The street-art movie "Exit Through the Gift Shop," a comical documentary with question marks attached, has set off an approving hum among hip collegiate audiences. It goes beyond the manufactured buzz of big-studio releases. The international street cred of guerrilla artist Banksy brings them to the theater -- after all, it's "A Banksy Film," though no director is listed. (That's one of Banksy's rat stencils above, from 2002). But the movie itself holds them and amuses them and keeps them arguing in the theater lobby afterward. It's that rarity: not just "a water-cooler picture," but a cinematic conversation piece that gets people talking about issues, such as the elastic or fraudulent values of 21st century art.
A chronicle of the evolution of men like Banksy from hit-and-run pranksters to celebrities, it pivots on the antics of Thierry Guetta, a camcorder addict as well as the owner of a successful vintage-clothing business in Los Angeles. Guetta turns his lens on Banksy and Shepard Fairey and others, recording their process and their finished work before it has a chance to get wiped off walls or trashed, or hung on collector's walls and put in museums and galleries. The result is supposed to be an epic documentary -- that's what Guetta promises and the artists expect. Instead, his videotape funnels into this "Banksy Film" that's mostly about Guetta, who becomes an artist-impresario himself.
I won't give away how this happens (or any other surprises), but I didn't buy it for a minute. I thought Guetta was not a real person but a terrible actor, a French version of Robert Benigni; I considered my suspicions confirmed when he called his huge L.A. art show "Life is Beautiful." And who was taking all those professionally composed shots of Guetta before he became the subject of the film? In its maddeningly slipshod construction, this is the "District 9" of documentaries.
So I felt as if someone had pulled my futon out from under me when one of the film's distributors, Baltimore-bred Bart Walker, assured the audience at a special Maryland Film Festival screening last week that just about everything in the film was real. Banksy should rest easy: with Walker, if not Guetta, he's in good hands.
Walker, who grew up in Mount Washington and went to Park School, is a partner at Cinetic Media, a company devoted to film sales and financing as well as talent management (Walker previously worked at CAA and ICM, representing writers and directors). With his Cinetic partner John Sloss he formed Producers Distribution Agency, or PDA, specifically to release "Exit Through the Gift Shop."
When the film came to them at Cinetic, they knew they had a potential youth explosion on their hands. The Sundance Film Festival's senior programmers didn't know about Banksy. After they consulted with their younger programmers, who did, they invited the film to the festival sight unseen. Walker and Sloss recognized that a Banksy film demanded sophisticated word of mouth.
So PDA has set out on a city-by-city campaign to get conversations started with art house habitues and college students. The plan appears to be working: the film pulled in over $9,000 per screen last weekend. At the special MFF screening at the Charles (the film opened the next day at the Harbor East), the crowd's approving chatter and applause gave "Exit" another sort of PDA: public displays of affection.