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.