Documentarian Chris Wilcha is stepping back through time for his latest feature “Flipside.”
Wilcha revisits his own shelved past projects including capturing “This American Life” icon Ira Glass in the midst of a creative rebirth, an origin story of David Bowie’s ode to a local New Jersey cable television hero, and an unlikely connection between jazz photographer Herman Leonard and TV writer David Milch.
The film is the product of Wilcha returning to the record store where he worked as a teenager in New Jersey and realizing that the staple of his youth is now out of touch with the times. Per the official synopsis, “Flipside” documents Wilcha’s “tragicomic attempt to revive the store while revisiting other documentary projects he has abandoned over the years. This disparate collection of stories coheres into something strange and expansive — a moving meditation on music, work, and the sacrifices and satisfaction of trying to live a creative life.”
The film debuted at TIFF 2023 and is distributed by Oscilloscope Laboratories. The IndieWire review called the film a “mesmerizing collage… An endearing, dizzying documentary about the crushing convergence between art and commerce… [It’s] like a perfect, wondrous B-side collection: It is filled with the ideas you wished had become singles, and the intriguing conceptions that, even in their failure, tell you a bit more about the artist.”
Wilcha directs the feature, which he co-wrote with Joe Beshenkovsky and Adam Goldman. Producers include Wilcha, Beshenkovsky, Goldman, Michelle Currinder, Alex Fisch, and James A. Smith.
Wilcha won two Emmys and two International Documentary Association Awards for directing the TV adaptation of Ira Glass’s radio show “This American Life.” The Coen Brothers later hired him to direct concert documentary “Another Day, Another Time,” featuring music from their film “Inside Llewyn Davis.”
Legendary mega-producer/director Judd Apatow executive produces the documentary, along with James P. O’Shaughnessy, Lance Acord, Jackie Kelman Bisbee, Sam Bisbee, and Justin Pollock.
Apatow recently lamented the lack of original projects in the filmmaking industry as a whole.
“There are these corporate behemoths and people from the tech world taking over creativity. And for some of them — not all of them — their intentions are just eyeball time online,” Apatow told Vulture. “I don’t know if they’re obsessed with quality filmmaking in the way other owners of these entities have been in the past. That’s why they started calling it ‘content.’ All of a sudden, they diminished it as much as it possibly could be. I don’t think it would be that weird if you read something in the paper that Pornhub bought Paramount+.”
He added, “The industry does follow the leader. That’s why in the [DGA Awards] monologue I had a joke about all the different toy movies that will come out next, like ‘Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots’ by Lars von Trier. But for comedy, it just requires another hit or two. If a movie like ‘The Hangover’ came out and it was a big hit, suddenly everyone would want five more of those.”
“Flipside” premieres May 31 in theaters with the NY Theater as IFC Center with Oscilloscope Laboratories as the distributor. Check out the trailer below.
