Special Report: This is Buzz (2026)

Hold your ears, folks. It's showtime. People pay good money to see this movie. When they go out to a theater, they want cold sodas, hot popcorn, and no monsters in the projection booth. Everyone pretend podcasting isn't boring.

Turn it off. I think the term in those days that people used to use was a magazine show. And so this was like sort of an avant-garde magazine show. John called it a spin through the pop culture blender. The term used at the time was the pop culture blender.

You know, we used to call it a spin through the pop culture blender. It'd be loud one minute, just like grabbing you by the throat. It's the way things are going. It's like the creative voices you want to hear. It's like everybody's voice and nobody's voice.

It was a kind of, you know, subversive current affairs show. It was genre-less. In fact, it just took the word genre and ripped it up and spat it out, you know, and pissed. All over me. But Buzz was overload.

Buzz was like a little glimpse through the curtain. I was buzzed. It's about what gives you a buzz. Television is the result of endless experiments. This is Buzz.

It felt like a distillation of The Zeitgeist. Suddenly you saw this thing where in 15 minutes you'd seen more ideas than you'd seen in the last two years. And when I first saw Buzz, I thought I was seeing. The future of television. When I watch Buzz today, I still think I'm seeing the future of video.

It was extraordinary. I mean, really, it looked like something that Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs would have produced at kind of five o'clock in the morning after a whole weekend being on it. It's supposed to make you buzz, it's supposed to give you a buzz, what moves you. There is a buzz around. It's hard to classify.

I would talk about Buzz and they'd be like, well, what is it? And I'd try to explain it and I'm like, well, it's this new show. But it's really like, imagine somebody's changing the channel. It was Paul's boutique. There was no keeping up with old samples.

Buzz was the first piece of programming that really got my attention that just fucking blew my mind. But what Buzz did was it pushed the envelope further than anybody else had ever pushed it. It was thought-provoking. It was like a scream. It was like this primal scream.

It felt like a thousand eyes all over the globe at once. I think the first person I ever heard talk about Buzz was Bono. It was like flicking through a magazine. Influenced by pros. It's supposed to make you buzz.

It's supposed to give you a buzz. He was way out of his time. That was understood. We didn't realize that it was actually prophetic. So I.

Shut it all off. So I shut it off. This is Buzz. This is Buzz. Hey folks, welcome to a special episode of The Projection Booth.

I'm your host, Mike White. Today, I am talking with Mark Pellington all about his new documentary, This Is Buzz. It is an experimental deep dive into the experimental MTV series, Buzz, from the network's, well, not early years, from the 90s. I guess that's kind of early when it's now 2026. It is told through the people who lived that MTV generation firsthand.

This Is Buzz premiered at Slamdance.com. landed a distribution deal through Antenna Releasing, and is currently touring theaters. Visit thisisbuzz.com for more information and to find out where the movie is playing near you. Had a great time talking with Mark, and I hope you have a great time listening. Enjoy. I kind of grew up in that MTV generation that This Is Buzz is all talking about.

Yep, yep. How old are you, can I ask? I am 54. Okay, yeah, I find a real, like, that generation like 10 years below me, right? So I was like 30 coming of age then as people who were really from anywhere from 14 to 22 that they gobbled up MTV in a different way than I had in 81, 82, 83.

The form was different. And so good for you. So I'm here to lead you back into the promised land. What was the first music video you ever directed? First one I did was a band called Deep Six.

They're a little New York kind of nervy pop band, 1985. And last weekend at the Braindead in LA, I showed an hour of music videos and I showed my first one, Deep Six, and my most recent one from two months ago. Both around the same budget, but yeah, it was fun. It holds up pretty good, to be honest with you. I was just rewatching the information society video.

So good. And just so many techniques you were using back then. Those videos, like what we do in some cities is some cities I show afterwards, like an hour of videos. And then some, I just do a little shorter, like sampler plate. And those, I try to keep those for ones I made before buzz and right after.

So information society. PM Dawn, Crystal Waters, those were all. And the language of those videos is very much the language of Buzz. A lot of film bleach, a lot of text, a lot of the editing style. I edited them almost all myself.

