McSweeney's DVD magazine is better than it sounds

BURNING SENSATION One of the most interesting indie magazines to come along in a while actually comes on DVD

Amid the crush of earnest-looking MFA grads at the McSweeney's headquarters in San Francisco, an editor taps away at a laptop balanced on a fold-up TV dinner tray. There just isn't any desk space left. The twee-media empire founded by Dave Eggers in 1998 is now operating at full capacity, regularly churning out art books by the likes of David Byrne and Marcel Dzama, fiction by Lydia Davis and Jonathan Lethem, and essay collections by Nick Hornby and Neal Pollack—in addition to monthly cultural magazine The Believer, and, of course, the flagship quarterly. Colonizing Park Slope's meticulously curated bookshelves isn't enough, however. Now they want your DVD player.

We have this footage I'd always heard of: Dennis Hopper trying to blow himself up with dynamite. It was this old Hollywood legend and it was filed somewhere between a gerbil story and whatever...Wholphin, a genre-defying DVD compilation of shorts, documentaries, cartoons, and found footage, occupies a modest corner of the office, but its creator, Brent Hoff, has big plans for the project. Hoff, 37, started the series after working as a writer for The Daily Show With Jon Stewart and putting in a stint at VH1, where he helped develop Best Week Ever. (Full disclosure: I worked there too.) In its first three issues, Wholphin has featured unreleased work by filmmakers like Spike Jonze, David O. Russell, Errol Morris, and Alexander Payne—side-by-side with lesser-known clips that might otherwise have been ignored by Hollywood or lost in the swirl of YouTube. Like, for example, Dennis Hopper attempting blow himself up. Hoff took a break from setting up a shoot with predator ants to talk to Radar about his latest issue.

HEAD STRONG In Yemen, 13-year-old Najmia is an outcast for refusing to wear her veil

RADAR: So, why should people buy the third issue of Wholphin?
BRENT HOFF: A Stranger in Her Own City, by Khadija Al-Salami, is the highlight of the disc. It's a documentary about a 13-year-old girl in Yemen who refuses to wear her veil. The filmmaker just randomly came across her and started filming. We also have this footage I'd always heard of: Dennis Hopper trying to blow himself up with dynamite. It was this old Hollywood legend and it was filed somewhere between a gerbil story and whatever. I ran into Dennis Hopper at CineVegas and was able to ask him about it.

How'd you get the actual footage?
He was like, "I've got it!"

Where was it? A rodeo?
It was a performance art piece and he tried to set it up in Houston, but they were like, "No, not really okay in our city limits." So he drove out of town to the Big H Speedway where there was a race going on, and he just kind of set up.

Why would he blow himself up?
Dennis Hopper is an artist, first and foremost. There's a gallery in Los Angeles that shows his stuff, and he produces a ton of work. He had seen this done at a road show when he was a kid, and he was trying to get back into performance art. He had made this sculpture called Bomb Drop, and this was just kind of a logical conclusion, I guess. He's an artist. It's not just like, "Oh, crazy Dennis Hopper!" As he explains it, it's a pretty logical evolution.

EXPLOSIVE PERFORMANCE Hopper does a bang-up job in a once-lost short film

What about the other filmmakers? Is Alexander Payne happy people can see his student film, The Passion of Martin, now?
I think so. And I hope so. He's obviously excited enough to take time to organize it and put it together ... A lot of times, honestly, it's not at the top of their priority list. Alexander Payne is in the middle of making two movies, you know.

How do you know about the films?
Rumors. Rumors within rumors.

Do they ever prove fruitless?
I'll let you know in a few weeks. There's this Paul Thomas Anderson film. He went to speak at Berkeley and mentioned this movie he'd made with the late Elliot Smith that no one's ever really seen and he doesn't know what to do with. So people started e-mailing me [saying] Paul Thomas Anderson made a film with Elliot Smith. Elliot Smith plays a Rastafarian basketball player, and there's a cameo by Bette Midler. I managed to contact P.T.A.—my dear, good buddy—and he doesn't know where it is. It's in one of four storage spaces that he's got. He's in the middle of these other movies, but, he says, get back in touch in six months.

There are a couple of those. Like Todd Solondz says that two of his best films—people think they're his best films—are only screened in his house to friends. The reason they've never seen the light of day is because they contain a Beatles song and a Go-Go's song. We're gonna work on trying to clear those.

