‘Flipside’ is a documentarian’s delightful notebook dump
Chris Wilcha's film revisits several of his unfinished documentary projects while also examining what it means, and doesn't mean, to sell out.
I don’t usually like documentaries that are primarily about the documentarian. I also don’t always love documentaries about a laundry list of subjects that the documentarian cares about but that have seemingly little to do with one another.
All those things apply to Flipside, the new doc from filmmaker Chris Wilcha, which landed last week in theaters and on VOD channels. But all that said, I loved it, mainly because Wilcha takes many disparate ideas and somehow makes them fit together while openly acknowledging precisely what he’s doing.
It’s a wildly unconventional documentary, but it's also one of my favorite of the year.
Wilcha is a Gen Xer who, like many people who came of age in the era of Reality Bites and Rent, entered adulthood with a palpable fear of selling out. He brought that to his first-ever job at the Columbia House record club, although he spent much of that job making a rogue documentary called The Target Shoots First, which debuted to some acclaim in 2000.
Wilcha soon took on the profession of documentary filmmaker but eventually found himself in the position of many documentarians who aren’t named Michael Moore or Ken Burns: He saw lots of success and acclaim for his work but not nearly enough remuneration to make a living at it.
So he took jobs like directing commercials, producing a “making-of” documentary about the Judd Apatow movie Funny People, and having a key creative role in the TV version of Ira Glass’ This American Life.
It’s the kind of career that many nonfiction filmmakers would probably envy, getting to work regularly with interesting people, probably making enough money to live on, and almost certainly coming out of it with a million great stories. On top of that, he appears to have a happy and healthy family.
But that pesky Gen X attitude keeps coming up: Wilcha feels like a sellout. Flipside is mostly about Wilcha coming to terms with how he feels about his career. In the process of that, he revisits several documentary passion projects he picked up over the years but never entirely completed. (Judd Apatow is a producer of the doc and is interviewed in it, possibly feeling bad that the making-of doc he commissioned only aired on HBO just once before becoming an unwatched DVD extra.)
These included a portrait of jazz photographer Herman Leonard, who was dying of cancer at the time that Wilcha was working with him. He had been put up for that project by David Milch, the famed creator of Deadwood, who has since developed Alzheimer’s. He was also interviewed.
The other big project is a look at Flipside, a record store in the director’s Northern New Jersey hometown where he had worked as a teenager, which in the present day is struggling to survive (a rival record store has opened up across town, somewhat hilariously adding to its troubles).
The store is run by one oddball and frequented by another, the New Jersey cable access legend known as Uncle Floyd (whom I had never known until now, is the brother of longtime Conan O’Brien bandleader Jimmy Vivino.)
There’s a bit of a connection between the purity of wanting to keep a record store open in the year 2024 and the sellout-policing so common back in Gen X’s heyday, especially when it came to that generation’s characteristic gatekeeping of musical tastes.
Flipside will be fascinating viewing for Gen Xers and may lead them to conclude that all that worry of “selling out” was perhaps the wrong approach all along.