Baby Pepper

A No-Budget Extravaganza from Rats Ass Productions!

Latest News,
Winter 2008

by Carl Russo

PAST SCREENINGS

International Fest of Cinema & Technology
Washington, DC
October 15-16, 2007

Best Film Fest
Santa Monica, California
June 24, 2007

Movieside Film Festival
Chicago, Illinois
June 7, 2007

DeReel Independent Film Festival
Melbourne, Australia
May 4, 2007

Naoussa International Short Film & Video Festival
Naoussa, Greece
May 3-6, 2007

Independent Days Film Festival
Karlsruhe, Germany
April 21, 2007

Insert Name Here Film Festival
Fitzroy, Australia
April 4, 2007

Wet West Film Festival
Hokitika, New Zealand
January 7, 2007

Panorama of Independent Filmmakers
Thessaloniki, Greece
December 11, 2007

Nihilist Film Festival
Santa Monica, California
December 10, 2007

Giggleshorts International Comedy Short Film Festival
Toronto, Canada
November 18, 2006

Alter-native International Short Film Festival
Tārgu-Mures, Romania
November 8-12, 2006

First Sundays Comedy Film Festival
New York, New York
November 5, 2006

International Short Film Festival Detmold
Detmold, Germany
September 29, 2006

Trash Film Festival
Varazdin, Croatia
September 14, 2006

Twin Cities Underground Film Festival
Bloomington, Minnesota
September 2, 2006

Portobello Film Festival
London, England
August 19, 2006

Denver Underground Film Festival
Denver, Colorado
August 17, 2006

Open Air Filmfest
Weiterstadt, Germany
August 13, 2006

Weekend Digital Film Festival
Berkeley, California
August 8, 2006

Zeitgeist International Film Festival
San Francisco, California
July 10, 2006

Short Film Festival of Los Angeles
Los Angeles, California
July 1, 2006

Portland Underground Film Festival
Portland, Oregon
June 10, 2006

Digital Barcelona Film Festival
Barcelona, Spain
May 26, 2006

Astoria Moving Picture Festival
Astoria, New York
May 21, June 25, 2006

Surry Hills Film Festival
Sydney, Australia
May 20 & 25, 2006

Parkdale Film Festival
Parkdale, Oregon
May 6, 2006

Dawson City International Short Film Festival
Dawson City, Canada
April 14, 2006

Outhouse Film and Video Festival
Baton Rouge, Louisiana
April 1, 2006

Boston Underground Film Festival
Boston, Massachusetts
March 25, 2006

Bradford Film Festival
Bradford, England
March 12, 2006

New York Short Film Festival
New York, New York
March 12, 2006

Backseat Film Festival
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
March 4, 2006

Big Dam Film Festival
Quincy, Illinois
February 25, 2006

San Francisco Independent Film Festival
San Francisco, California
February 4, 12 & 13, 2006

TucsonFilm Micro-Cinema
Tucson, Arizona
December 11, 2005

Miami Short Film Festival
Miami, Florida
November 26, 2005

Fucking Fabulous Film Festival
Seattle, Washington
November 12, 2005

24 Hours of Nuremberg
Nuremberg, Germany
November 5, 2005

Z Film Festival
Chicago, Illinois
October 15, 2005

Lost Film Festival
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
October 7, 2005

Trasharama a-Go-Go
Fremantle/ Adelaide/ Melbourne, Australia
October 7 & 8, 23, 2005

Milano Film Festival
Milan, Italy
September 18, 2005

Evil City Film Festival
New York, New York
September 11, 2005

TromaFling Independent Film Festival
Edinburgh, Scotland
August 23, 2005

Tulsa Overground International Film Festival
Tulsa, Oklahoma
August 21, 2005

Valley Arts Festival
Amherst, Massachusetts
August 19 & 21, 2005

Free Range Film Festival
Wrenshall, Minnesota
July 29 & 30, 2005

Announcements

[Mar. 24, '07] Springtime for Pepper! Just when you thought SIDs got the best of him, our hairless Hamlet is back! But he's on his own now. After trotting him around the festival circuit for almost two years, I can no longer keep up with his celebrity lifestyle. While he's returning to Germany for the fourth time, Australia for the fourth time, Greece once more, and approaching his fiftieth screening, I done ran out of baby jokes for this web page. This will be the final written announcement, though you can continue to follow his career by scanning the always-updated festival links on this page. And after Pepper hits the skids, used up, tossed out like yesterday's Brady kid, I'll finally, finally post the film on YouTube.

[Jan. 1, '07] Life's EZ in NZ! Baby Pepper is shin-deep in sheep dip at the Wet West Film Festival in the bitchin' beach town of Hokitika, New Zealand. Featuring movies with a wet theme, our eternally damp scamp is amped to be hamming it up in a liquid lineup. At the mud tub after-party he gets a whiff of Sam Neill's splendiferous spliff of Maori Wowie, which sends the peewee kiwi lover on a fruit binge. Peter Jackson taps him to star in Lord of the Runs.

