Winnebago Man

"The Internet is like the modern day freakshow.  Except you don't have to pay the nickel to get in.  It's like meeting the three-headed boy or something."  Such are the insights of a probably not quite self-aware hipster as he waits in a Disneyland-sized line to catch his glimpse of the infamous Winnebago Man at the Found Film Festival in San Francisco.  Though just because he isn't quite self-aware and a hipster doesn't make him wrong.  We're all guilty of it; scouring the archives of YouTube and eBaums World for videos of drunken "celebrities" eating cheeseburgers off the floor, Jersey Shore wanna-be's putting themselves on display, hopeful sportscasters going...eh, boom, or regular folks generally making fools of themselves.  In that way we are all Homer Simpson.

And so we have the Winnebago Man.

Winnebago Man is Jack Rebney, a broadcast journalist who quit his job at CBS over what he perceived (seemingly presciently) as the dumbing down of broadcast news and ended up working for the Winnebago company making industrial films for RV tradeshows and dealers.  Evidence seems to suggest he hated it.

Jack Rebney is also the star of one of the viralist viral videos of all time.  In fact, the video pre-dates the term viral video, YouTube, and even the Internet (at least as we know it) itself.

In 1989, during a shoot for one of these promotional videos, he apparently had the mother of all One of Those Days.  During the shoot, the videographers kept the cameras rolling during in the outtakes as Rebney became more and more frustrated and angry with...pretty much everything.  He cursed when he forgot his lines.  He swore when a demonstration of a feature on the latest Winnebago model didn't work correctly.  He cussed at the flies buzzing around his head in the blistering Iowa heat.  To borrow a line from A Christmas Story, "He worked in profanity the way other artists might work in oil or clay.  It was his true medium; a master."

The videographers found it so hilarious that they made copies of the outtake tapes and gave them out to their friends.  In the years to come the tape was copied and re-copied and given to friends of friends of friends, until it had become a sort of primitive, underground precursor to what the Internet and YouTube were one day to be.  Rebney became the Winnebago Man or simply, the Angriest Man in the World.

Of course, once the Internet and YouTube were born it was inevitable that someone would upload it.  There are many permutations available on YouTube, but this is probably one of the more definitive ones.  Over seven minutes of furious profanity laced rage.  Here it is.  View at your own risk.  Seriously it's almost nothing but curse words.

Filmmaker Ben Steinbauer (no relation) came across the Winnebago Man VHS tapes in the 90's, and like countless others was for some reason mesmerized by it.  Once it went viral on the Web he began to wonder who this angry fellow was.  Did he know he had become an Internet sensation?  What did he think about being famous--or infamous?  Was he always this angry?

Steinbauer set out on a quest to find the Winnebago Man.  It proved more difficult than he thought.  Even after he was able to discover his given name, Jack Rebney.  Rebney appeared to have vanished from the face of the earth and Steinbauer finally resorted to hiring a private investigator.  Steinbauer finally tracked Rebney down to a tiny cabin in the mountains of Northern California and met the Winnebago Man face to face.

What he got was nothing like the YouTube sensation.  Here was an old man, living a life of peace in the mountains.  Polite, patient, even demur.  He said he had heard about how his bad day had turned into a sensation, but claimed never to have seen it.  But something seemed a little off.  Both to me, the viewer, and the filmmaker.  It seemed like an act.

It was.

A few weeks after that first meeting, Steinbauer received a call from Rebney and discovered the man from the video was not so different from the man he was now speaking to.  It turns out Rebney is a man with a lot on his mind and he wants to share it.

The rest of the film is the pretty fascinating interaction between Steinbauer and Rebney, as Steinbauer tries and tries to get an idea of who this Winnebago Man is.  All Rebney wants to do is pontificate about his views of the world and his disdain for pretty much everyone in it.  He never says as much, but he has been wounded by his fame; he feels laughed at, not with.

Steinbauer attempts to convince Rebney to appear at the Found Footage Festival in San Francisco.  Rebney, unsurprisingly, stonewalls.  He has nothing in common with those people.  Why would they want to see him?  Steinbauer persists, and finally Rebney agrees.

Its at the festival where we meet our hipster friend from the opening quote.  Waiting in line to see the "three headed boy" he has no idea what a surprise he is in for.  What happens at Rebney's appearance is pretty remarkable and had to be a surprise to everyone involved, perhaps most of all Rebney.  It's a surprisingly poignant moment.

Cinco Banres, co-host of The Show With No-Name--a TV show in the pre-YouTube era that featured videos like these--puts oddball video voyeurism in succinct if not eloquent terms, "This is something to be watched, a cage, something on the other side.  I don't want the reality of it, I want the buffoon..."

Steinbauer wanted to know the reality of it and what he found probably surprised him and I know it surprised the Winnebago Man.  Sometimes they are laughing with you.

Here's the trailer (which is edited, for what that's worth).