OAKLAND, Calif. - "A few years ago I got really burnt out from shooting nothing but porn and chasing after clients who wouldn't pay their bills," Lavender Lounge webmaster Mark Kliem said. "I felt creatively frustrated and needed a low-stress outlet to get inspired about filmmaking again."
That's when he and a couple of friends decided to branch out and shoot some material just for fun.
"We would get together on Thursday nights, smoke some pot, make cocktails and brainstorm funny bits," he said. "If we felt like shooting something, we would. If we didn't feel like shooting, we'd just sit on the couch and giggle."
The Bong Show was born.
"We had a shitty camera, no lighting and editing was done with two VHS decks and pause control," Kliem revealed. "Eventually we got better cameras and iMovie, but the stress-free environment of no deadlines and no money involved was just the inspiration I needed."
The Bong Show is amateur gay sketch comedy. It encompasses riffs on old movies and TV shows, ridiculous drag, drug humor, phony commercials and goofing around. Kliem and company never intended it to be anything more than self-amusement, but in looking back at the snippets, Kliem - who admits to being inspired by such diverse icons as Dick Clark, Merv Griffin, Hugh Hefner, Larry Flynt and Florenz Ziegfeld - found some of them to be pretty good.
"We were doing the kind of stuff kids are doing on YouTube today, but we started around 2000, long before the tube craze," he said. "The stuff we were doing was perfectly suited for YouTube, but we didn't know it at the time."
Kliem recently posted 16 video clips from The Bong Show to the comedy section of Lavender Lounge's video blog. All are free to watch, and all have embed codes so they can be posted on admirers' blogs or shared with friends.
The new postings are all just part of following his muse, Kliem noted.
"I don't want to get stuck in just one gay-porn pigeonhole," he said.
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