Super on the Inside, Too
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There’s an unmistakable parallel between artist and subject in “Confessions of a Superhero,” a heartbreaking new documentary that will make its New York debut Friday night at the Two Boots Pioneer Theater. In a not-so-subtle stroke of irony, the director, Matthew Ogens, set out to record a quirky sort of freak show, but wound up making a film about men and women — dressed as superheroes, walking the streets for money — with dreams not all that different from his own.
The tale starts on Hollywood Boulevard — that short strip of asphalt where a celebrity’s fame is commemorated in concrete and gold, where people with stars in their eyes come to gaze at the stars below their feet along the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Of course, to those who love it the most, Hollywood Boulevard is also commonly known as the boulevard of broken dreams. It’s this interplay, between Hollywood as the dreamland of possibilities and Hollywood as the gutter of despair, that stands at the center of “Confessions of a Superhero.”
Enter Mr. Ogens, who has long chased his filmmaking dream through TV documentaries for such networks as ESPN and VH1, as well as his own short films. But it was his day job on a commercial shoot that first brought him to Hollywood Boulevard some years ago, and it was during that shoot that he began to notice the parade of superheroes wandering the Walk of Fame. As tourists gawked and locals dreamed, such familiar icons as Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, and Wonder Woman wandered up and down the street, offering photos in exchange for “tips.”
“We were shooting this documentary, and we started to notice all these guys in costumes, and we were just drawn to it,” Mr. Ogens said. “We thought, ‘These guys are so quirky, this is just a train-wreck.’ And so we thought of doing a film as a profile of these odd characters. We were assuming that one was a drug addict, another a drunk … it was actually supposed to be a comedy.”
But the more he spoke with the superhero clan, the less pathetic they seemed.
“The sad thing was that we were judging the book by the character, and the more we started talking to Superman, the more we started to see ourselves in these characters,” Mr. Ogens said. “Over the span of a week, I started taking some still photographs, and within two weeks we were shooting the movie. It just hooked us.”
As enthusiastic festival audiences have already learned, Mr. Ogens unearthed a fascinating cornucopia of aspiring artists who were climbing into their rubber and spandex every day in large part to pay the bills, but also to exercise their acting chops and boost their egos.
Usually there are few boosts to be found. In one scene, we learn that that Wonder Woman is a small-town girl who moved across the country in hopes of being an actress. When she isn’t strutting her stuff along the boulevard, she’s meeting with her agent, an acting coach, and attending auditions. We learn that Superman is an obsessed Superman collector and Christopher Reeve fan. He’s collected tens of thousands of dollars worth of memorabilia and, thanks to his appearances at conventions and on late-night Los Angeles talk shows, is a rising celebrity in his own right.
Mr. Ogens is there on the day when the man who plays the Incredible Hulk gets the callback from an audition; he’s been cast in the new Justin Lin film, “Finish the Game,” which opened at IFC Center earlier this month.
“These aren’t just people in costumes,” the director said. “They’re trying to be actors and make it in the entertainment industry. And when you think about why we were there, shooting commercials, trying to make some money to pay our dues, we were doing much the same thing. So the movie became about peeling the onion, that you start thinking these are weirdos, but the deeper you go, the more you realize they are anything but.”
In a similar twist of fate, while Mr. Ogens’s commercial shoot helped him to find the topic he would use to make his first feature-length film, this unlikely documentary has given some of the hopeful superheroes the attention they have long been seeking.
“I wasn’t sure, at first, what I thought about it at all, to have my life dissected,” said Christopher Dennis, who impersonates Superman almost daily along the Walk of Fame, and who stands as the central character of the documentary. “But at the very first screening, just as the film started playing, people started laughing and cheering and crying, and I thought to myself, ‘Well, we don’t have too much to worry about, if we’re hitting all these emotions.'”
Mr. Ogens described witnessing festival audiences rushing to greet this stoic impersonator after screenings. But he also saw the fear with which Mr. Dennis shed his costume. “We’d be going to a festival party, and we’d say, ‘You don’t need to wear your outfit,’ and it was almost like he wanted to wear the outfit because without it, people wouldn’t recognize him.”
But Mr. Dennis says this isn’t entirely a bad thing. When he appears as Superman along the boulevard, he is admired all day long. In “Confessions,” we see men and women of every age fawn over him, running up for photos and gushing, “Superman, you’re my hero.” Mr. Dennis also takes obvious pride in the heroic efforts he often makes in the service of his fans — helping lost tourists, foiling shoplifters, and nabbing purse-snatchers.
Mr. Dennis will freely admit that his need to be “in character” may be unhealthy. But it’s just the kind of unhealthy obsession, he says, that built this town in the first place.
“I did some research on Hollywood, and did you know that way back in the day, when Hollywood was getting started, actors and actresses would put on crazy outfits and strut their stuff along the boulevard, in hopes of getting a director or producer to see them and say, ‘Hey, you have what I’m looking for’? The way I look at it, I’m just carrying on the tradition of Hollywood.”
ssnyder@nysun.com