[Dec. 10, '06] Stupid Cupid aims for Greece: Baby Pepper swaps his Play-Doh for Plato at the Panorama of Independent Filmmakers in Thessaloniki. Our Olympian imp is feted with fetid feta (from an ancient culture), awarded a set of mythological action figures (Helen of Troy makes a helluva toy!), and crowned with plastic laurels on a propeller beanie (beware of geeks wearing gifts!). When ESPN cameras catch Officer Chott trying to pass his baton across the champ's toga'd tookas, the two are signed to play the title roles in a miniseries based on Homer called The Idiot and the Oddity.

[Dec. 1, '06] Ga-ga in La-La Land: Pepper contemplates being and nuttiness at the Nihilist Film Festival in sunny, sandy Santa Monica, where he breaks into the Scientology mansion hoping to bag some booty from Baby Suri's shower. But our starstruck snotslug busts a bust of cult founder L. Mother Hubbard, giving Kirstie Alley a fat-ass pain and John Travolta a Saturday night fever. Busted, he's bused to the daycare section of Palisades Park known as the Beach Blanket Baby Lawn.

[Nov. 13, '06] Going undercover for the Pelosi administration, Baby Pepper tweaks the latest face-recognition software on a Toronto hockey crowd from high atop the CN Tower. He zooms in on the shining pates of Karl Rove and Dick Cheney hiding among the wool caps like lice on moose fur. The fugitives-from-reality claim to be in town for the Giggleshorts International Comedy Short Film Festival, but everyone knows that Bushies can't smile. This sends our knee-high spy into a wriggling fit of the giggleshits, causing him to fire a steaming puck into the opponents' net. After a victory lap on the Zamboni, the lucky schmuck chucks his Canuck mukluks, hocks his new Stanley Cup on eBaby, sells Rove to a back bacon plant, and takes Cheney on a duck hunt.

[Oct. 30, '06] Our pampered pipsqueak chugs across Romania on the Transylvania Choo Choo, nursing an Orange Revolution (o.j. and axle grease) and juggling Soviet blocks to the delight of fawning press members and a snockered 911 nanny. Pulling in to Tārgu-Mures for the Alter-native International Short Film Festival, he's met by sinister Minister of Truancy, Comandante Vladimir Chott, TIT (Trained In Torture). Pepper flies the coop, straps on a beak and lands the role of a knicked chicken in a Gypsy-produced Rom-com. Chott gets sacked and is spotted in the Bucharest subway huffing glue with street kids, earning the nickname Vlad the Inhaler.

[Sep. 29, '06] Thanks to No Child Left Behind's heavy sessions of A-B-C indoctrination and Ritalin suppositories, Baby Pepper--a.k.a. Downtown Diaper Brown--is flush with enthusiasm for Alphabet City and the First Sundays Comedy Film Festival in New York. After learning that his old man's old squat on Avenue C now lets for $4k/mo., he lets loose a child's garden of curse against gentrification. The blue streak catches the ear of the director/usher of an off-off-off-Broadway (okay, sock-puppet) production of Rent, who recruits our bātard bavard to play a bag of packing peanuts in a dumpster. Five nights (plus a Wednesday matinee) in a silent role sends our squirmy squawk-box on the skids, and he's last seen gnawing a used Webster's Third Unabridged at Strand Books, hopelessly hooked on phonics.

[Aug. 19, '06] Pepper: a Balkan Culkin? Serb's up at the Trash Film Festival in Varazdin, north of Zagreb, the only competition on earth to award a Golden Chainsaw to the winner! But that slovenly slavic slob Slobodon Chott, ex-dictator for life plus 100 years, escapes, threatening to bring damnation and ruination to the Croation nation (not to mention the irritation of inflation not seen since the Haitian stagflation!). So where in tarnation is our own ragin' creation? In the projector booth, splicing a Baby Pepper preview in between each film on the program, proving that he's really just trailer trash.

[Aug. 15, '06] What's a foot wide and a mile high? Baby Pepper at the Denver Underground Film Festival! Though his Desitin cream is confiscated by airhead Airport Inspector Chott, our bug-eyed bronco turns those chapped cheeks to his advantage: Upon arrival he is cast in Dynasty: The Movie as a pet red-assed baboon. During the banquet scene he sinks his tooth into a prairie oyster, but spits out the bitter bollock in the direction of Joan Collins. The plastic dynastic is flattened--choppers, walker, wig and all--in a single strike. A PBA junior league recruits the little Lebowski, so now he's bowling for Columbine.