So there was a certain impatience, I guess you could say. Back then, what were you using to edit? A rough cut on a three quarter inch tape two channel thing where you have to hit in and out things. And then it wasn't until like 92, 93 that the Avid came up. So I didn't work on a nonlinear system till 93.

Jeremy was still cut old school. I cut that rough cut myself. Yeah. All tape, tape before digital. I just remember how long that process would be, especially when you would set those in and out points and you had to get the tape up to speed so you wouldn't ruin that control track.

It was just insane. Control track, yeah. I tell a little story that my cutting style became known for being frenetic because a lot of times when you would edit like that, you would have a flash frame, right? So to really redo it, you'd have to relay. Maybe it would be all three minutes up to that point. then relay that edit to a frame to, you know, and sometimes I just was like, fuck it.

I'd put three shots in where there had been two in the glitch. I'd cover the hole with say like an eight frame shot. So within a second, there'd be three shots instead of two. And, but there was always something interesting musically going on in the track. So if it wasn't on a snare, it was on a baseline, it was on a vocal.

So I learned, how to alternate in my cuts between, sometimes I'd cut on the vocal, sometimes I'd cut on the bass, sometimes I'd cut on the counter rhythm in between it. And I learned from some really good editors, like Hank Corwin, who cut JFK and Natural Born Killers. We did the Alice in Chains video, and he cut that way remarkably different. I just was watching that and noticing how long many of the shots were, because we shot it like a movie, how long many shots were and then how short many were in between as opposed to the whole thing being fast. Was it the Avid that allowed Buzz to be what it was?

There was no Avid with Buzz. It was all tape, online, and highly structured and highly, a lot of the pieces were pre-made, all the host projection things and all the textures and all the transitional pieces with film bleach and strips and were all pre-made per theme of each show. So I'd made them in the few months before when I was in New York. And then so when we got to England, it was like you'd have the panels of the people talking, two of them per show. So somebody would work on those.

We'd pre-mix the audio for that. And so when I would sit in the online edit room, I was like, okay, go to those host projections. John would write some text. So it was kind of like very following a recipe. It was never until maybe the last few shows where we went in there and it was like completely free form.

I never went in with any script. It was just kind of like, let's just go to here. There was way more like jazz then and before it felt... like jazz, but it was hyper-constructed, very curated to the frame. There was nothing left to chance. How did you have to kind of shift your brain when it came to actually making more feature films?

When you made Arlington Road or Mothman Prophecies, How did you have to change yourself to approach those, or did you? You had to. When you look at those films, I had a lot of transition. I think by the time I finished Buzz and Disposable Heroes of Hypocrisy and Jeremy, and even Jeremy and Alice in Chains in relation to Buzz are a little bit slower, and they're also narrative. There's stories in there.

So around My Father Got Sick, And I think generally that kind of, a lot of my videos became very slow. There's a Connell's video, Leonard Cohen. A lot of them became very meditative explorations of memory. So I think my super hyper speed thing ended around 92. I definitely put my career into speed, memory, and trauma, loss, and healing.

Very much so. the 2010s were very different than the early 2000s. And so movie-wise, by the time I did a poetry series in 1995, which was two-minute, three-minute, one-minute collage poetry films, I was very tired of doing that collage work. United States of Poetry is like buzz meets spoken word. But I remember a friend of mine said, You should just put the camera down and see what it's like to tell a story that way. And so that was exciting.

On one level. So my first movie was very much going all the way, was very much a wake-up call. And if you look at it, I got to redo the movie a few years ago, and I'm really happy with it now. But there's moments that are very hyperkinetic, and there's moments that are very single camera, no cuts, because... the limitations of an independent film is like, shit, you got an hour to do it. Do one floating master.

So you didn't have the kind of three camera shoot the hell out of it set up. And the material was also very like 1950s, very languid. Not that people haven't made hyper kinetic fifties movies, but I remember shifting gears into that and working with actors. And I really liked it because it was a challenge cutting up, And doing stuff, I've been doing it for a long time. So I'm sure you as a writer, journalist, interviewer, like if you do the same thing over again, sure, you get really good at it.

