The Backyard
"The Backyard" has been nominated for many film awards. "The backyard" is not too be confused with any other films on Backyard Wrestling"
The Backyard is one of the greatest, out-there, documentaries you will ever see in your lifetime. Greg Tingle (Australian Sports and Entertainment Portal). Greg Tingle points out, not all "Journalists" and "Film Critiques" are of the same thinking!
Wrestling with violence
By Gabriella Coslovich
August 3 2002
To the uninitiated, The Backyard may seem remarkably
like a film about testosterone-charged, IQ-deficient, white-trash American teens
with nothing better to do with their leisure hours than set themselves alight,
smash fluoro tubes over each other's heads, hurl themselves into makeshift graves
filled with mousetraps, pound each other over the head with bats
wrapped in barbed wire, charge at each other with flaming rubbish bin lids,
and generally make out like The Three Stooges on steroids.
But for film maker Paul Hough, the antics of backyard wrestlers are akin to a less cultivated form of Shakespeare, a kind of beat-me-up Bard for the masses, where the audience gets more pounds of flesh than they bargained for. Wrestling, he says, ripples with drama, spectacle, and larger-than-life characters.
Those expecting a sermon on the perils of screen and
actual violence should avoid Hough's first feature documentary, The Backyard,
showing at the Melbourne International Film Festival. A disturbing, often repulsive
insight into the world of backyard wrestling, the documentary steers clear of
passing judgment on the young men and women who stage Fight
Club-style matches for friends and family in the hope of one day graduating
to the professional ring.
"I wanted to make a documentary that was as honest as possible," says the London-born Hough, speaking from his adopted home, the United States. "The only conscious decision I made early on was to try and show it from the backyard wrestlers' point of view. It's a world that nobody knows."
Hough discovered backyard wrestling while working for a professional wrestling television program in the US. He was given a homemade video showing the usual routines of barbed-wire beatings and wrangles in pits of broken glass.
"That's the first time that I realised that there must be all these kids out there who imitate their wrestling heroes," says Hough.
He found the Internet was choked with backyard wrestling associations, e-mailed 100 of them, and so unearthed his bizarre cast of small-town, pro-wrestling wannabes - from the strangely endearing, gap-toothed "Lizard", to the odiously homophobic and racist Chaos.
Hough travelled from the Nevada desert, to suburban Arizona, upstate New York and back to England, filming this motley crew, who provoke a myriad of reactions, from disgust to sympathy.
Their parents' take on backyard wrestling is equally fascinating to observe.
If there's one thing that riles about The Backyard, it's
the seemingly gratuitous violence. The documentary runs for almost 90 minutes,
and repeatedly shows thrashings, long after we've got the picture. "I am
not a fan of violence in real life, but I am a fan
of film violence," says Hough. "That's one of the major reasons I
wanted to do this.
"There are two audiences for this film. One is the person who likes documentaries and the other, maybeeven a bigger audience, is wrestling fans.
"Wrestling is so big all over the world that I felt itimportant to leave a lot of the violence in, partly due to that audience but partly because I enjoyed watching it myself." Like his documentary, Hough is brutally honest.
The Backyard screens at the Greater Union, Russell Street, tomorrow at 5.15pm, as part of the Melbourne International Film Festival. The Age is a sponsor of the festival.
A negative, but entertaining, review of "The Backyard". Greg Tingle (no, it's not my review, it's kingjeckyl's)!
Lately it seems to me that here at the Compactor, alot of attention has been paid to the realm of professional wrestling. Now while I’m not complaining about the acceptance of ‘rasslin’ as a worthy topic of discussion on a site specifically for cult culture (hell, I pretty much spearheaded the inclusion campaign in the first place), our fearless leader Mack’s intention was a predominantly film-based forum. It’s obvious that as he is my benefactor in this opinionated medium, I must comply with the ‘prime directive’ of his vision. That being said, the following will be my last column for a while dealing with pro-wrestling. That doesn’t mean I won’t be throwing out an “Ass-Kickin’ Central” edition when I need to rant on wrestling, nor does it mean that I won’t post topics about the subject at the boards every now and again, I simply feel that I’ve paid too much attention lately to one corner of the cult culture world.
However I’ve got to get this column out there. I firmly believe this one will appeal even to those of you who’ve never even harbored a thought about checking out a wrestling match... and oddly enough my inspiration for this came during a chat at the Trash Compactor’s newly generated chat room. Mack, Timdogg and myself were commenting on different topics when the subject of hardcore wrestling came up. I seemed to be the most knowledgeable on the subject and did my best to educate my brethren with what I knew when I comment I made became misread and an odd question found itself on my monitor screen... “Jeck, are you a wrestler?”
