Alice and I ran across Johnny Berlin on the Documentary Channel last night and just loved it. I tried to write while it was on, but I had to stop and listen to Johnny’s fascinating monologue. I didn’t know Jon Hyrns aka Johnny Berlin before, but found out that he wrote and played in Woodpecker, which was in the line-up for this year’s Maryland Film Festival. We were looking at it but it collided with something else we wanted to see. We will have catch up with Woodpecker later, especially now after we saw Johnny Berlin last night. :)
The first documentary was created back in 2005, but I have never seen it before. Last night we followed him into a dumpster in the new Johnny Berlin Part 2. Both are available on DVD here.
“With a dry wit and self-effacing humor, as well as an endearing eccentricity, Jon Hyrns gives voice to his life and dreams in Dominic J. DeJoseph’s hour-long documentary, narrating a journey that traverses much of the West Coast by 1930′s Pullman car. The camera is silent witness to a monologue delivered by 40-something Hyrns, whose job as a porter on a dying breed of luxury train endowed him with his nickname, Johnny Berlin. A sad-eyed wanderer with a quick tongue, who counts punk rock and pilgrimage among his main influences, Johnny still hasn’t figured out what to do with his life. In trying to do so, however, he has managed to do quite a bit, which he describes as he goes about his never-ending tasks of changing sheets and battling dust. Johnny is engaging on just about any topic, from his love for strawberry milk to his somewhat-lacking love life, and his tales of get-rich-quick schemes are particularly hilarious: a deadpan Johnny details the slightly morbid story of once trying to increase his father’s life insurance plan to garner himself a more robust inheritance.
With big dreams of finishing his novel about a man who decides to roll across the United States, Johnny is a gravel-voiced, diamond-in-the-rough character, assuming literary proportions of his own. The low-fi, talking-head documentary style of the piece allows the charismatic, melancholy central figure to take center stage. (from IndiePix Films)
“JOHNNY BERLIN PART 2: NOTES FROM THE DUMPSTER, picks up where JOHNNY BERLIN left off, right after Johnny’s tour of duty as a porter aboard a luxury train ended. In PART 2, we find Johnny lying in a hotel room bed, talking about how he gambled away almost all of the money he had saved for his trip while working on the train, and thus ended up destitute in Phnom Penh where he had visions of leaping off of a bridge into the Mekong River.
Filled with profundity, existential crises and anecdotes like the one above, JOHNNY BERLIN PART 2 is the continuing story of an oddball’s mid-life crisis and his attempts to overcome his dark obsessions in his own humorous, and often enlightening, fashion.
The film follows Johnny, alone, as he travels from Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia where he searches in vain for the graves of his uncles, Benjamin Franklin Simpson and Thomas Jefferson Simpson, to New York City where he goes on a failed job hunt. Along the way, he talks about his grandfather’s lost novel, “Autobiography of a Failure,” muses about finding himself after reading a New Yorker article by Tom Robbins on Buddhism, and ends up in a dumpster on the street filled with used books reminiscing about his homeless older brother whom he lost contact with years ago. (from the Johnny Berlin website)