But you also start to be like, all right, here's some text. Here's some this. Here, this is over cut. And I would notice it. I would note, I saw, I remember a Lush video.

I was like, Jesus, if I just slowed the fuck down for two seconds. But these are things you learn artistically. So let's talk about This Is Buzz. Why now for this project? How did this come about?

It came out of a little bit of COVID boredom. Not boredom, but Chris Gore from Film Threat said, oh, you should do Buzz again. I was like, what do you mean? He said, you should just do it again. And he goes, or do a doc about it.

And I thought about. It, and. So that could be interesting. Let me ask a few documentary filmmakers that I knew, not super well, but a couple of friends I knew like Scott Kennedy. And I knew I'd met Alex Gibney before and Davis Guggenheim and Marina Zinovich.

So I'd met these doc people who I respected. And I said, I have this show. And then some had heard of it. Some were like mildly remembered it, but they always said, what's the story? Not what's the form or what's the collage or, They said, what's the story?

So there was this old show that we made that was, I think, a little bit ahead of its time. And as I look around at the way people communicate in the media, I find it's very much like we were saying this is where the world was headed and the form of which we were saying it. Globalism, news information. So in that kind of news magazine show, voiceless, faceless kind of interactive on a certain way. So I said, oh, let me see.

Let me start interviewing some people. Let me get the rights to the show, which took a long time. And you don't go out. A lot of times movies, feature films, you're like, I want to make this movie. I got to get the cast.

I got to get the money. And it's an arduous task. I wasn't going out to do this. Well, let me see what it is. Because you can go do interviews.

You shoot five interviews per pay a cameraman a thousand bucks. And I said, well, let me see, let me do three or four waves of interviews and see what it is. And again, what the story is. So I did that for like two years and I was never really sure. There was no timetable.

Nobody was clamoring for it. I tried to get some finishing funds. That went nowhere. I was like, well, I'll just keep shooting people till I had enough witnesses to it. People who had experienced it, saw it. knew what it was.

It didn't do me any good to have people not have seen the show, although in retrospect we had some ideas of getting reaction videos from kids in it. Again, all things that were different kind of construction, but I said, let me just tell the honest story of two guys who were coming from different places. MTV, let me tell the story of a corporation that was trying to expand. Let me tell the story of a corporation wanting to have their cake and eat it too. So they'd want the hip things, but to what end would they be experimental?

And we, look, we took advantage of it and we got canceled. There's no happy ending to it. There's no happy ending to a buzz show and there's no happy ending to this. But in retrospect, it's like somebody let you go make something and there was nobody at home watching us. So a certain raw experimental thing freedom of expression erupted out of it and was contained.

And that's what got made. So the fact that you could never see it, it was only airing once. That became, for me, mythic and interesting because everything is so readily accessible all the time now. Everybody can watch everything about anything. And the fact that you couldn't, a friend of mine in New York said, yeah, Buzz was like this lost piece of media.

So I was always interested in that and we finished it. And again, you don't get in major festivals or get streamers knocking on your door. So you're like, all right, this is a very narrow kind of culty. It's like doing a cult band, but nobody even heard of the band. Right.

But maybe you and I had, and certainly Chris Gore and a few people had. So you shoot it, you edit it and you try and get it out in the world and find a, a brave distributor that'll get it out in the world and let journalists and audiences see it for what it is, good, bad, or indifferent. The response has been good. The people that criticize it, that I am in it talking about it. There was only a few witnesses to the experience.

And again, we got canceled and we knew exactly what we were doing. As John Klein says, We made a Faustian bargain. We were fully aware, but that's what being 28 years old does. In retrospect, sure. But at that time in the 80s, the way the world was and the way that media was, you're in this room.

But I had been in those edit rooms for six years. I was just doing the same thing I'd always done. Try things and I said, I'm just going to keep going until they tell me to go home. That's what happened. Speaking of lost media and preservation, what was the shape of the materials?

Did you have all of this at the ready or did you have to go to MTV and go, yeah, give me the three quarter inch tapes? One inch. I went to the guy who gave me the rights to it for a reasonable amount of money to make the series was a guy named Bruce Gilmer. Bruce Gilmer's last real professional job was the head of MTV docs, right? He was the last man fired at last year when David Ellison cleaned house at MTV, right?