[Aug. 5, '06] That mindless midget mines the midwest once again at the Twin Cities Underground Film Festival, just outside of Minneapolis in Bloomington (presumably a secret step-sibling town). He goes stag to a John Deere repo sale in the parking lot of the Mall of America where a film idea hits him like a Jesse Ventura body slam: Officer Chott (as Minnesota Fats) chases Baby Pepper (as Mini Soda Jerk--try his Many Apples Mint Soda!) to a downstate potato patch and nearly mashes the gravy out of the little spudling. Will our tater tot soil his yammies when the chips are down? Find out after I post the footage on YouTuber.

[July 23, '06] Hooked on teutonics! The oompa band strikes up "Ode to Joy" as that germinant joyboy enjoys his third German journey, this time at the International Short Film Festival Detmold, in the choice Westphalian hamlet. He bellies up to the wunderbar at a LegoLand lounge where he falls for an older woman, the three-year-old Fraulein Freckle, yodeling kindergarten verse on stage. The mottled toddler lures our lovestruck thumbsucker to the castle of the evil Baron von Chott, who sends him to bed without supper. With keen sleuthing skills (a Google search on his Playskool Blackberry), Pepper learns that the cheesy burgher is none other than Shotzie Chotsky the Trotskyite spy. He screams, "Curse you, red Baron!"

[July 14, '06] London bawling! Never mind the polyps at the Portobello Film Festival, named after the main drag in Notting Hill, the Big Smoke's punk-historical quarter. Our punky porcini, Pepper, head in a mushroom cloud, rolls up in his side-car pram modded out with thirty-two rear-view mirrors. But that porcine teddy boy, Officer Chott of the Yard, showing no Mersey, beats him to a bloody pie. Kid Vicious attends the fest in a mismatched neon-pink and lime body cast with a Union Jack bandana. The Times heralds the "Return of the Clash."

[July 9, '06] Babe in Deutschland (again)! Our dimpled dumpling takes a breather at the Open Air Filmfest in Weiterstadt. But a Germanic panic makes for a sour crowd when Officer Chott--juiced on a Jäger jag--raids the inn where Pepper is regaling a Rick Steves tour group with "The Near-Beer Barrel Polka" on his baby Steinway. The munster cop stops the brewhaha and takes Herr Hare the hotelier hostage in a Volkswagen Rabbit, hollering, "Where's my hasenpfeffer?" The bratwurst brat is declared the festival wiener while the frankly furtive Chott is deported for attempting a hostel takeover.

[July 16, '06] With a tiny fist thrust heavenward, our revolutionary rascallion rallies an army of red-diaper babies known as the Pink Panthers at People's Park in Berkeley. The pacifier pacifists-turned-militant mommy maimers, brandishing noisy rattles and shouting "Power to the Pepper!", blockade the Weekend Digital Film Festival at Blake's on Telegraph, demanding free admission and zwieback biscuits. A single squirt of Officer Chott's tear gas is enough to mollify the main minor's minions, but a major social movement is born: Bib Lib.

[June 21, '06] Our Left Coast laddie makes the scene at the Zeitgeist International Film Festival--in San Francisco's famed hipster biker bar--decked out with clip-on nose ring and tattoos from a Cracker Jack box. Odious Officer Chott charges the beer garden on his mean Electra Glide chopper, but Pepper plugs the exhaust pipe with a fat Mission Street burrito. The explosion blows the porky party pooper through the screen and into a nearby cannabis club, causing a 4.20 quake. To toast his defeat, the bartender mixes one part vodka to two parts bong water, thus inventing the Harley Wallbanger.

[May 28, '06] Kid to score again in Oregon! Unbeknownst to our swaddled swashbuckler, a black-op stranger on a train tracks him north by northwest to the Portland Underground Film Festival. Officer Chott, that gastric domestic spy, grabs the guest list and runs, but a beefy bouquet wafting from a Ruth's Chris Steak House suddenly appeals to his constitution. A stampede of furious filmmakers tackles the government cheese mid-slice, led by the new ACLU poster boy, Pepper. Thanks to his stash of banned Dr. Suess tracts, he's able to sound out the Oregonian's headline: "Cop Chott, sought for hot DOD plot, caught in top chop shop."

[May 19, '06] Baby draws applause, nay, hurrahs in Oz! Our unhinged munchkin is considered way-in in the outback and over-the-top down under, which is why the Australians are popping their Fosters over his return. The Surrey Hills Film Festival is nicknamed "Hopscotch" for its fostering of short-short flicks. When that shortest of subjects--Pepper--takes his turn at the game, he eats the colored chalk and hops the first kangaroo out of town. The spoiled sport even rips off third prize: a pair of Crocodile Dundee undies, now stained in pleasing pastels.

