George Kuchar, experimental filmmaker, dies

Experimental filmmaker George Kuchar, whose no-budget, lo-fi, "plot, schmot" technique became a genre followed by generations of San Francisco art students along with auteurs such as John Waters and Andy Warhol, died of prostate cancer Tuesday with his twin brother by his side. He was 69.

Mr. Kuchar made more than 500 films and videos, many of them with his brother Mike, who shared a home with him in the Mission District for the past 30 years. The brothers moved to San Francisco from the Bronx in 1971 so Mr. Kuchar could teach film at the San Francisco Art Institute.

With titles such as "I Was a Teenage Rumpot" (1960), "Hold Me While I'm Naked" (1966), "The Devil's Cleavage" (1975) and "Insanitorium" (1987), Mr. Kuchar's films have been labeled campy, avant-garde, underground and simply indescribable. He used friends, relatives and students as actors, hastily constructed props and shot in whatever shabby locations he could find.

Once, when the female student lead in one of his films dropped out of class, he continued the class production by using a male stand-in, shot from behind.

"George's movies were funny, but if you looked deep enough you'd recognize the upsetting things we all deal with as humans," said San Francisco documentary filmmaker Jennifer Kroot, a former student who turned her lens on Mr. Kuchar and his brother for her 2009 film, "It Came From Kuchar."

His annual trip to El Reno, Okla., to wait for tornadoes led to several films and video diaries on "storm squatting." When some suggested he was using weather as a metaphor for internal and external emotional storms, he quipped that it was more likely an homage to his "tumultuous digestive tract."

Mr. Kuchar used potty humor in his movies to poke fun at Hollywood glamour, and many of his films touched on religion and sexuality, exploring the clashes between his Catholic upbringing and his homosexuality.

"George would just make pictures about how he felt and how he interpreted things around him and although they have an element of camp, it was not yet an appreciated art form," Mike Kuchar said.

The twins grew up in the Bronx in the '50s, messing around with an 8mm camera and spending their allowance at the movie palaces, captivated by the turgid adult plots.

After graduating from a commercial art high school, Mr. Kuchar drew storm clouds and weather maps for a local TV station before joining the underground film scene in New York City, where he attended avant-garde films with Warhol and Kenneth Anger.

After moving to San Francisco, Mr. Kuchar befriended comix titans Art Spiegelman, Bill Griffith (who credits Mr. Kuchar with partial inspiration of his Zippy the Pinhead character) and Robert Crumb.

Mr. Kuchar enjoyed some success with "Hold Me While I'm Naked," which was ranked 52 in a list of top 100 films of the 20th century by the Village Voice. Many of his films are archived at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley and the Harvard Film Archive. The Kuchar brothers were honored by the San Francisco Frameline Festival's annual filmmaker award in 2009 for lifetime achievement.

But deep in his heart, he loved to make flops, Kroot said. "He never wanted his toe in the mainstream," she said.

Mr. Kuchar continued teaching until the spring, when his cancer worsened. One of his last two films, "Lingo of the Lost," a student collaboration, will be shown at the New York Film Festival in October.

"Without my brother, it's going to be strange," said Mike, his sole survivor. "But he acted in his later productions, so in some ways his image and spirit and soul is still very much alive."

There will be no services, as Mr. Kuchar preferred to say his goodbyes in person in his hospice room. Several cinematic retrospectives throughout the Bay Area are being planned.

E-mail Meredith May at mmay@sfchronicle.com.