They were the last company that was maybe even interested in doing buzz again or doing it as a streaming show. They were super cool. And Bruce was the guy who was an intern when we were doing buzz that gave us now 35 years later, gave me the rights to the footage for 10 grand for an hours of footage, right? Which is, Really great. So it was on a PAL.

The European standard is PAL, P-A-L, not NTSC. So they had a PAL one-inch master. in their vaults in England. They had them on a Google Drive, sent that to me. So those were the best quality that I could get. Now, I never up-res'd all 13.

I probably would if I held the rights to them. And people would really like to see them. So maybe in a museum context, we could show them. But I don't have the rights to just do whatever I want with them. But I would up-res those.

And that would be the best you could do. Even if you went back to England and got those tapes, I'm sure there's super high-end up-res now that can really get it looking pretty great. But anything pre- Anything really pre-1998 is still pretty shabby. Anything that was really tape-based, even though a lot of our elements that we shot on film went up-res, really hold up better than stuff that was like stock footage from a Bulgarian commercial shot on VHS. Yet it has a certain scruffy and all you want is the texture.

You just don't want it soft. You don't mind texture. You just don't want the whole thing going too soft. That was really the aesthetic watchword because it's a mixed media piece, right? And there's literally stuff in there from the 1970s, old footage of old stock films that I had that we put into this.

So there's stuff in there that's 50 years old. Who were some of your influences when you were growing up? you're talking about pulling together all this footage and immediately my mind goes to Bruce Conner or something where it's just like this kind of, back when found footage was meaning literally found footage. I didn't discover Bruce Conner until I was in New York in the 80s when my friend Louis Klar, who was a filmmaker who did all the film strips, he would turn me on to a lot of these avant-garde filmmakers, Nam June Paik, Bruce Conner, Robert Longo, the artist, and Gretchen Bender, they were definite influences. Gretchen's video work. Julia Hayward and people at The Kitchen in New York City.

Yeah, like Brackage influenced Glenn Ribble, who was RPA at MTV, who did all the bleaching and turpentine. And I worked with Glenn a lot. That bleaching, cutting out of, film onto strips and bleach, because when it would go on bleach, depending on the contrast or what the image was, sometimes it would eat away the subject, sometimes the background, and it always did something very different, very unpredictable. There was a cutout film artist named Esther Shitovsky, who Lewis turned me on to, who she would cut out the images in 16mm film, like somebody's going through a record, right? And the hands go, but she would cut out literally the image of the record in the person's hand.

So then she would animate different things within it. So all that super intricate handmade processed handmade time-based art was a huge influence to me. So between those artists, every music video that came in, I would watch everyone that came in. I'd be like, Ooh, What's that shot? Ooh, that's cool.

Peter Kerr, Cabaret Voltaire, or the Untouchables would do a thing with little animated figures that later on I used that in Information Society. So I would watch every video and make notes on what were the cool videos that nobody ever saw. And I would take images from those and put those. I said, can I make a promo with all these images? And they said, sure.

And that promo starts with Martin Fry from ABC saying, is in the film. So that first promo from 1985 I found online looks terrible. And we put it in because it was important to me to kind of show some of those seeds, which were just taking bits and chopping them up. And again, soundtrack first, sound and emotion first, and then the pictures really secondary. I just loved that it was this sampling culture kind of writ large we're already hearing even sorry to keep harping on information society but having the clips from star trek inside of that song was wonderful but then watching stuff like buzz and you hear all of these things you're just like where is this even coming from or just that whole idea of like bringing together all of these disparate things and just like recontextualizing all of them it was so wonderful that was always what i really appreciated about the show Well, it was fun.

And we even in the film recontextualized some of that stuff. There's one chunk early on before we're talking about Burroughs and there's a little bit of Clint Eastwood. It's a little sample from Dirty Harry. And I remember the piece was sampling from Dirty Harry and Taxi Driver at the same time. But in this transitional piece in the film, I remember I said to the editor, I said, throw in the thing about a one-hit wonder and just keep this rhythm going for about eight bars and end up ultimately just get to the Burroughs bite.

