The Reeler spent the wee hours of Independence Day at Eugene, where New York’s infamous Motherfucker party left a few thousand club kids deafened, drunken and debauched as the sun rose July 4th. Not a big clubgoer myself, the prospect of attending Motherfucker terrified me: I am fashion illiterate, more than a bit claustrophobic and I dance like DMX drives. But knowing that Monday would be my last shot to catch filmmaker David Casey and his crew at work on their upcoming Motherfucker documentary, I shook off my dread and, for once, joined the crowd. Literally.

Motherfucker: A Movie director David Casey (left) grills party icons Miranda Moondust and Amanda Lepore at Monday’s party (Photos: STV)
“I went to my first Motherfucker in years on Labor Day (2005), just to feel it out,” said Casey, who had more regularly haunted the holiday-centric party when it launched in 2000. “It was like, ‘This makes so much sense.’ I can talk about everything in New York right now: We can talk about post-9/11 music; this party itself; we can talk about the nightlife industry and how it’s kind of under attack right now; we can talk about all of the relevant bands that have played and the fact that the four producers who put this on are literally tastemakers. They always choose the right acts.”
By “the four producers,” Casey means Johnny T, Justine D, Michael T and Georgie Seville–an intrepid New York society supergroup whose rock-and-roll enterprise has showcased the New York Dolls, The Rapture, !!! and Bloc Party among others. The surprise act Monday night was The Futureheads, another “right act” that Casey said represents an evolved and closely observed symbioses between band and listener, DJ and dancer, host and guest.
The director noted the phenomena early in the production phase of what was supposed to be a multi-tentacled doc about the current NYC rock scene. It left such an impression that he scrapped the other stories and approached the organizers about shifting the focus exclusively to Motherfucker. Casey had their blessings after a few meetings, and he launched production with an eight-person crew during the New Year’s 2006 event at the Avalon.

“We were all flattered to some extent, just because it’s something we’ve thought about,” Johnny T told me during Monday’s party. “We’ve hired people to come with a video camera a couple times, but it’s never turned into anything. It’s nice to have someone from the outside say, ‘This is worth spending my time on and my money on.’ That was a real compliment. And beyond that, I think we agree it’s something worth covering. It may not be the next Superman, but we feel like there are people who want to see New York nightlife in action–if for no other reason, as sort of a time capsule of this moment and the music and the people and the style and all that stuff. Hopefully there’ll be a great story in it, but that’s not up to us. We throw the party. We’ll sit down and do the interviews and all that, but it’s basically up to him as a filmmaker.”

The Futureheads: On stage, on tape.
He also acknowledged that while Casey does not pass along dailies or anything, he was aware that the filmmaker’s focus had changed since he had conceived the project. To wit, Casey had recently broached the heady realms of science, filming through two-way mirrors and with elevated cameras capturing large-scale views of the action. He discussed the resulting footage with a sociologist, one of 140 interviews conducted for the documentary.
The idea was not necessarily to capture the spectrum of skin or omnisexual, coked-out kinesis for which Motherfucker is legendary (“It’s not a movie about debauchery, so I don’t think a lot of that stuff is even going to be in there,” said a resoundingly straight-faced Johnny T), but, in Casey’s words, to explore the questions: “Why do we need to party? What is that purpose?” And, of course, to figure out how that need plays out against the backdrop of New York hipster strata, where just getting through fearsome gatekeeper Thomas Onorato’s velvet rope confers a social entitlement that makes the Amanda Lepore sightings inside almost depressingly anticlimactic.
With this paradox in mind, Casey admits that the documentary crew can hinder itself more than it helps. “One piece of commentary that I really focus on in the film is the fact that we overdocument,” he said. “We shoot instead of dancing. All these late-night parties, all these nightclub events have these party photographers, and everybody else has seen themselves getting some sort of star power from that, so they start posing. And now, I kind of feel like we’ve gotten to the point that we are what [we] hate: Posers. We’re all posers, and we’re all posing and not dancing.”

“Luckily, no one’s murdered anyone yet. But it’s only 11:30.” Motherfucker cameraman Matt Kleigman.
At the very least he could keep the posing to a minimum in the interview room he and his crew had set up in the most removed subterranean corner of the club (the film crew arrived at Eugene at 1 p.m. Monday; Casey said they would break around 6 a.m. Tuesday). Seville guided a handful of subjects behind the makeshift door–a slab of soundboard that had worked surprisingly well as the DJ’s ratcheted up the volume later during the party. Brad Roszell, Casey’s executive producer and fellow University of Kansas alum, had flown to New York for the final shoot; he had been monitoring the nearly 200 hours of footage acquired prior to July 3 (the phrase “seven terabytes” came up at one point in casual conversation). He spent the early part of the evening spreading the gospel of selectivity.
“We have the outside perspective, being in Kansas,” Roszell told me. “I mean, David is immersed in this New York culture. And as much as this film is for all these New York party kids, we’d like to have a broad audience. So when he starts talking about this person or that person–and I’m very much into indie rock, and I know who a lot of these people are–but when I don’t, and he says, ‘This is a huge deal, we need to get this person.’ Why? ‘Well, they did this party…’ What party?
“From an outside perspective, you go, ‘What the fuck is that?’ But with him being out here, it might be big. It might be relevant to people here, but no one on the rest of the country gives a fuck about any of that.”
And just as Casey attributes Motherfucker’s success to its close attention to its devotees, so the director cultivates his own audience. He told me post-production would commence this week, with a rough-cut deadline of Oct. 15 and a national tour of the finished film (and corresponding parties, of course) planned next year for January through March, culminating in a screening at South by Southwest. What, I asked–he already has a booking, a la Weinstein at Cannes?
“It doesn’t matter if we get accepted–we will be there,” Casey pledged. “We’ll have all these bands who have been a part of this supporting us and all of these audiences who have been pushing us along the way. If we don’t get accepted, we’ll get some college kids to give us a house, we’ll have our projector in the back of our van and we’ll pitch it up on the side of their house for a thousand people.”
Spoken like a true Motherfucker–not that I would know anything about it. Anyway, the doc wrap party fires up tonight at 11 at the Delancey; the filmmakers encourage your attendance and promise to leave the cameras at home. Lijke that will be any fun.

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