How do you get around copyright issues?
It's a big headache, but so far we have been able to make good choices. So far. I don't want to deprive anyone who invested in a film—it's hard to make these things. But if a video is languishing in perpetuity, we'll look into it and see what we can do. It's a case-by-case basis.

Are there any films you're dying for?
There are a couple I've been tracking down for a very long time. I'm on the hunt for this African movie called The Draughtsman. I've got a guy named Saba Saba—aka the Krazy Native—who's a rapper in Uganda, helping me. He's got connections to the film world in Africa. It's a really funny little comedy I saw as part of an African screening years ago at the Museum of the Moving Image. No one knows where it is. Someone just brought a DVD over on a plane from the Congo. There are a lot of things like that.

SET PIECE Relations on the U.S.-Mexico border get heated when there's an immigration spike

How did it come to you to be the curator of this stuff? Are you qualified to select these films?
I'm certainly not. [Laughs.] I have no film background at all. I lack a lot of pedigree. I'm sure there are a million more people who have a greater knowledge of what's out there than me. But maybe that's a benefit, too.

Do you think your gut instinct can translate into a cohesive product and reach an audience?
It has so far. We're doing phenomenally well. Surprisingly well. It's a huge experiment—we had no idea if anyone cared or would buy a bunch of short films when they can watch them on YouTube. But more people like to watch films than read books, that's just a sad fact. So, I'd imagine we'd have lots of opportunities. There's a big niche to fill between the ultra lo-fi passion, on the one hand, and having to wait three years to go through a development process for your one little half hour, on the other. Between the extremes, a bunch of people with talent and cameras and ideas are making things. The model for distribution is something that is still being worked out for everyone. We're playing around with ideas for a TV show or making a lot of these things downloadable.

RADAR: What about the predator ants?
BRENT HOFF: They have the fastest predatory strike of any animal! There's no animal that moves that fast!Before Wholphin, you were actually in development at VH1. What did you learn from that experience?
On Best Week Ever, at the beginning, we had a lot of freedom to do things not so dissimilar to things I do on Wholphin—somewhat quirkier items. There were pieces on scientists who were going crazy about the Mars Lander, for instance. We'd do a piece like that, but quickly we found that the more we did celebrity segments, the higher the ratings were. So under the ratings-are-king economic model that television must follow, shows are going to, by necessity, end up catering to the lowest common denominator. That doesn't mean serving the entire market.

Isn't that letting the media off the hook a little bit by saying it's the market's fault?
Yeah, well, you try. We tried. I tried. Some of the stuff that I would make there would rate okay, but stuff that was really, really offensive and demeaning in some way would rate phenomenally. I'm not trying to completely let them off the hook, but there is a misconception that people don't try. There are a lot of people trying to make very good television. One of the stumbling blocks is, you know, a lot of people don't want to watch it.

Is it a relief to not have focus groups?
Well, I have a really pure focus group, which is, are we selling enough to keep us going? And just barely on our third issue, we're already doing well, surpassing what we thought. There are a lot of people who like the strange stuff. Not that we're that strange, really.

ANT BULLIES Wholphin's foray into National Geographic turf

What about the predator ants?
They have the fastest predatory strike of any animal! It's a world-record holding thing! There's no animal that moves that fast! No matter who you are, just to know the fastest motion an animal makes on the earth is kind of an interesting thing. I didn't say it was useful. [Laughs.]

It looks kinda fake.
People think everything we do is fake!

McSweeney's does have a history of skirting a line between very complicated put-ons and reality. How do you deal with that?
I try and try and try to say as often and loudly as possible that everything we do is real. We don't have computer graphics. It's a little bit of a cross to bear. And it's unfortunate, because I don't think I would enjoy the pieces so much if I thought it was just someone fiddling around with knobs.

Do you find people bring their expectations or assumptions about McSweeney's when they come to Wholphin? There's a perception that McSweeney's is sort of precious.
So far, I doubt enough people know who we are for that to be a problem. And we're pretty separate. Wholphin is me and my assistant editor, Emily [Doe], and whoever else we can get to help us edit things. If there's a bleed-off from the fact that we're published from McSweeney's, there's just as many people who'll make the assumption the opposite way, that we're especially genius. As much as I resemble it or mesh with that McSweeney's ideal, it's purely incidental.

But we should point out we're doing this interview on unicorns on a cloud, for an audience of sasquatches.
Yeah, yeah. Totally.