George and Mike Kuchar: attack of the killer twins

If directors were ranked according to the greatness of their films' titles, brothers George and Mike Kuchar would instantly be inducted into the pantheon of gods. Together and separately since the late 1950s, these mainstays of the early 1960s New York underground film movement have bestowed on their audience – tiny and cult-like though it's always been – such eyeball-searing marquee-toppers as Sins of the Fleshapoids, Hold Me While I'm Naked, A Town Called Tempest, The Devil's Cleavage and I Was a Teenage Rumpot. Others have liked their titles, too. As George tells me on the phone from his home in San Francisco, where he has taught film since 1971, "I once got a call from Mad magazine saying, 'We're doing a strip and we'd like to borrow your title The Naked and the Nude. We'll take ya to lunch!' I said sure. So they took me to lunch. I was very, very flattered. I forget where they took me." Other fans of their lurid, lush 8mm mock-melodramas include David Lynch, Atom Egoyan, Guy Maddin and Brian De Palma. Mike Kuchar remembers an early encounter with a barely out-of-his-teens John Waters: "John later said our pictures made him work harder, made him feel uplifted and less alone." The identical twins were born in Manhattan – "in the same hospital as Tab Hunter," George says - but raised in the Bronx. They made their first splash on the underground scene when they turned up at the downtown loft of experimental film-maker Ken Jacobs, in 1963. There, they projected their home-made 8mm movies: ripe colours, cheesy string soundtracks, bargain-basement special effects, casts featuring their friends and neighbours, as well as their mother. Their audience included the glitterati of the emergent Factory and Film Culture magazine scenes – among them editor Jonas Mekas and Andy Warhol. It shouldn't have worked because, as George's friend Buck Henry points out in Jennifer Kroot's lovely new documentary It Came from Kuchar, the Warhol crowd were affectless – "and the Kuchars were nothing but affect!" Still, the in-crowd loved the movies, marvelling at how an entirely coherent proto-camp sensibility had sprouted unassisted in the Bronx wilderness. "They were fascinated by us because they were all hipsters," George says, "while we knew people who, y'know, worked in the post office." Even so, the twins were anything but square: they had already horrified the members of the New York 8mm Motion Picture Society, whose usual fare consisted, in George's recollection, of "well-mounted movies about baby's first steps, or our summer vacation. They took it all very seriously, dressed up nice. It was held in a big ballroom at a hotel, chandeliers." The brothers took their film A Woman Distressed, a perhaps ill-advised comedy about Thalidomide, which was in the news. "That was the only time they ever wrote a bad review in their club periodical," George says. Somehow, isolated in the Bronx, filming in their parents' apartment and on rooftops, channelling the Hollywood movies they had spent their after-school hours watching, the Kuchars created a dingy, candy-coloured yet authentic parallel universe to the ones being imagined in the East Village by Jack Smith (in Flaming Creatures and Normal Love), and by Warhol with his increasingly ambitious Factory outings. ("Some of the Kuchar actors were even more berserk than the Warhol Superstars," Waters recalls in Kroot's documentary.) Although the brothers remain best friends, by the late 1960s their different rates of output had led them to work apart. George still makes movies the way other people write diaries: students at the San Francisco Art Institute can expect to make about 15 movies a year in his class; he has now cranked out something approaching 300 movies and video diaries. Mike is more the reticent novelist, and works only when inspired, making his output much smaller. Their influence persists. "A surprising number of Hollywood people know my brother and I," Mike says. "I went to the Skywalker Ranch once, and George Lucas said, 'I'm a big fan of your work!' They have their realm, we work in ours. I never feel any kind of urge to work in Hollywood. If I want to make a movie, I just make it. It's all creativity."