Employing an outsider to disarm subjects deep in Bubba Texas, Booger Red turns to writer/director/actor/provocateur Onur Tukel as its conduit into this world, asking the absurd questions at the heart of a scandal that involves swingers, foster parents and a “sex kindergarten.” Inspired by Michael Hall’s 2009 Texas Monthly article, director Berndt Mader (Five Time Champion) constructs his own documentary/narrative hybrid with Tukel as a reporter named Onur Tukel (although not as himself) in his most restrained role yet.
Playing an Austin-based investigate reporter, he’s dispatched to the small town of Mineola, Texas where the neighborhood swinger’s club is conveniently located across from the town’s newspaper. It’s here where the mysterious Booger Red apparently brought kids he trained in his “sex kindergarten” to perform — an allegation made by a profiteering set of foster parents.
Rather curiously, Mader has insisted many real players involved of the scandal talk with Tukel, right down to Patrick Kelly, Booger Red himself, said to be the kingpin of this sick sex cult. The names of the minors have been changed and creative liberties have been taken, including a backstory for Tukel’s fictional reporter that pays off in the film’s climax. The real-life foster parents throwing accusations, Maggie and John Cantrell, appear briefly after “dogging” Tukel’s questions in narrative sequence. It’s a convenient liberty that might bother documentary purists until you recall that Robert Flaherty, the father of the genre, also played fast and loose with the truth when making and subsequently reshooting Nanook of the North.
Other liberties the story takes are providing Tukel a sidekick in the form of his brother’s sexy ex-wife Marija (Marija Karan), who tags along as a research assistant. At times the film gets a tad on-the-nose as Tukel and Marija explain certain relationships to each other and relay to the audience in sequences that seem necessary to our understanding of the players in the saga.
Tukel, previously known for his unhinged roles in his pictures Summer of Blood and Applesauce, is disarming as the fictional story provides him with a kind of subjectivity that does not make for good journalism. If he had the objectivity of Tukel, the unhinged provocateur, as he does in other pictures where he plays himself (such as Abby Singer Songwriter), he might have turned into a kind of Turkish Nick Broomfield, an outsider quick to point out the irony of the situation. Booger Red has bigger fish to fry and a narrower focus. The state and community have largely one the right thing and exonerated all but one of members of Booger Red’s clan.
A straight-forward documentary in the vein of other travesty of justice docs like those made about the West Memphis Three probably wouldn’t have been more effective, although screening the film one can see how that can easily come together. The characters and atmosphere are rich here; the benefit of the narrative hybrid is that the film saves us from the graphics, text and voice-over that might be required to glue a traditional talking head documentary together. Here the glue is Onur and Marija’s scrappy journalistic adventure.
Functioning like a making of with a critique of subjectivity, it perhaps is the best portrait that can be made about this story as Mader distances himself, directing a movie about the makings of journalism while journalism is happening. I wish the film was a little more curious in the atmosphere of this North Texas hamlet to provide a more interesting portrait, but that’s not its main objective: the truth is known. The cover-ups and the dodges by public officials are considered common practice. There’s not much be outraged about — it’s all in the open. The motive to lie is what’s left for Tukel to uncover.
Booger Red screened at the Montclair Film Festival and will next screen at the Chicago Underground Film Festival.