Duo’s doco upsets the onion cart
Zachary Capp was the president of Las Vegas’ largest nannying and housekeeping firm – and a gambling addict. Then he discovered a dangerous new obsession, documentary film-making. Armed with his grandfather’s inheritance, he knew instantly what he wanted his first story to be about – the Minnesota onion rings he loved as a child.
After striking out when trying to discover how the fried snack was invented, Capp decided to focus on the man who made his beloved version, Larry Lang.
Described as a ‘‘kitchen ninja and a dining room ballerina’’, Lang had spent more than half a century serving the tasty treat battered with his own secret recipe to the people of Worthington, Minnesota, and across the State border in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.
Putting together a team of experts, Capp had plans to shoot it as a fly-on-the-wall, half-hour pilot for a series on American food legends, but through ‘‘brute force and tenacity’’, he ended up with more than 300 hours of footage and something very different.
However, The Ringmaster (screening as part of this year’s online edition of the Doc Edge Film Festival), isn’t even Capp’s film. Instead it’s his crew Molly Dworsky’s and Dave Newberg’s hilarious and heartbreaking look at one documentarian’s search for a happy ending and the ‘‘best onion ring moment of all time’’. Part Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse, part The Room, this is an excellent primer on how not to make a documentary.
Lang might have been responsible for something people travelled hundreds of miles to sample, but it’s quickly clear that he was someone who preferred to be in the background.
Likewise, there are multiple points at which Capp could have ended his tale, but he couldn’t resist trying to make Larry’s onion rings as world famous as he could.
Dworsky and Newberg capture this in all of its awkward, agonising glory. As Dworsky says, she was ‘‘shaking her head in horror at what was happening’’, while equally hoping Capp would succeed and it ‘‘would all work out’’ for Larry and his sister, Linda.
The former star of the children’s exercise video Mother Goose Workout, Linda is just one of a number of quirky people adding texture to Capp’s quixotic quest. There’s the owner of Sioux Falls’ Badlands speedway, gun range, pawn shop, and entertainment complex and, somewhat unbelievably, the members of the rock band KISS and the owner of the NFL’s Las Vegas Raiders.
It all adds up to a compelling watch, best accompanied, of course, by a suitable salty snack.
But arguably Capp’s three-year obsession pales in comparison to the eight-year odyssey that comedian Ben Sisto took himself on, recounted in another of this year’s Doc Edge titles, Who Let the Dogs Out.
Bugged by an incomplete Wikipedia entry, he was determined to find out where the Baha Men’s hit 2000 single truly originated from.
A global phenomenon (although New Zealand was just one of two countries where it topped the charts), the tune was later named third in a poll of the world’s most annoying songs by Rolling Stone.
Starting by tracking down the London hairdresser ‘‘Keith’’, cited by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger’s online search tool as bringing the tune from the Caribbean to the world, Sisto goes down a rabbit hole filled with crazy, colourful characters, competing claims and lengthy lawsuits.
Director Brent Hodge (whose previous subjects have included comedian Chris Farley and adult My Little Pony fanatics) and Sisto retell the tale in stand-up comedic lecture style (similar to Apple TV+’s recent Beastie Boys Story), to engrossing effect.
The Doc Edge Film Festival 2020 runs until July 5. For online session times, the full lineup and more information, see festival.docedge.nz.