Some of the most intriguing videos on the internet aren't "worldwide viral sensations" … they lurk deep beneath YouTube's placid surface, where they remain largely undiscovered. A wonderfully weird little film known as Mary Worth – the Movie definitely fits in the latter category, and it has a great backstory.
First of all, for those of you who aren't familiar with the original Mary Worth, it's a soap-opera-type daily comic strip that has been published in various American newspapers since 1938. We can't show any of it here for copyright reasons, but you can get a sense of the thing over at Comics Kingdom.
Mary Worth – the Movie (MWTM) is a shot-for-shot filmed adaptation of Mary Worth strips that were published between May 17th and June 13th, 1998. The awesome thing about it is, the actors in each shot stay frozen awkwardly in place as they say their lines in stilted voices, just like their characters appeared to do in the comics.
While that gimmick might get pretty old pretty fast on its own, what really elevates the film is a disturbing-dream-like quality which is present throughout its 14-minute-plus runtime.
That quality is maintained first and foremost by a desolate whistling-wind sound effect in the background of all the scenes, along with a sustained droning musical score. The combined effect is more reminiscent of David Lynch than Saturday Night Live.
Additionally, despite the fact that MWTM was filmed in Milwaukee during the summer of 1998 – when video was definitely an option – it was shot entirely on black-and-white 16-mm film.
A delay in the processing of the film stock (which was performed by hand at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee) resulted in some chemical damage, unintentionally adding surreal smears and bubbles to the movie's already gritty, "unsanctioned" look. It brings to mind the 2011 film Bellflower, in which specks of dirt on the jerry-rigged camera's image sensor were left in place to boost its grungy ethos.
Over a dozen people were involved in the making of MWTM, many of them taking turns performing duties such as directing, cinematography, sound recording, and acting.
"We were all friends in Milwaukee, mostly living in a neighborhood called Riverwest," says Stephanie Barber, who is now a Baltimore-based writer, visual artist and filmmaker. "Some of us were students and some of us weren't. Most of us were in bands with each other, and other art projects."
The ball initially got rolling when some of the group members organized a contest, in which both themselves and members of the public submitted ideas for a short film. Once all the entries were in, the organizers voted on which idea to actually make into a film – without knowing whose idea was whose. As it turned out, the winning idea was submitted by group member Brent Goodsell.
"I submitted Mary Worth because I had recently realized how strange the Mary Worth comic strip was, and it was just something in my head at the time," says Goodsell, who is now a Milwaukee-based filmmaker and musician. "I also thought it was a good idea because it gave us prewritten scripts, reducing the work and complexity for the project."
Because different scenes were directed by different people, there are some variations in style throughout the film. A few shots do have small amounts of actor movement, for instance, while most do not. The 16-mm film was transferred to video for editing, where further differences in style arose.
"Since we were such a big group of filmmakers, we had a hard time deciding how it should be cut," says Didier Leplae, who is now a Milwaukee-based musician, sound engineer and filmmaker. "Some people wanted it to be cut really long and awkwardly, others wanted it to be a little quicker-paced. We decided to split into a few groups and each made a cut. We then got together and voted on the cut we liked the best."
A variant created by Leplae and Goodsell ultimately took the crown, mainly due to its eerie soundtrack.
"For our version we had been playing around with this new audio plugin called VocAlign," Brent tells us. "The actors redubbed their dialog and we used VocAlign to match the [lip] sync. We did this because we discovered the plugin would create bizarre results when the overdubbed performance was too far off from the original recording. It would try to cram the new recording into the rhythm and allotted space of the original performance, resulting in oddly chopped up and sometimes sped up dialog that still somehow fits. We then added the ambient wind and other background audio."
The soundtrack made for what Leplae describes as "a creepy and awkward vibe" ... which certainly reflected the feel of the storyline.
"Mary Worth comics are not funny funny, but they are odd, and so melodramatic in an old-fashioned kind of way," says Theresa Columbus, who is now a playwright, actress and performance artist living in Baltimore. "The subject matter of a sexist bigoted man interacting with a married woman, a hired hand, a teenager and an elderly woman, and saying creepy disturbing things, is funny because of the way he is portrayed and the way he becomes a buffoon."
Although MWTM has certainly gained a cult following, one of the things that's nice about it is the fact that it was never intended to be widely seen, make any money, or build anyone's career. After all, it was completed six years before YouTube or similar platforms even existed.
"We weren't really thinking about showing it when making it," says Barber. "Just friends making artwork together. I'm not sure we ever even sent the film to festivals or galleries … I don't think anyone was thinking about where it might land."
Along with Barber, Goodsell, Leplae and Columbus, other members of the MWTM collective included Peter Barrickman, Sara Boland, Tate Bunker, Yasuhuhiro Ikeguchi, Anna Siri Johnson, Annie Killelea, Xavier Leplae, Doug Schall and Naomi O. Wyoming.
There are multiple uploads of Mary Worth – the Movie online, but the best-looking and most complete is the following version posted on the Activities Archive YouTube channel.
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