My Screengrab colleague Scott Von Doviak and I tried to see Ben Steinbauer’s hot ticket documentary Winnebago Man three times during the 2009 South-By-Southwest festival in Austin, TX and were thwarted each time: once by sold-out crowds, once by SXSW traffic combined with sold-out crowds and once by a scheduling conflict.

Thus, I was happy to finally catch up with the movie at this year’s IFFB (which, curiously, stands for just “Independent Film Festival Boston,” rather than the presumably too mainstream-sounding “Independent Film Festival OF Boston”) -- and, I’m happy to report, the experience was nearly as rewarding and worth the wait as Steinbauer’s own three year pursuit of his elusive subject, Jack “Winnebago Man” Rebney, a.k.a. the Angriest R.V. Salesman in the World.

My wife had never seen the infamous YouTube clip that spawned Steinbauer’s project (a fact that, when spoken aloud at yesterday’s screening, brought astonished cries of disbelief from several audience members surrounding us at the Somerville Theater) -- so for those of you similarly unfamiliar, “Winnebago Man” was among the earliest generation of viral video superstars, back when “viral videos” were actually bootleg VHS tapes passed from one found footage enthusiast to another. Later, with the advent of YouTube’s paradigm-shifting time-suck technology, the montage of expletive-laden outtakes from some long-ago industrial film “blew up” (as the young people say), inspiring dozens of online parodies and spreading the Winnebago Man’s Daffy Duck-esque exasperation to millions around the world:



Austin documentarian Steinbauer, no stranger to on-set frustration and stress, became obsessed with the man in the clip (who’d inevitably become, among other things, a kind of patron saint to independent filmmakers everywhere) and set out to discover what the Winnebago Man himself thought of his new-fangled digital age fame (if, indeed, he was aware of it, or even still alive).

And so begins a funny and thought-provoking investigation into the nature of overnight on-line notoriety (featuring several hilarious and wince-inducing clips of comparable interweb superstars like the Star Wars kid and Aleksey “Impossible Is Nothing” Vayner), followed by a search for Rebney, the mysterious, reclusive Winnebago Man (whose Kurtz-like enigma is pieced together in the first reel of the film via intriguing clues like a telling string of P.O. boxes and off-the-grid identity erasure, the purple prose of a lone online classified ad attributed to Rebney and, eventually, first-hand accounts of actual encounters with the angriest RV salesman in the world).

Then one day, in a comically thrilling moment, the voice of the actual Winnebago Man finally issues from Steinbauer’s answering machine, luring the filmmaker on a journey that snakes through the rest of the film like a main circuit cable, plugged straight into Rebney. Since the filmmaker’s multi-faceted encounter with the real-life man behind the ranting is part of the fun and suspense of Winnebago Man, I won’t reveal more, except to say the results are funny, unpredictable and satisfying, resulting in a foul-mouthed, misanthropic (yet deeply human) examination of privacy and community in the internet age -- ideally suited for a double-feature screening with the somewhat sunnier, thematically-linked and equally enjoyable Best Worst Movie on your Netflix queue and/or at a savvy art-house near you.

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