So sometimes it was just like, here's a pathway, do whatever you want. So she could take it out of the context of the show and put it in. So where the show and where the film blurred was I was interested in that relationship. Well, tell me about your editor. Like one, what was she working on?

And two, how was it? You're coming from a different mindset, especially in the early nineties than probably people have now in the early 2020s. The first person who helped me work on this edit was at the time he was in high school and we ended up making like a 15 minute presentation reel to try to get footage to try and get money to continue shooting and stuff like that. And I remember in that was the first time, okay, a little piece of this, a little piece of that. You can kind of say this is what the film, Steve Jobs, and do a little piece from the show, a little interview bite.

And he had to leave. And I said, God, I got to find another editor. He goes, is this the final editor for the movie? I said, I said, I just want someone to help me expand this presentation reel. So he went on Facebook and he put a description of it and we looked at some reels and my Reutno was a late 20s.

She's from Lithuania and she had a very interesting reel. She knew After Effects and I said, okay, so she came in and We'd start to play, play, try this, try that. And then she started taking some of the bites, interview bites, which were on black, shot on black, started putting them within some of the faces of host projections, which had also been shot in black and morphing where the subject and the object of the buzz host was blurred together. I said, oh, that's interesting. And then she knew split screens pretty well.

And as long as I gave her a good direction, Like any editor needs a path. And once we had laid out the bites in, okay, here's the story in a linear fashion. And you get it from eight hours to five hours to three and a half. I think three and a half hours was the first time that I showed anybody the cut. Like a group of 10 people say, what is this?

What do you think this is? And she was with me the whole time, just grew and learned. And so I wanted the film to have kind of a modern feel. She was younger, but I wasn't trying to ape the past, but I'd say, here's all the faces, here's all these things, make buckets and say, here you go, here's the music. I'd cleared those songs that I liked and got stems for those.

So in a way, like back to the old Buzz thing, take any piece of any bit of music, any of the footage, it should all work together. You mentioned that this is touring and I'm curious where can people find out more about that and keep up with this movie? On our website, this is buzzfilm.com and we're in Virginia tonight, Kansas City, doing the really cool takeover of the Atlas 9 environment which I'm really excited about seeing it on a big screen. We've done a few immersive screenings with eight projectors showing the film. We've done single screen.

It's really fun to We have small but loyal and rabid little audiences. And there's so many things competing for your attention out there in the world. So for somebody to show up to a theater and experience in a theater is cool because it's a very different experience in a theater. You really get swallowed up by it. You really do get immersed in it differently than if you watch it on your phone or your laptop.

Hopefully we'll just keep going, keep showing. No, that's fantastic. The thing too is MTV, watching MTV was usually a solitary thing, maybe a few friends, but seeing this with an audience, this has got to be a completely different experience. I've seen 150 people and I've seen five people. And I think once you have that intention in the dark room, it hits you in a singular fashion.

And I've sat up front, I've sat in the back, I've sat to the side, and It does just tell you the story and it is pretty unrelenting. It's not for the faint of heart, but I don't think it's more than anybody can handle in this day and age of media consumption and media literacy and verbal and sonic acuity. Mr. Pellington, thank you so much for your time. This was so nice talking with you.

A pleasure. You too, Mike. Thank you very much. There are some things you can't hide I wanna know what you're feeling Tell. Me what's on your mind Thank you.

Here I am in silence Looking round without a clue I find myself alone again All alone. With you I can see behind your eyes The things that I don't know. If you hide away from me How can our love grow? I wanna know what you're thinking There are some things you can't hide I wanna know what you're feeling Tell me what's on your mind. I know I could break you down But what good would it do.

I could sure never know That. What you say is true Here I am in silence. And it's a game I have. To play You and I in silence I don't know. What you're thinking.

There are some things you can't hide. I want to know what you're feeling. Tell me what's on your mind. I wanna know. What you're thinking There are some things you can't hide I wanna know what you're feeling Tell.

Me what's on your mind I wanna know. What you're thinking There are some things you can't hide I wanna know what you're feeling Tell me what's on your mind