Clark: A Gonzomentary is an American 2013 gonzo journalism-styled mockumentary written, directed and produced by Daniel D.W.
Production and creation
Clark: A Gonzomentary is about a fictionalized version of the director documenting an eccentric local artists creative process and obsession with phallic art. It is a style of metafiction. The term "gonzomentary" was created by director Daniel D.W. and was a portmanteau of the words "gonzo", from gonzo journalism, and "mockumentary" to define a new type of film where metafictional events are presented to show fictional events in a subjective first-person narrative in documentary style to create a parody of itself intentionally to confuse the viewer between reality and fiction. This included using fictional hype and notoriety to make audiences believe that that hype and notoriety existed while insisting that the film is a work of fine art.
Daniel and the two main actors, William Clark and James Curcio, are credited as the writers of the movie based on the fact that much of the dialogue was ad libbed by them. The episodes plots and scenes were scripted with a loose outline and talking points that the actors were required to improvise around, a method that Daniel D.W. borrowed from Larry David's H.B.O series, Curb Your Enthusiasm. Clark: A Gonzomentary began as a seven episode bi-weekly webseries syndicated by Alterati.com in 2010, and a 2011 five episode fictional "behind the scenes" series which was edited together and serves as the long-form movie version.
The two main characters, Clark and J.C. are played by the American actors William Clark and James Curcio, who both had never acted beforehand. Daniel D.W. wrote the characters as an exaggerated parody of themselves, and felt that their inexperience as actors would translate more realistically. Daniel D.W. appears as an alternative version of himself, the maker of the documentary and his character is normally off-camera and occasionally interacts with Clark and J.C. Other actors in the movie are David Proch as Tito, and Jazmin Idakaar as a fundamentalist Christian executive producer for the fictional film company. Actors Albert Mariotti, Mike Zimmer II, Matt Grossman, and Rahim Muhammed play supporting roles.
Style
The film satirizes the wild personal behavior, social deviations and self-image pretensions of artists and filmmakers, and was inspired by Satyr plays, Dadaism, contemporary counter-culture artists, the film Pollock as well as other influences. For the majority of the film, it is stylized as a parody of a popular mockumentary and reality show style that trended in the late 2000s and early 2010s, but combines a variety of styles similar to sitcom TV shows, silent film and art films, purportedly filmed and directed by the fictionalized alter ego of Daniel D.W.. The film tells the meta story of Daniel, an amateur filmmaker documenting the lifestyle of phallic artist, William Clark and his opportunist art manager J.C. for a documentary web series. This plot line is established with the opening text stating "In 2010, a guy with a camera tried to make a webseries about an eccentric local artist's art process and this is what happened instead." The film jumps back and forth from the documented webseries, to interviews during filming of the webseries, to interviews filmed after the webseries with the main characters playing actors who were portraying characterizations of themselves.
Being purposefully careless and using guerrilla filmmaking techniques, the director stylized the film itself as a parody of amateur films which is referenced by multiple characters during the story, stating that the process is far more important than the actual end-product. This was an attempt to create a meta story that is a parody of itself to comment on do-it-yourself style filmmaking and art. This was noted by Mark Bell of Film Threat saying "Even when I'd come up with a criticism to lodge at it, the film itself would find a way to address it. For example, at one point the film’s dynamic between Clark and J.C. becomes repetitious and stale: Clark says he doesn't need money, calls J.C. a parasite and J.C. points out how wrong he is. This "conversation" happens quite often in the film, and the moment I started to make note of how old it was getting, the film started fucking with its own audio, looping the two going back and forth at each other. In other words, the film was just as annoyed as I was; it’s like the film itself had become self-aware."