Nine years in the making, the new documentary film Weirdo: The Story of Five Eight details the experiences of one the longest-running and hardest working bands to ever emerge from Athens.
The film traces Five Eight’s roots back to several years before its 1988 launch, to when singer and guitarist Mike Mantione experienced a mental health crisis and was institutionalized for symptoms of manic depression and schizophrenia. His family signed him out of the hospital against the advice of physicians, but Mantione resolved from that point forward to use songwriting and performance as a coping mechanism. History and lore unfold from there, explaining how the band—positioned amidst the world-wide fervor surrounding Nirvana’s album Nevermind—always seemed to remain just on the brink of breakout commercial success.
The band’s whirlwind tale is primarily told through the voices of its own current band members—Mantione, guitarist Sean Dunn, bassist Dan Horowitz and drummer Patrick Ferguson—who are able to look back on both their successes and shortcomings with humor, acceptance and remarkable tenderness towards each other. Outside perspectives are offered from friends and contemporaries such as Bill Berry (R.E.M.), Amy Ray (Indigo Girls), Patterson Hood (Drive-By Truckers), Vanessa Briscoe Hay (Pylon Reenactment Society), David Barbe (Mercyland) and Velena Vego (40 Watt Club).
“I was personally in awe of the live show these guys put on,” says director Marc Pilvinsky. “The earnestness and the bombast and the insanity and the heartbreak and the comedy between songs all just added up to a rock show experience that felt like magic almost every time. I never saw a train wreck Five Eight show, but they always seemed on the verge of it—as Chris Bilheimer says in our movie—and the dynamics of that tightrope walk were riveting. And when the band would leave the stage but Mike Mantione would stay to play a solo version of his song ‘Weirdo,’ you could hear a pin drop in the packed club, except for the choruses where 800 people would sing along, weirdos united.”
A former Athenian, Pilvinsky wrote for Flagpole from 1991–1997, spending his final year as the music and film editor. After some time in Dallas, TX, where he learned how to edit video, he spent the following 12 years in Los Angeles, working as a video editor primarily specializing in behind-the-scenes DVD special features. In addition to collaborating on documentary projects for movies by Steven Soderbergh, Clive Barker, Pixar, Tim Burton and others, he also created Jucifer’s Veterans of Volume: Live With Eight Cameras.
Not long after relocating to Atlanta in 2013 and reconnecting with Mantione online, Pilvinsky saw that the band’s 1994 album Weirdo—an album he had once interviewed the band about 20 years prior—was being remixed and remastered. Looking for a fun side project to do outside of his day job, he reached out and offered his video services to the band. What was initially envisioned as a two-minute clip explaining Weirdo’s revision soon grew into a 20-minute mini doc that left both Pilvinsky and Five Eight excited to discuss the possibility of a full-length film.
“I didn’t want to commit until I could see their archives, but once Mike showed me the enormous mountain of material they had collected over the years—VHS tapes, DV tapes, thousands of photos, hundreds of flyers, dozens of unreleased songs, etc.—I was all in,” says Pilvinsky. “The problem with a documentary about an evolving, current-day subject is that it’s hard to know when to stop shooting. So I shot and shot, for years. I never wanted to miss something crazy happening onstage or funny between-song banter or an argument in the van on the way to Austin, so I added to the mountain of archival material with my own stack of SD cards and hard drives.”
A major thread that resurfaces throughout the film is the relationship between mainstream success and artistic validation. Most artists who skyrocket to stardom are essentially anomalies within the greater creative pool, and the film reminds viewers that there’s really no one way to measure success. For a band to survive over three decades—let alone with friendships between bandmates still intact—is a miracle in and of itself.
“There will be people who see the movie and say ‘Oh, it’s a shame these guys didn’t make it,’” says Ferguson. “Let me be super clear about something: We made it. We didn’t ‘make it’ like Nirvana; we ‘made it’ like most of the passengers on the Hindenburg. A lot of our peers didn’t survive the ‘Grunge Explosion.’ I feel incredibly lucky. We still argue and still struggle to articulate ideas, and we definitely get irritated, but we also get to collectively beat our chests and roar at the world.”
The world premiere of Weirdo will be held, naturally, in the band’s hometown at Ciné on Saturday, Sept. 28 at 7:30 p.m. and 10:30 p.m., with a Q&A and live performance happening in between the screenings. Seats for the first showing sold out almost immediately, but an encore screening was added on Sunday, Sept. 29 at 7:30 p.m. Streaming distribution will happen down the line, but in the meantime, Pilvinsky and the band plan to take the show on the road to other cities.
“This is the happy ending,” says Ferguson. “It’s the happiest ending. We’re a rock band. It’s not complicated. Nobody is punching anyone in the middle of an arena tour. Nobody is shuffling around Dr. Drew’s house on ‘Celebrity Rehab.’ Nobody is writing a secret tell-all book about us. The people who love our band either love us as people, or they just love the music we make. How could you ask for any more than that?”
Though the band was shown a preliminary version of the film four years into the project, the night of the premiere will be the first time any of the members see the final cut.
“Even though it’s taken years to get finished, I still can’t believe it’s done and it’s happening,” says Horowitz. “I mean, how many bands do you know get a full-length feature made about them? We are freaking lucky! I really can’t wait to see this thing. I hope it’s funny.”
Mantione, whose 62nd birthday will land on the film’s release date, says the band has just wrapped up a new album that they’ve been working on with Barbe at Chase Park Transduction over the last two years. Tentatively called Help a Sinner, the album will be released in 2025.
“That’s what Five Eight does for me,” says Mantione. “It helps this sinner in me, and what I am is a weirdo. I mean, when I wrote Weirdo, it was because I looked at a yearbook picture of myself, and I thought, ‘What a weirdo! Oh my god!’ I knew what I was feeling in that picture, and it was about as close to emotionally dead as you can get. I feel like Marc understands that kind of depression and the band’s relationship to mental health. It’s one of the reasons the band has been so important to me; it’s not just a way to rock like Jack Black in School Of Rock, but an outlet, a pressure release valve and a group therapy session.”
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