Jack Rebney, Pavel Goberman and Pool Hustling Pretty Boy Floyd may not be recognizable names to the average person, but in the arena of found-video compilation, they are superstars. Rebney is an RV salesman with a short fuse and an insatiable appetite for dropping f-bombs; Goberman is a self-proclaimed fitness guru who punches himself in the chest and says he can cure cancer; Floyd is a pool hustler who spends more time talking about making sandwiches than about actually playing pool.
What do these people have in common? They have more ambition than talent and they are all featured in The Found Footage Festival playing Sunday at the Bijou Art Cinemas.

Back in 1991, Nick Prueher and Joe Pickett stumbled across a training video called “Inside and Outside Custodial Duties” at a McDonald’s in their home state of Wisconsin. The bad tracking, rigid acting and absurd premise immediately had them hooked. And since then, the two have collected a mountainous assortment of bizarre videos once lost and forgotten, but re-found for the ironic enjoyment of audiences nationwide.
“A few years ago I found an old video of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Carnivale in Rio at the Salvation Army,” said Prueher, who works as a producer for “The Colbert Report.” “It had this really young-looking Arnold, and it was just this after dark travel video from 1983 with Arnold basically groping every woman in sight.”
Sunday’s screening will feature the fourth installment of the Found Footage series. Running at about an hour, the final presentation is a mere fraction of the hundreds of discarded videos that Prueher and Pickett picked up from Goodwills, Value Villages and dumpsters across the country. The videos that made the cut are comedic treasures, but it took a lot of digging through trash to find them.
“It’s really not an exact science,” Pruehler said. “A lot of it is just picking up every tape that looks promising and then going back and looking through tape by tape to see what’s good. It’s a needle in a haystack.”
The videos compiled for Found Footage have to follow a simple criteria before they can be included in the show. First, the video has to be a legitimately found, actual piece of video tape – it can’t be taken off the Internet. Second, it must be unintentionally funny.
“Something we are drawn to is people with a lot of ambition and very little talent,” Prueher said. “And luckily for us, there is no shortage of those people who had access to video equipment.”
Prueher and Pickett will be on hand Sunday to provide live commentary on all of their workplace sexual harassment and feline toilet training videos. They will introduce each video and explain how they found it, then proceed to make fun of it as the clip rolls.
“A lot of these remarks come from just watching these videos, like, dozens of times,” Pruehler said. “Occasionally inspiration strikes and you just shout something out that you found funny.”
The Found Footage Festival will not be just a spectator event. Everybody attending is encouraged to shout out their own insults, inputs and jokes if and when they feel inspired. And if anybody wants to bring in their own found video, Prueher and Pickett would love to have a look.
[email protected]