By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
S07: Spletzer on Mudede on Zoo and AOL
For an admiring piece, Andy Spletzer‘s interview at GreenCine with screenwriter Charles Mudede (Police Beat) about his essayistic Sundance doc entry, Zoo, has quite the lede: ““It’s hard to believe, but one of the most beautiful films at Sundance this year will be about a guy who was fucked to death by a horse.” “Back in 2005, when the Seattle Times reported on the “Enumclaw Horse Sex Incident,” the story spread like wildfire across the Internet and became their most-read story of the year. It also caught the eyes of Seattle-based director Robinson Devor and writer Charles Mudede, whose dreamily poetic feature film Police Beat debuted at Sundance just six months prior. The resulting documentary essay is Zoo… Far from a traditional documentary, the narration is taken from extensive audio interviews with members of the group and was edited together to form the spine of the story. On top of that, they hired actors to portray the incidents that were being spoken about, and they brought in their Police Beat cinematographer Sean Kirby to create beautifully evocative images to punctuate the story.” The story broke in the summer of 2005, with the revelation that bestiality was legal in the state of Washington. “[T]he Internet made it possible. There’s no other reason why they got together, which is wonderful when you think about it. We didn’t get this out in the film and I wanted to express this, but you can only do so much. I like the fact that the Internet, this advanced form of technology, made it possible to do something that you’d almost say was kind of… primitive. Right? You know what I mean? At the root, at the center of all of this, the exchange between nature, the wild, the animal and the human was only made possible by the foremost technology of our time.” Spletzer notes that the caretaker of the barn says, “I got a computer in 2002 and started with AOL.” Mudede: “Yes. That’s right. “And I discovered myself. I discovered who I was. I was a zoo.” I mean, he discovers it on the Web, which is amazing.” [More amazement and perplexity at the link.]