Director Jeff Feuerzeig , 2005 Sundance Film Festival, Winner - Best Director A Sony Pictures Classics Release EAST COAST WEST COAST DISTRIBUTOR Donna Daniels Public Relations Block- Korenbrot Sony Pictures Classics Donna Daniels Melody Korenbrot Carmelo Pirrone Emily Lowe Ekta Farrar Angela Gresham Ph: (212) 869-7233 Ph: (323) 634-7001 Ph: (212) 833-8833. Fx: (212) 869-7114 Fx: (323) 634-7030 Fx: (212) 833-8844 1375 Broadway, 4th Floor 110 S. Fairfax Ave, Ste 310 550 Madison Ave., 8th Fl. New York, NY 10018 Los Angeles, CA 90036 New York, NY 10022 Visit the Sony Pictures Classics Internet site at: http:/www.sonyclassics.com SYNOPSIS Daniel Johnston, a manic-depressive genius singer/songwriter/artist, revealed in this portrait of madness, creativity and love. “The Devil and Daniel Johnston” is a stunning portrait of a musical and artistic genius who nearly slipped away. Director Jeff Feuerzeig exquisitely depicts a perfect example of brilliance and madness going hand in hand with subject Daniel Johnston. As an artist suffering from manic depression with delusions of grandeur, Daniel Johnston¹s wild fluctuations, numerous downward spirals, and periodic respites are exposed in this deeply moving documentary. As a reclusive teenager growing up in New Cumberland, VA, Johnston began showing signs of unusual artistic ability at an early age. He religiously recorded his thoughts and stories onto cassette tapes, directed intuitive Super- 8 films starring himself in multiple roles ala Peter Sellers, and created expressive comic book-style drawings and animation in the basement of his family's home. However, in the eyes of his fundamentalist Christian family, Daniel simply wasn't contributing to society in a useful or productive way. After running off on a moped and joining a carnival, he landed in Austin, Texas, broke and alone. It was there he began to hone his musical career, recording folk songs on a series of homemade, lo-fi cassettes, which Daniel handed out free to fans, friends and journalists in the early 80s. With the help of a timely break and the thriving Austin music scene, Daniel managed to secure a brief spotlight on MTV making him a minor celebrity. But just as he was beginning to make a name for himself, his inner demons began to surface and Daniel¹s ongoing struggle with manic depression became more and more evident in his songs and drawings. “The Devil and Daniels Johnston” artfully melds current footage, vintage performances, home movies, and dozens of recorded audiotapes from Daniel's life. Testimony from supportive friends and a deeply committed family adds a rich layer to his personal history, but it is Daniel¹s poetic songs interwoven through out the film, that tell their own passionate, haunting, and truly unforgettable story. Now in his mid 40s, Daniel Johnston has grown into a prolific visual artist. His expressions have earned him worldwide recognition and critical praise, producing international exhibits where he continues to sell his vibrant and intimate sketches. He has recorded over ten full length albums, and his supporters have included Nirvana lead singer Kurt Cobain, who was often seen wearing a Daniel Johnston t shirt, Matt Groening, The Butthole Suffers, Sonic Youth, noted Minutemen/FIREHOSE bassist Mike Watt, David Bowie, Tom Waits, Beck, The Flaming Lips, and an ever-growing international cult audience. This is the story of talented and tormented Daniel Johnston, a manic-depressive genius singer/ songwriter/ artist, revealed in this portrait of madness, creativity and love. 2 PRODUCTION NOTES Daniel Johnston is an enigma, and a living breathing folk legend. Ever since Simpsons creator and preeminent Daniel Johnston fan Matt Groening mused in his LA Weekly column years ago that “someone should make the Daniel Johnston documentary,” and Kurt Cobain declared him the greatest living songwriter, Daniel has long been considered as the ideal subject for a documentary feature. It has taken director Jeff Feuerzeig, and producer Henry S. Rosenthal to bring it to life. The Devil and Daniel Johnston unravels the persona of Daniel Johnston: songwriter, musician, performer, painter, cartoonist, manic-depressive, visionary, and artist. Feuerzeig has been fascinated with the legend of Daniel Johnston since the late 1980’s and spent over a decade compiling clippings of the events of his life as they appeared in the press. Feuerzeig says, “Word was quickly spreading through the underground in 1988 about this amazing crazy kid from Chester, West Virginia who wrote hundreds of songs of unrequited love about a girl named Laurie who married an undertaker and recorded all of his albums on a cassette recorder in his basement. When I heard these songs for the first time and was exposed