Jack Rebney in a still from the movie Winnebago Man.
He shouts. He swears. He's in a state of mental self-immolation as he flubs line after line in a 1988 industrial film for Winnebago motor homes.
The clips of Jack Rebney verbally pummelling his way through endless, angry outtakes have found a life of their own. The original tapes got passed to friends, copied from one VHS tape to another and became a cult video, finding their way to found-footage film festivals and eventually to YouTube. Nowadays, Rebney's is considered one of the all-time great viral videos.
And it's the basis of the new documentary Winnebago Man, with Austin, Tex.-based filmmaker Ben Steinbauer finding the older but no less temperamental Rebney living in seclusion on a forested mountainside in northern California.
The film, however, only tells that part of the story. A whole other part involves the continuing saga of Rebney after the film was made.
The documentary shows Rebney coming to terms with his unexpected mini-fame and finding a certain redemption. Yet it only hints at a much larger process at work here. Rebney portrays himself not as a victim of ridicule for the viral video of him. He has instead turned the video into a masterful manipulation of the media. That is how the 81-year-old Rebney now describes it as he rides the wave of publicity surrounding the film.
A former producer and director for CBS News and a student of the Edward R. Murrow tenet of just-the-facts journalism, he has a keen sense of media and information control, he says - even though he admits that he couldn't initially understand why Steinbauer would want to make a documentary about the outtakes.
"It seemed then a complete irrelevancy. My interest level was something below zero," Rebney said by phone from his remote California home. "I couldn't conceive in my wildest dreams why anyone anywhere would have any interest. What would be interesting about these clips?"
Then he changed his mind.
"When I first made contact with Ben," Rebney says, "I thought to myself that this is worth the experiment to find out what this guy wants to do and where it might lead. There was always an ulterior motivation. I am, and have been over the last 20 years of my life, enormously involved in social and political criticism." (In the documentary, Rebney indicates that he has a lot to say against the former Bush administration specifically and politics in general.)
"I thought to myself, 'Wait a minute, there may be an in-road here for one purpose or another. I may be able to get a message across.' So that ulterior motivation always stood out in my mind," he says. "I knew precisely what I was going to do. I am not the pretty little person on Facebook. I don't advertise myself as this wonderful, wonderful person that you should meet."
Still, was Rebney caught off guard by his notoriety? "I'm not caught off guard ever!" he responds.
However, Steinbauer mentions his concern in the film about exploiting Rebney, for here is a man whose claims to fame are clips of him having a truly bad day in the heat and flies of Forest City, Iowa (the Winnebago headquarters). Fans of the industrial-film outtakes aren't necessarily laughing with him as he swears up a storm, stumbling over lines about the motorhomes' " accoutrements." This was clearly a man fighting the inane sales talk of marketing films, and that's the humour of it all.
Has this notoriety and the subsequent documentary changed him? "My stock answer is that, no, it has no effect whatsoever. My life? I'm a rather free spirit, and I have been since I can remember," Rebney says. "I'm not interested in having anybody having any idea realistically of who the hell I am."
Speaking from Austin, Steinbauer said he wanted to understand Rebney's personal life to get to the bottom of what made him so mad shooting the sales film. But, he said, "Jack immediately turned the table on me and said, 'What makes you think that I would want to go there, that I would open up to the camera?' I think that has a lot to do with Jack being in media. He knows how media can be taken out of context and be made to look in a certain way."
Rebney's heroes were Morrow and Eric Sevareid. It was about delivering the news and not about personalities. That's Rebney's mindset.
"As a young person, even more than as a filmmaker, that was startling to me. Things are so different [now] We know everything about where Michelle [Obama]and Barack go on dates," adds Steinbauer, who is 33.
In short, for Rebney, this is about presenting himself on the surface and delving no deeper. He wants people to see the viral-video outtakes and the subsequent documentary in that same light. Not as a consequence of a man disgruntled with his work, or as someone who left journalism, then had to sweat it out in marketing films. These were simply outtakes, pure and simple, and that's why he got so heated back in 1988.
"As a [former]working newsman and media professional, I didn't want anybody screwing up the works," Rebney says about the original sales film. "I wanted it my way, absolutely my way. I wrote it. I produced it. I directed it."
And when mistakes happen, "I don't say Jiminy Crickets! I don't say Mary Poppins!"
Winnebago Man opens Thursday in Toronto at TIFF Bell Lightbox (tiff.net). The DVD goes on sale Nov. 9.