dick for making the vice president really speak his mind — in this case, via Al Pacino's dialogue in Scarface. The title fits: Boyce's two-minute movie exposes the gangster mentality of Cheney and the rest of the Bush administration, perhaps giving his subject more charisma than he deserves. Ultimately, Cheney gets around to admitting he's the bad guy — after he's compared the convention's hostile New York setting to "a great big pussy waiting to be fucked" and speculated about how much money is required to buy the Supreme Court.

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"Fuck you! Who put this thing together? Me — that's who!" he bellows when a graphic exhibition of his oral sex talents receives some boos.

One might think the man behind America's Biggest Dick might be boisterous and loud, but Boyce — who lives in San Francisco — is in fact soft-spoken and modest, crediting the movie's "stunt mouth," Jonathan Crosby (whose teeth and lips Bryce pastes onto Cheney and other political figures), with the idea of using Brian de Palma's 1983 film. "I knew I wanted extensive profanity, and Scarface more than delivered," Boyce says during an interview at the Mission District's Atlas Caf. "But I was also amazed at how well the dialogue fit."

The dialogue fits because Boyce masterfully tweaks found material, particularly footage from television. It's a skill he's honed and a skill that motivates the most recent waves of TV manipulation thriving on YouTube, on DVD (in the case of the Toronto-based TV Carnage), and at film festivals and other venues that have the nerve to program work that ignores the property rights of an oppressive dominant culture. "It is, admittedly, crude," Boyce says of America's Biggest Dick, which inspired raves and rage when it played the Sundance Film Festival last year. "It's a crude technique for a crude movie matched to a very crude vice president." As for the contortions of Crosby's mouth, which exaggerate Cheney's own expressions, Boyce has an apt reference at hand: "The twisted mouth to match his twisted soul — he's got a Richard III thing going on."

America's Biggest Dick isn't Boyce's only film to mine horror and hilarity from the hellish realms of Fox News. In 30 Seconds of Hate, for example, he uses a "monosyllabic splicing technique" to puppeteer war criminal (and neocon TV expert) Henry Kissinger into saying, "If we kill all the people in the world, there'll be no more terrorists.... It's very probable that I will kill you." All the while, mock Fox News updates scroll across the bottom of the screen. "That footage came from a time when Fox thought that Saddam [Hussein] had been killed," Boyce explains. "That's why Kissinger kept using the word kill. Of course, no one says kill like Henry Kissinger."

In Boyce's State of the Union, the smiling baby face within a Teletubbies ...

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