Beast Issue #75 - Audio / Visual Files

Warhol was an Optimist

The Best of the Five Minute Video Series

Saturday, May 21, 7pm, Market Arcade Cinema

Hey reader, what are you doing Saturday night? Wasting your paycheck at the bars of downtown Buffalo in a vain attempt to pick up STD-ridden floozies? How about something new, something you’ve never done before? How about going to the Market Arcade Cinema on Main St. at 7pm to see the premier of "The Best of the Five Minute Video Series," a collection of clips from your favorite public access TV program, "The Five Minute Video Series." This event marks the one-year anniversary of the show, brainchild of Richard Wicka, 15-year veteran of public access here in Buffalo. In the past year, "The Five Minute Video Series" has given 225 people just that, a five-minute forum to do and say whatever they please. Of those 225, the best 25 have been voted on and selected for this big-screen cinematic debut.

The series began as all great things do, in a moment of spontaneous, porch front realization. A friend was visiting, who had a penchant for tangential chatter which resulted in a lot of unfinished conversational threads. Wicka grabbed a clock and his video camera, set the two up on the porch and told his friend it was him, the camera, and five minutes. Nothing else. When he showed the clip to friends, they wanted their own five minutes. That snowballed into the television show, which in the intervening year has garnered a worldwide audience, thanks to the internet. Now The Five Minute Video Series is broadcast not only here in Buffalo, but in Monterey, California and Auckland, New Zealand.

The clips presented in The Five Minute Video Series run the gamut from funny to warm, from moving to off the wall, and are held together by a kind of unrehearsed spontaneity, which inevitably leads to some truth peeking out from time to time that in any other situation would have fallen victim to a corporate cutting room butcher block.

If you want to be a part of this event you’d better get off your ass, because there are only 320 seats available. Tickets are five dollars each and can be purchased in advance by e-mailing para@adelphia.net, or at the door the night of the show. As an added bonus, after the showing you can meet your favorite five-minute artist in the lobby, and probably talk Mr. Wicka into doing your own five minutes if you are so inclined. You owe yourself this look into untamed, unscripted human nature (not like that "Survivor" bullshit) and, even more so, you owe it to the loyal "Five Minute" fans of New Zealand, who would gladly give up their sheep and their pseudo-Australian accents to be at this premier. Or you could just go ahead with your STD-gathering experiment, getting your shallow and poorly thought-out kicks behind some dumpster downtown before collapsing in a pile of your own (you hope) vomit, dick in the wind, wishing you had heeded my advice and actually done something useful with your life