WINNEBAGO MAN
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Rebney’s video outbursts have won him the sobriquet of Angriest Man in the World, but what makes the bloopers so arresting is his evident misery. If you’ve ever done any kind of recording, you know that the mental pressure increases with each error, until you feel as if there’s a house sitting on you. “My mind is just a piece of shit this morning!” Rebney declares in one outtake. Mixed in with his temperamental explosions are courtly expressions (“Will you do me a kindness?” he asks an offscreen intern, in one of his most quoted lines) that suggest a dignified man being pushed past the point of exasperation into existential crisis. “I don’t want any more bullshit any time during the day, from anyone,” he announces at one point. “That includes me!”
Documentary maker Ben Steinbauer was among those cultists who couldn’t get enough of Jack Rebney, and in 2006 he resolved to track down this legendary crank. It wasn’t easy: Rebney had completely dropped out of sight, and Winnebago Industries wanted nothing to do with Steinbauer’s project. From the jokey credits included with one version of the outtakes he managed to find members of the video’s crew, who sat for interviews and regaled him with stories of the hellish shoot and Rebney’s irascible behavior. Finally Steinbauer consulted a private detective, who turned up a series of post office boxes registered in Rebney’s name over the years; Steinbauer sent letters to all of them and got a phone message from the Angriest Man in the World, now living in seclusion atop a mountain in northern California. Winnebago Man, which screens this week at Gene Siskel Film Center and returns to town in early August for a theatrical run, chronicles all this and more, giving Rebney a chance to unload in front of the cameras again but also presenting him as a real human being instead of the foaming caricature created by the outtakes. After 20 years, and against all odds, it restores his dignity.
Steinbauer returns to the mountaintop to discover a complicated man with an intriguing story. (Spoilers follow, so check out here if you’re so inclined.) Rebney started out as a broadcast journalist, hoping to emulate people like Edward R. Murrow and Eric Sevareid; he tells Steinbauer he got his start at WBBM in Chicago and went on to work as a news director in various cities before becoming disillusioned with the industry. Contrary to the image of an RV pitchman, he’s politically liberal and eager to share his thoughts about the sorry state of the country. For the past few years he’s been writing an intellectual tome called Jousting With the Myth: An Heretical Analysis of God, Religion, Sex, and Politics. Keith Gordon, an old friend of Rebney’s, pinpoints the inherent contradiction in his character: “He’s always wanted an audience, he’s always wanted to influence people’s thought process, [and] at the same time has always wanted to be totally isolated.”