[May 13, '06] King of Queens! Fuming over a New York Post hit piece ("Pepper Best Argument for Land Mines"), our diapered dwarf hits the boroughs in his tricked-out bio-diesel carriage (it runs on baby oil) with spanking new rubber baby buggy bumpers. Hell on Reels: The Astoria Moving Picture Festival is named for this hip 'hood's hella-great Hell Gate Bridge, which the East Side Kid can't maneuver after sucking a whole bottle of Long Island iced tea. In a NY minute he's plunging into the East River, where a green monster with warts scares the crap out of him. The directors rename the festival "Smell on Wheels: The Froggy Horror Picture Show."

[May 5, '06] El Nińo lashes Spain! Indistinguishable along a line of hanging hams, our half-pint Hemingway swings into the bull ring, grabs ol' Ferdinand by the huevos, and the rodeo is on! Pepper's goal at the Digital Barcelona Film Festival is to provoke a spanking from Penélope Cruz, but his bottle of virgin absinthe (Scope) gets the better of him: the cheeky cherub is inspired by a certain Catalan surrealist to paint a wild mustache on the Virgin of Montserrat. A priest is called in to grant the only thing that can save his unholy hinie: a Dali pardon.

[Apr. 30, '06] Off-roading across Oregon's Hood River in his Big Wheel H1, our reprobate rug rat changes his spots to green at the scenically-endowed Parkdale Film Festival. He saves a spotted owl from doubling its dots at the hands of Grand Wizard Chott and his Paintball Patriots, and is quickly awarded a plum animal rights gig--panhandling in front of Saks--while I get stuck with the cleanup bill. But that prodigal spawn of mine will pay back every penny, even if he has to rob PETA to pay Pa.

[Apr. 1, '06] When DefSec "Strangelove" Rumsfeld extends the new military draft to include anything that breathes, Pepper and his entourage of stuffed animals defect to the Great White North. Our artless dodger is granted asylum and crowned with a toque at the Dawson City International Short Film Festival, but he's met in the Molson's tent by Constable Chott of the Royal Mulleted Mounties. A Canadian goose chase ensues to no avail. The Klondike tyke is rumored to be roughing it in an improvised diaper (a maple leaf rag), self-videotaping his life among the teddy bears for Werner Herzog's next documentary.

[Mar. 29, '06] Baby Pepper, code named Kid Creole, totes his toot-toot to Baton Rouge's outrageously outré Outhouse Film and Video Festival ("Have a seat!"). Sheriff Chott, itching to rouge his baton on some red-state pinkos, attacks the crowd and narrowly escapes a lynching by Mardi Gras beads. He calls in the ushers for backup, but they're all in Iraq cleaning latrines. FEMA declares our film a disaster, "though it has its moments."

[Mar. 4, '06] That titular tot works his street cred at the Boston Underground Film Festival, only to flaunt his sellout at a Beantown Brahmin schmooze festival later that night. He hits up John Kerry to fund a project (a sadistic reality show based on WGBH's Zoom), but the old pol gives him a dingy Purple Heart instead. Then a pack of preschool bullies called Toy Boat Veterans For Truth corners our boy at the kids' table and paddles him with flip-flops till he bawls like a Banshee. Senator Ted gives him a buck to shut up, making Pepper the youngest recipient of Kennedy hush money.

[Feb. 1, '06] Baby Pepper may not play in Peoria, but the Big Dam Film Festival in Quincy, Illinois, releases a torrent of love for our itty bitty bastard. In the spirit of Huck Finn, he plays hooky to explore the fest's namesake waterworks on the Mississippi. A little informed knob-twiddling forces a huge fissure to split the concrete and reveal Dick Cheney's secret, five-star luxury bunker. The President blames al Qaeda because "they hate our underground bowling alleys," but everyone knows it's really Pepper's own dam fault.

[Jan. 29, '06] Flimflam flung at Philly film fling! The "drinking man's" Backseat Film Festival prides itself on the before-, during- and after-parties. Although Pepper is banned from a bash at a South Street dive, the bouncer (an off-duty Officer Chott) is rushed to the ER with mysterious ankle bites. Our rebellious runt kicks off his booties and does the crawl across the bar, but must suffer yucky booze kisses from admiring grown-ups. Flu-struck and disgusted, he closes the joint slamming shots of Robitussin with a root beer chaser in a two-handled sippie cup.

[Jan. 19, '06] The little pink punk is back in the UK, and the bobbies are on Baby Alert at the Bradford Film Festival. Disguised as a Teletubby, he bursts onto a live BBC newscast and flashes photos of Bush and Blair enjoying tea and yellowcake in a Soho bathhouse. The Labor Party is so teed off that it renditions the Prime Minister to Romania for questioning. Pepper demands knighthood but the Queen instead pronounces him a Royal pain in the ass.

Continued on next page

INTRODUCTION

BEHIND THE SCENES

FILM CREDITS

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