For Hoaxes, Mike Z Marks the Spot
'Post-Ironic' Filmmaker Keeps It Unreal
By Ann Hornaday
Special to The Washington Post
Sunday, May 11, 2003; Page N01
"Emergency Announcement," the newest creation of experimental filmmaker Mike Z, is a 60-second soundtrack that accompanies a black screen with a bold white stripe down the middle. Punctuated by the alarming bleat of a siren, a man's voice urges viewers to vacate their seats immediately. "We have learned that an extremist group has targeted this room for attack," he says. "This information came directly from a suspected terrorist being held at an undisclosed location overseas."
"Emergency Announcement," which will be shown Saturday during the D.C. Underground Film Festival, is vintage Mike Z: short, tightly scripted, darkly funny, politically charged and just close enough to reality to make viewers squirm a little before they break into a knowing chuckle. Or not. For the past five years, Z has been making videos that blur the line between fact and fiction, challenging audiences to decide for themselves whether what they're seeing is true, sometimes inciting their rage at having been tricked.
Whether they're called "mockumentaries" or hoaxes or pieces of avant-garde agitprop, Z's films join a long artistic tradition -- one that spans trompe l'oeil painting, the sculptures of George Segal and "The Blair Witch Project." But -- like the writings of Daniel Defoe and Jonathan Swift, Orson Welles's 1938 broadcast of "The War of the Worlds" and the dada-inspired performance art of the culture-jammers known as RTMark -- most of Z's work has a decidedly political edge, provoking viewers to question authority, whether it's in the form of government policy or mainstream media. Although it's sometimes easy to discern Z's smile, most of his short films are so deadpan that they are more likely to leave audiences unsettled, confused or even frightened.
Mike Z is actually Michael Zieper, 43, who lives in New Jersey and who often dreams up his bent visions of reality while shuttling his two children around in the family van. Although he went to Hollywood after studying screenwriting at Syracuse University, he eventually realized his interests resided elsewhere.
"I always wanted to create things that were closer to the 'Playhouse 90' idea of television than to the Jerry Bruckheimer model of things," he explains, referring to the producer of Hollywood blockbusters. "I didn't want to do anything with aliens, or people with supernatural powers -- no easy answers, no conventional narrative flow and character development -- all those things filmmakers usually start with, I wanted to throw aside."
He made his first video in 1998. It's called "Homeless Man Steals Camera (And Kills Somebody)," it lasts for one hour, and it is a chillingly convincing piece of fictional cinema verite. Z calls it his Rosetta stone.
"The biggest reason I do the hoax medium is because everyone is so post-ironic today," he explains. "No one believes in anything. The willing suspension of disbelief is long gone. People have disbelief every moment of their waking hours. So I do try to craft my work so that it's considered important information and not a goof. I think too much of our culture has been abandoned to goofing on truth and meaning. I want to address issues, and I think the best way to do that is to be taken seriously."
Z's gift for verisimilitude, and his willingness to push the envelope of what is acceptable speech in the name of art, has made him something of an outcast in his natural habitat, the festival circuit. (Most of his work is shown on his appropriately named Web site, www.crowdedtheater.com.)
"A lot of people try to make these fake realistic things," says Skizz Cyzyk, who programs the Maryland Film Festival and Microcinefest in Baltimore. "And his stuff actually looks real. It probably scares people."
In 1998 Z made a phony video suicide note called "Don't Watch This Until I'm Dead." He lent it to a friend, who mistakenly returned it to a local video store. When clerks saw what was on the tape, they called the police. (Even Cyzyk, whose Microcinefest specializes in subversive and confrontational work, passed on the film.)
The following year, Z made "How to Start a Revolution in America," a "how-to" video featuring three young revolutionaries -- all played by actors who answered Z's casting call -- who proceed not only to tell viewers how to build bombs, but also to commit a series of increasingly violent and repugnant acts. Z described the piece as "a carefully targeted swipe at punk rock kids who have just read 'The Anarchist Cookbook' for the first time and think they've found politics." By then, Z had moved back to the East Coast, and he set up a screening of the film that spring. Just one week before the screening, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris opened fire at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo. "Mike Z is going to have some explaining to do," wrote Amy Taubin in the Village Voice.
But Z's prescience took a truly eerie turn later in 1999, when he made "Military Takeover of New York City," a video that purported to be a training tape for a rogue military group that was going to foment a race riot in Times Square during the Y2K blackout on New Year's Eve. As an unseen narrator takes a camera through the area, he speaks directly to his cohorts in convincing jargon: "First team, you're all here by oh-four-hundred. . . ." Z put the video on his Web site, accompanied by a fake "disclaimer": "I don't know too much about this tape you're about to see. I got it from my cousin Steve, who's in the Army." Within weeks, FBI agents were knocking on Z's door, asking him to remove the video from his Web site. He refused, and the FBI, along with the U.S. Attorney's office, contacted the artist's Internet service provider, which promptly shut down the site.
Z sued the individual agents and attorneys with the FBI and the Justice Department -- including Attorney General Janet Reno -- for violation of his First Amendment and Fifth Amendment rights, and the American Civil Liberties Union took on the case (in the meantime, after the Village Voice published an article about Z, his server put the video back on the site). The suit has wended its way slowly through the courts -- a judge recently ruled in favor of Z when the FBI appealed a lower court's refusal to dismiss the case. Along the way, Z has had to contend with a world that, since the events of Sept. 11, 2001, isn't likely to take his paranoid, often conspiracist, view very lightly.
"I feel like my case is of another time," Z said recently. "It's like we're saying, 'Can't we keep these cars away from all these horse-drawn carriages.' It's very last century." Still, he admits that the tape was somewhat prophetic. "At the time people were worried about Y2K, and I got the sense that there was a kind of normalization of fear," he explains. "The government was telling us we should prepare for the worst, and yet to go on about our business. That's why I wanted to make that tape, to try to show that perhaps certain elements, certain types of people in the government, would take advantage of catastrophic circumstances to further their agenda. And in fact that's what happened with me."
Z adds that he believes the government's actions since 9/11 -- the sequestering of al Qaeda and Taliban fighters in Cuba, the use of the alert system, the broadening of intelligence-gathering powers for law enforcement and the military, some of the rhetoric surrounding the Iraq war -- have only added credence to a body of work that has consistently asked viewers to think critically about what they're seeing and hearing.
"I'm not trying to affect the course of world events with my work, but I think people are using similar procedures to mine to do so," he says. "I've always had a vision of life that was fairly bleak. I just felt there wasn't a place for my message, because you can't run around saying 'The sky is falling' when it's a beautiful sunny day. Until the sky starts falling. I don't know that I'm ahead of my time. I'm just of my time."