First of all, if you've never seen the video of the angry RV salesman you need to go watch it right now. This movie chronicles filmmaker Ben Steinbaum's quest to find the man behind the violent torrents of profanity. He discovers the subject's name quickly, Jack Rebney, and is easily able to collect the crew from that fateful shoot, now twenty years older but still happy to reminisce and laugh about a protracted sweltering shoot cramped inside an RV that was so nerve-wracking to pitchman Jack Rebney that he cursed his way right into history. But will he find the man himself Jack Rebney? Well the movie opens with footage proving that, yes, yes he eventually does, but the story's journey is much more interesting that its destination, and also incredibly hilarious and even a little touching in some parts but mostly just really, really funny.
This movie actually has stakes, and they build them up rather well. The creators of the Found Footage Film Festival routinely refer to Rebney as their 'holy grail' and assume that tracking him down would be impossible because surely he must have succumbed to a massive rage-induced heart attack years ago. Writers and directors from Hollywood reveal their fondness for the outtake footage and illustrate a few mainstream Hollywood absorptions of internet ephemera. The cameraman, sound guy, and intern (Tony!) from the industrial shoot swap stories and laughs about it but eventually reveal that they feel guilty about cutting together the tape of outtakes that eventually led to Rebney's infamy but more importantly it lead to his termination from the Winnebago corporation back in 1989.
Steinbaum finally ends up hiring a private detective and mailing letters to every PO box every registered for Jack Rebney before finally making contact with the man who will dominate every frame of the film afterward. Rebney is just a damned interesting man, largely because of his swearing but also because of his contradictory personality. During their first visit, Rebney is calm and congenial and seems only somewhat aware of the outtake footage, the internet, and how those two things combined to make him famous. But a few months after Steinbaum returns home from visiting Rebney's remote mountain top hermit-cabin, he gets a phone call from him revealing that was all an act.
Before this point, I was almost sure they had found an impostor, or that maybe Rebney had massive brain damage. But thankfully he reveals he was just playing nice. He is just as cranky, crazy and cantankerous as ever, and he still curses like a legend. He's one home-made bomb away from a completely different type of fame, with his remote hermitage, his disgust for modern society, and his bizarre manifesto subtitled 'a heretical inquiry into God, religion, sex, and politics' (now available as an E-book sans the crazy subtitle but with a suitably weird-ass cover photo). He's lived a solitary existence amongst the towering trees of Shasta County for fifteen years, and dreamed of that lifestyle for much longer, even before his time at Winnebago, during his original decades-long career as a respected news produced for CBS Chicago.
Rebney is no monster though. He loves his dog named Buddha. He has a close friend he speaks to daily on the phone; the friend says years ago Rebney took him in when he had no money and helped him get on his feet. He wears giveaway sweatshirts with logos from Gatorade or EA Sports. When they drive into Redding, he wants to get a sandwich at the Sausage Factory, but not before they film him in front of a WalMart complaining about the downfall of America. He still has a funny, youthful energy; when the store manager runs up and tells them to get lost, Rebney mocks him a in German accent, and then laughs contemptuously when the manager refers to the area as his 'super-center lot'.
But he has the current generation pegged all wrong. He thinks young people in Northern California won't be interested to hear about how much he hates WalMart and Dick Cheney, but when Steinbaum arranges from him to appear at the Red Vic (RIP) in San Francisco, he is downright overjoyed to discover that people would applaud anything he said, even what he thought were scandalous political opinions. And you can almost see his icy heart melting a little when adoring fans line up to take pictures with him. Rebney gets the last word in this offbeat and inspirational documentary, and he remains as skeptical and fond of cursing as ever, wondering 'why anybody would want to watch this shit.'
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