Play Loud! and director Dietmar Post are German, so naturally there are German subtitles and Spanish too.
The trailer which you can see online at www.playloud.org (also the place to buy the DVD), is as you'd expect - a composite of action in the film. Nothing too fancy. This is the low-buget DV arena, remember. The image and sound quality are fine, although the sound has a peaky roughness to it when the reverend is yelling through his megaphone at close range. This kind of glitch is more to do with how events were recorded than the transfer. It's not a big problem.
The main extra is an interview with Bill Talen, which is welcome since we get a chance to learn more of him out of character.
It doesn't appear that performance activism pays. The inside of Bill Talen's New York apartment is modest. His computer is a shelf backing onto the kitchen, too narrow to even rest his wrists (look out for the RSI, Bill!). The kitchen utensils above his head, add to the sense of cosy domesticity.
Talen shows us a few of his belongings - a painting of a loon on a lake that he did when he was a kid. He describes the spooky call as being "crazy like preachers". He shows us his Starbucks sign, the new one, where they airbrushed the nipples off the mermaid logo.
He comes across as a genial, liberal chap, and not much different from the reverend in real life. It doesn't take much for him to warm to his themes that the "dominant religion" of our day is "consumerism" and "Disney is the high Church of retail". Who's being interviewed the reverend or Bill T?
He describes the emergence of his alter ego as a gradual process. His upbringing, which caused him to rebel, was hugely influential. He was raised in The Dutch Calvinist tradition, whose ideas of predestination are "very much part of the corporate CEO world view". You are elect or you are not. He arrived in San Francisco in punk era where he saw the last Sex Pistols concert. He is a writer and an educator as well as a performer.
At the time of the interview in 2002, he had been jailed five times, but doesn't feel his "work" risky. He is protected by his "congregation", some of whom hold influential positions in the media and law, and those who he teaches at local educational institutions. He is also white, which helps a lot, he says.
He shares some secrets about his style of protest: for instance, he has a lawyer's telephone number written on his arm with a magic marker whenever he goes into an action.
There is no major update on the Poe house situation (there is a compromise to preserve the facade and historic elements, but "much remains to be seen"). He tries to explain what it is about Poe that chimes with Americans with a nice analogy about exploring the unknown. "It's like looking at the night sky and seeing more that we can stand".
Towards the end, he tells an anecdote about September 11, where 4 firemen who had been working on Ground Zero fell into a bar. It's a long anecdote, but suffice it to say that when one of his Disney "actions" was shown on the bar television, the ensuing conversation was much more "open" about what America represents to people outside of it.
Although he doesn't talk much about the personal sacrifices and suffering that he has had to endure for his actions, there is no doubt a sensitive individual not far beneath the preacheryness. In the retelling of the September 11 anecdote you get the sense that this was a huge moment, a vindication.
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