Winnebago Man screens tonight at CineVegas, and next week at SilverDocs. In the interest of full disclosure: I was on the jury that awarded the film the grand prize at the Sarasota Film Festival in April.
Many documentary filmmakers have to at some point insert themselves into the lives of their subjects in order to get the story in front of the camera. Actually incorporating that blurring of boundaries between documenter and documented into the finished film is tricky business; at best, you’re David Maysles, capturing unforgettable material from Little Eddie Beale whilst engaging in shy flirtation with her from behind the microphone. At worst, you’re Michael Moore, piling the post-9/11 sick on to a boat, sailing through the seas of self-parody to Cuba, drowning your own good intentions further with each nautical mile.
Rarely is a filmmaker’s experience of becoming part of their story presented with as little artifice and self-service as in Winnebago Man, Ben Steinbauer’s document of his mission to first find Jack Rebney, the man who became a cult celebrity via a widely circulated video of his profanity-packed outtakes from a motorhome industrial video shoot, and then coax Rebney into coming to terms with his unlikely notoriety. The film works on a number of different levels: as detective story, as a no-frills work of historiography on the strange new phenomenon of accidental celebrity motivated by the rise of viral web video, and as insight into a filmmaker’s process of discovering what story he’s telling and how to tell it. Structured against a narration (spoken by Steinbauer, scripted by Steinbauer and Malcolm Pullinger, who also edited) of remarkable candor and clarity, on the whole Winnebago Man is an incredibly literate examination of YouTube culture (arguably the biggest threat to actual old-school literacy to be invented in decades), its discontents, and its half-hidden side effects.
The first documentary (that I’m aware of, at least) directly inspired by an unexpected YouTube hit (although I had hoped 