It’s no secret that I’m a huge fan of what is now known widely as ‘sports entertainment’, and I would loved to have responded with a gleeful “you betcha”, but that is just not the case. “No”, I replied, “I’m just a really big fan”. However that’s not entirely the case, and in retrospect I have a confession to make...
There was a time not all that long ago when I could label myself with the odd-sounding title of ‘backyard wrestler’ (for those of you who are unfamiliar with the term, I’ll explain shortly). This is not something that’s easy for me to admit. Backyard wrestling is amateurish and extremely dangerous. For those of you unaware; there’s a movement in at least the U.S. where youthful fans of wrestling emulate their idols by holding matches (or something reasonably similar) between each other in backyards, alleyways, on trampolines, in makeshift rings, basements, garages... basically any place where adult supervision is at a minimum. With no regard for their own well being or the well being of their peers, these kids do whatever they can to, well, fuck each other up. The vast majority of them have no training on how to properly apply holds or take ‘bumps’ (landing or taking a move properly as to not hurt oneself), but that doesn’t stop these crazy sons of bitches from dropping each other on their heads, beating each other with chairs, putting each other through tables, jumping off ladders or roofs, etc. Now that I’ve slapped a negative connotation to the thought of being a ‘backyarder’, let me also point out that it’s also fun and semi-addictive, and idiotic as that may sound.
I don’t know how it starts for most, but for me it started rather innocently. A bunch of friends gathering together on Monday night to have a few beers, perhaps partake in some sort of green leafy illegiality, and watch the weekly wrestling fare. After enough testosterone-filled inebriation someone in the group (usually one of the larger individuals with need to prove his manliness) will inevitably say after watching someone on the tube get put through a table, “I bet I could do that to you.” Most would pass it off with a clever insult or a flippant attitude, but on one occasion i was stupid enough (not to mention trashed enough) to say “OK, do it”. Let the idiocy begin!
At that point it’s a simple case of one thing leading to another. A powerbomb on the safety of a pile of cushions becomes a bodyslam on a bare floor becomes a chokeslam through plywood becomes a headshot with a folding chair and so on and so on. Adding fuel to the already raging fire are the slackjawed dimwits we call friends in our adolescence who wax poetic about these feats after the fact as if you were their personal idol. Before you know it, you’re holding full-fledged matches in the backyard to a crowd of twenty two hours before the shows are set to air that night.
I won’t try to lie about it, we may have been amateurs, but were entertaining and had fun doing it. We talked smack in fabricated interviews, planned out the matches and actually tried to develop storylines from week to week. It’s very easy to see from that point of view who the pros do what they do. Hell, there were times that we actually threw parties just to hold a few matches. People came to these ‘shows’ with friends just to see what was up, and proud to say we disgusted and baffled just as many people as we entertained with our antics. However, like all poorly planned and poorly executed dangerous ideas, eventually you go to far. I watched my best friend blow out his knee so bad on a botched move that he’s had to have two serious operations in the years that followed, and my back is so shot from being ‘hardcore’ that odds are it’ll give out long before I do.
The kids in these situations don’t think about the long term effects of what they’re doing, or even worse they simply don’t care. Let it be known here and now that I do not condone backyard wrestling in any fashion. Don’t get me wrong, if I get my hands on video tape of two stupid bastards beating each other over the head with barbed wire and light bulbs I’m damn sure going to watch it; but I’ve had the opportunity to live what they do first hand, and to do what we did with the proper training is not only a poor plan for a Monday night but incredibly dangerous. When I think of all the dangerous stunts we pulled back in the day, I’m blown away to think we didn’t end up killing somebody.
Would I take it all back if I could? Not a chance. I’m a firm believer in the notion that every action and choice we make helps to mold our character, and I might not be the person I am if I hadn’t had that experience. Besides, I can check a few things off my ‘to do’ list of life experiences. Take a chair in the face... check. Break plywood with my body... check. Permanently damage my back... check. Hey what do you know, three down!
I hope that this little confessional has at least entertained you, if not also opened your eyes to just how passionate wrestling fans are about what it is that they love. I don’t take back a thing that I’ve done, and I certainly don’t apologize for my youthful stupidity. You learn from your mistakes. Besides, in a round about sort of way I’ve lived one of my dreams. I may never face Ric Flair on WWE television; but for one brief, fleeting moment I was the first, only and undefeated FWO Hardcore Champion, and I still have the belt to prove it.
Win a fictitious pro-wrestling championship... check.
‘nuff said