to the raw emotion in Daniel’s art - it truly touched me on a molecular level – and it has stayed with me since. It seemed that Daniel’s mental illness allowed him to tap into a place where the music and art he was creating was truly unfiltered and I found it mesmerizing. To say it caused an obsession would be an understatement.” While the music and art were capturing Feuerzeig’s imagination, the Daniel Johnston soap opera (real and imagined by Daniel) was being played out in public in a way that was truly riveting. Feuerzeig had a theory that Daniel Johnston was the wizard behind his own curtain and his theory crystallized in 1990 when Daniel appeared on 91.1 FM WFMU in what is now considered to be a legendary radio broadcast rivaling Orson Welles’ War of The Worlds. “Daniel had prepared an elaborate one hour radio special on his two cassette decks which he broadcast to the New York/New Jersey WFMU audience via telephone from the mental hospital in West Virginia. In this broadcast Daniel’s full mania was displayed in all its glory. Daniel delivered wicked sharp comedy skits where he did multiple voices of boys and girls, hilariously interviewed himself with more multiple voices, played multi-tracked skits centering on his massive obsession with fame, 3 promoted his new “gospel album” titled 1990, sang live over the telephone with Yo La Tengo for what would become a hit single of his signature song Speeding Motorcycle, and took phone calls from the listening audience.” One of the callers was director Jeff Feuerzeig. “I asked him if his song Funeral Home was taken from Bruce Springsteen’s Cadillac Ranch and Daniel admitted that it was. So, even our first exchange fourteen years ago was about deciphering Daniel’s art.” This broadcast turned out to be the key to Daniel Johnston and truly formed the idea for the film. Feuerzeig says “I believed that if I could visually and through audio make a film as innovative as Daniel’s radio show – editing together all facets of Daniel’s mania, his life story, as well as showing the beauty and innocence of his art and music--that I would have a movie that was a true reflection of Daniel Johnston as well as myself.” Flash forward to a sold out New York City Knitting Factory show in 2000 where Daniel Johnston appears live for the first time in his life, outside of his handful of shows in Austin, Texas in the mid 1980’s. Feuerzeig recounts, “Daniel appears as a prophet. He played a slew of new songs and was truly on fire. He had the entire crowd laughing and crying. Here was this fragile, tragic, bloated man, and he had aged as if he had lived a thousand lives and by some miracle had lived to come back and tell us the secrets of the ages. The voice was unmistakable, every crack and spittle-ridden plosive rendered the last musical decade as a folly of empty filler.” Feuerzeig immediately called his longtime friend and Daniel Johnston admirer, producer Henry S. Rosenthal and asked him, “If he wanted to take a ride on the space shuttle.” After they had agreed to undertake this truly high-risk venture the first step was to contact Daniel Johnston. Feuerzeig was in Austin, Texas and called up Daniel’s ex-manager Jeff Tartakov, who he had contact with over the years as he had been tracking Daniel’s story. As luck would have it Daniel was playing a show in Austin the following night and Tartakov agreed to make the introduction. The following night Feuerzeig and Daniel met backstage for the first time and Feuerzeig laid out his intention of doing a feature-length documentary about Daniel and his life. Daniel quickly agreed as Feuerzeig had directed Half Japanese: The Band That Would Be King, a successful film about longtime collaborator and friend of Daniel’s, Jad Fair. 4 Feuerzeig has also always had an interest in the internal monologue in cinema, feeling that a heightened level of intimacy is achieved and the audience feels closer to the truth. This technique is at its best in films such as Badlands, A Clockwork Orange, Zelig, and Taxi Driver, where the viewer actually feels like they are inside a character's head and he/she is talking directly to the viewer without any filters. “As a filmmaker, I have been trying to find a project to utilize an internal monologue in a new and innovative way. This became a reality when I discovered hundreds of hours of audio cassettes that Daniel had recorded of his entire life,” states Feuerzeig. “At my disposal were childhood arguments with his mother, audio verite' of his high school hallways, surreptitious recordings of his crushed college romance, secret telephone conversations, and -- the greatest find of all -- an audio letter campaign with his best friend that went on for years and acted essentially as an audio diary.