GEORGE KUCHAR, Sunday Times, October 25, 1998

For a year or so now, Pulp's guitarist Mark Webber has pursued a second career as an arts impresario, organising exhibitions and screenings. His latest project is an overview of the 1960s American underground cinema scene, showcasing 99 films by directors whose influence is felt today upon David Lynch, Martin Scorsese and John Waters. It started last Friday at the Barbican and the Lux cinema in London's East End.

"I did it for entirely selfish, personal reasons," confesses Webber over leek sausages. "I thought I might wait for years and never see most of these films. Then I had the bright idea of getting someone else to pay for it." Expect to view Andy Warhol documenting his polysexual friends and Tony Conrad reducing film to stroboscopic flickers, but make a special date on Monday for George and Mike Kuchar, two distinctive talents in a world of would-be individualists.

Historians credit the Kuchars with originating "the pop camp aesthetic", later to infiltrate the mainstream via their disciple John Waters, but the two working-class Brooklyn boys - who started making movies with an 8mm camera birthday gift - had no interest in kitsch. They strove to re-create Hollywood epics, but minimal budgets, saturated colours and peculiar language put a surreal spin on their efforts. The Wet Destruction of the Atlantic Empire, made in 1954 when they were 12, drowned pictures of New York in local streams.

Unaware of the underground scene, the Kuchars showcased their work at the Manhattan Hotel 8mm Motion Picture Club, alongside other members' holiday movies. Reception there to 1962's A Woman Distressed was mixed. "Thalidomide had just come out," explains Kuchar from San Francisco, where he teaches film, "and, because I was just a kid, I used it as subject material for this satire. We had a little rubber baby and people dressed as doctors and nurses, but a lot of the older people found it hard to handle.

"The way I saw the world was as a pick-and-choose playpen, and I was looking for subjects. If you can make a film about the Titanic where 1,200 people died, why couldn't I make this silly true horror story? It was the only movie ever to get a bad review in the 8mm Motion Picture Club newspaper."

Fortuitously, the Kuchars were introduced to Jack Stevens, a patron of Kenneth Anger and Warhol, and their work found a more appreciative audience at his Fulton Fish Market screenings, despite the brothers arriving among the bereted bohemians in their smartest suits. "Some of those guys were nuts, some of them were nice people," remembers Kuchar. "But I was inspired by Hollywood, and they were part of a movement against Hollywood. Then I looked at their films and got ideas from them."

The 1963 film Lovers of Eternity, part of Monday night's programme, is remembered as George's satire on the Lower East Side artistic community, but apparently that wasn't his intention at all. "I met a film-maker who used to bake his films in an oven," says Kuchar, diplomatically, of Dov Lederberg, "the others thought he was kinda pretentious, but I saw him as a nice man and decided to make a bohemian love story with him in it. But he had...flaws. He was in a nest of odd people. The movie turned out really horrible. It was supposed to be a pretty picture - I thought he was not a bad-looking guy - and the lead woman, she had pretty hair, too."

Kuchar's best known 1960s work, Hold Me While I'm Naked (1966), an inexplicably hilarious, abstract meditation on the tribulations of a film-maker (George Kuchar), is also featured tomorrow night. But Kuchar was initially baffled by audience responses. "Sometimes people would start laughing and I'd think, 'Hey, this ain't a funny movie. They're in for a surprise.' " The film was rescripted halfway through to accommodate the departure of an actress who objected to nude scenes, Kuchar making a virtue of crisis. "That's when you invent new stuff. When things go wrong your brain goes haywire trying to patch things up."

Perhaps Kuchar's finest moment is Thundercrack (1974), made when he and Curt McDowell, a student, snaffled a substantial sum from two heirs to the Burger King fortune to make a porn film. Instead, Kuchar scripted a bizarre 158-minute horror film parody, replete with occasional foully explicit sex scenes, in which he played Bing, a zoo keeper fleeing a gorilla who had fallen in love with him. Too obscene for arts audiences, and too arty for porn fiends, Thundercrack bombed, though the four remaining copies regularly thrill at film festivals, the vagaries of local censorship laws permitting.

Today Kuchar works mainly on video. His Weather Diaries, filmed on his annual vacations at a motel in Reno, Nevada, are strangely moving studies of meteorology, unusual local characters and Kuchar himself, alone in a cheap room. And how does he feel about being the subject of a retrospective? "It makes me feel like an old fart," he laughs. "But I am an old fart. I'm 56 and still making pictures."

George Kuchar is an oddly likable, likably odd, man, but is he calculatedly playing the part of the misunderstood naif? "Oh no," says Webber. "George is one of the good guys. When I told him about this season he said, 'Boy! It must be a big headache getting all those broken old films together!' "