The heady days of early-’80s Baltimore return with the film/cartoon/performance buffoonery of the Dork Brothers
Sipping a cup of coffee in Hampden’s Common Ground one unseasonably warm October morning, City Paper contributing photographer John Ellsberry describes his first encounter with former
CP art director Michael Gentile in the fall of 1978 as though it were the moment he cracked open Pandora’s Box.
The course of Ellsberry’s creative life changed when Gentile, a Maryland Institute College of Art printmaking student, knocked on his door.
“Michael and some of his cohorts from the Institute came to a party we had at our house in Ellicott City,” recalls Ellsberry, then a film and video major at University of Maryland Baltimore County. “Michael started telling me about a film he was working on and asked if I would be willing to shoot it. I said, ‘Yeah, sure’—without knowing too much about the nature of the film.”
That film eventually became 1979’s “Dead Strippers,” a 27-minute splatter-happy psychotronic featurette, partially set on the Block, that delivers on the literal promise of its title time after bloody time. Speaking over the phone from his Manhattan office, Gentile, now 47 and art director for Habitat magazine, characterizes his first collaboration with Ellsberry as an “underground art movie-slash-gore-satire kind of thing. We were really into the Ed Wood and Herschell Gordon Lewis films, and we wanted to put together a spoof on that genre.”
Co-directed by Gentile and fellow MICA student Brian Donegan and shot by Ellsberry, the black and white 16-mm film “made a little splash at the time,” Gentile says, playing at the Charles Theatre, MICA, and several festivals. It also attracted the attention of Baltimore’s resident film deity: In September 1981’s Baltimore magazine, John Waters cited the film as one of five local examples of “good bad taste.”
This bloody project laid the groundwork for a sprawling anti-empire unleashed under the banner of the Dork Brothers, a body of work that includes films, comic strips, books, fliers, photos, and at least one public performance. Now, this remarkable two-man output is the focus of a defiantly crass multimedia retrospective at the Creative Alliance titled Baltimore Anti-Art Scene 1979-1984, The Dork Brothers.
Prompted by their teasing each other as “dorks”—which still connoted nerdiness at the time, concedes Ellsberry, “but maybe with a little more of a sexual implication”—Ellsberry and Gentile created their first official production under the Dork Brothers moniker just after “Dead Strippers,” 1980’s animated short “Brain One,” which the pair shot in a single day. The three-minute short depicts primitive cartoon cutouts of the duo during an evening that ends—where else for Baltimore art-school buddies?—at the Mount Royal Tavern. Then came a second animated short, 1981’s “Fish Story,” which while still crude by today’s digital standards, represents a quantum leap in production values—complete with animated limbs, special effects, and even a narrative. Those who call the five-minute film a precursor to the work of animator Mike Judge may have a point: Two amateurishly rendered, heavily accented, slang-slinging cartoon youngsters haranguing each other and dealing with an unusual plumbing problem certainly sounds like a “Beavis and Butthead” synopsis.
Gentile doesn’t quite see it that way, though, taking the Dork mind-set as a matter of course. “There’s nothing really unique about two guys being goofy,” he asserts. “We were just trying to do something a little different, with our own flavor to it.”
Both “Fish Story” and “Brain One” will screen as part of the Creative Alliance revival, along with a 25th anniversary showing of “Dead Strippers,” but for true Dork aficionados the climax of the event might be seeing some of their never-before-screened works. First among them, sequences from an ambitious but never completed third film, “Funktown.”
“This was during the heart of the early rappers’ era, and we wanted to weave that rapper sensibility into the Dork Brothers—the Dorks become more hip-hop!” remembers Ellsberry, 49, now lead Imax projectionist at the Maryland Science Center. “We built this huge set—it was actually on display at School 33 at one point—and [“Funktown”] looked like it was going to be about 20 minutes long. It kept getting longer and longer.”
Unfortunately, “Funktown” remained only partially shot when Gentile moved to Los Angeles in the mid-1980s to become a photo editor for Hustler magazine. But Gentile’s departure also left unfinished another live-action featurette, 1984’s “Prisoners on Beaverkill Run,” a color video thriller about two escaped convicts on the run in Loch Raven. Now, it too will finally make it to the screen. Gentile and Ellsberry’s friend Todd Evans have cleaned up and re-edited this film, which will make its de facto premiere, 20 years after it began, at Creative Alliance.
Prolific as they were in film, though, no summary of the Dork Brothers phenomenon would be complete without heaping helpings of their work in print. Shortly after completing “Brain One,” the two began writing and drawing comic strips using the Dork Brothers characters. Their initial one-panel effort met with rejection, but it was Baltimore’s alternative newsweekly that gave them their big break.
“Then one day [in 1982] there was a [unsold ad] spot [in City Paper],” Gentile recalls, “and we snuck our comic in—I was working in paste-up! So it went to print, and Russ Smith, the publisher at the time, liked our stuff and decided to give us a weekly slot. We went on to do it for several years.” Other fans of the strip included two other cartoonists featured in City Paper at the time, Lynda Barry and a pre-Simpsons Matt Groening.
Several self-published Dork books also surfaced: 1981’s pre-strip Drinkin’ With Lincoln collected photos in which giant Dorks-in-profile cutouts posed in unusual settings (like a live hydroelectric plant), while 1984’s Take Five compiled the weekly comics. Ellsberry also produced around the same time Dork Trail, a chapbook comprised of Mark Trail strips boasting heightened anatomical correctness. Like the Dork Brothers film projects, the strip went on hiatus when Gentile moved west, but fax technology allowed for a two-year revival that began in 1994.
The pair managed to conjure some more elaborate pieces as well. The full-page work The Dork Brothers Remember features 12 panels that encapsulate one Dorky recollection for each month of 1983. This beautifully colored piece, featured in the retrospective, showcases a style not dissimilar from Barry’s, with an idiosyncratic sense of humor that glides from intentionally crude humor to political satire. Indeed, references to Abraham Lincoln (an admitted Ellsberry obsession), William Donald Schaefer, and Three Mile Island all abound in the Dork canon.
Finally, the Brothers also dabbled in performance, at least once, in 1981. A mutual friend asked them to appear at a show at the Red Door Hall performance space in Mount Vernon, but put the Dork Brothers name on fliers without getting final confirmation. Searching for last-minute inspiration, “we wrote this song called ‘Shoe Repair,’ which was sung to the tune of ‘Superfly,’” Ellsberry laughs. “We just wheeled the [giant Dork] figures [of Drinkin’ With Lincoln fame] across the hall while the song was playing, and then afterwards let a bunch of fireworks off, right inside the hall!” At this point, the double-sided Dork cutouts spun around, scarred with gruesome burn marks.
For two twentysomethings holding down day jobs, Ellsberry and Gentile certainly produced a prodigious amount of work in the early ’80s, and that period itself in local history also serves as a motif for the show, albeit a bittersweet one. In addition to the work co-authored by the Dork Brothers—as well as some Dork-related artifacts—the retrospective features a series of photos by and about the larger, underdocumented Baltimore subculture in which the Dorks operated at the time, including some photos by Ellsberry himself.
“There was an energy back then that you don’t really see now,” Ellsberry laments of his duo’s heyday. “People were more likely to step out on a limb. There’s a lot more control from government now, and more pressure to succeed financially now, too—as an artist and in general. Back then it was an I-don’t-really-give-a-shit attitude—it was more geared against financial success.”
“Back then . . . we would entertain ourselves by doing this stuff,” Gentile concurs. “If John Ellsberry laughed and I laughed while we were doing it, then we knew it was OK. That’s how we worked everything. Whether other people laugh, that’s up to them.
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