Your Totally Badass Sunday

Austin auteur Bob Ray has returned to the 512 after spending over a month trapped in a Prius with infamous local scenester/documentary subject Chad Holt while on his ambitious, coast-to-coast Down and Dirty Austin Film Tour. The good news? Nobody got busted!

We know, we know: your Sunday is already crammed to bursting with seasonal soirees, Festivus fetes, and ADHD-inspired, last second holiday shopping/meltdowns. But screw that noise. You deserve a break, a bong hit, and a bucket of beer, all of which are best enjoyed while watching Total Badass, Ray's twisted new documentary on perpetual ne'er-do-well, Whoopsie Magazine publisher, and public sex enthusiast Chad Holt.

How totally badass, exactly, is Total Badass? Ray accurately describes it as "An insanely funny and wickedly debaucherous documentary about crime, sex, art, drugs, music and life in the Austin Underground." Check out what the New York Times had to say here.

We spoke to Ray, via email, about the filth and the fury that was the Down and Dirty Austin Film Tour and here's what he had to say:

"Right off the bat, at the first stop of the tour in Houston, someone gave Chad ninety pills. Ninety of them! And the nice pill-giver even apologized that there weren't more. The pills almost turned into a felony in Boston a few weeks later.

"It was night two in Boston and we were in need of a place to sleep. We'd been drinking whiskey with Butthole Surfer/Honky basist Jeff Pinkus, who happened to be in Boston at the time, and we were unable to drive over to the place where we crashed the night before. That was at the home of a nice gay guy we'd met on the "strictly platonic" category of Craigslist. He let us sleep in what appeared to be his orgy and/or murder house, but that's a whole other story …

"So we decided to sleep in the car. Given the situation, it was obvious that I needed to chomp a Valium and a Soma. Two hours later, I wake up in a haze. Chad has his window down and a cop's face of poking into the car. Chad's making all manner of indiscernible noises, in a drunken and pilled-up effort to speak, but the cop can't make sense of him.  

"I tried to shake off the haze and talk our way out of it. Several minutes later, the cop is running our IDs and I'm thinking we're fucked. There are still about 20 pills left (not to mention the weed) and if he searches the car, we're off to jail.

"The cop returns and hands me our IDs, saying 'I'm gonna take you someplace that might not be so comfortable. Follow me.' And I figure that this is a weird way to arrest people. It turns out that he led us from Bridgeport, the nice part of town, to the shittier Jamaica Heights, where dirtbags are allowed to sleep in their cars. The car in front of where we slept had a bungee cord holding the trunk closed and a trash bag for a window. So we slept there for the night. 

"The next morning, at the pond next to us, there was a frolicking flock of geese. It was quite nice. Nevertheless, Boston sucks."

For more tales of the skeevier hazards of DIY independent film distribution (and related hi-jinks), check out the insanely great and laugh-til-you-puke hilarious Down and Dirty Tour Journal. Seriously. This is Hunter S. Thompson-style guerrilla funmaking at its deranged best.

(Total Badass screens tonight, Sunday, Dec. 19, 10 pm, at the Alamo Drafthouse Village.)