The Kuchar twins began their careers in the 1950s by making whacked-out 8mm shoestring epics while still teenagers in the Bronx, and then quickly found themselves at the center of the New York underground film boom of the sixties, rubbing shoulders with fellow cinematic visionaries like Andy Warhol, Jonas Mekas, Ken Jacobs, Jack Smith, and many others. Filled with camp and kitsch, and edited to the overblown rhythms of Hollywood melodrama, the Kuchars’ movies provided prime inspiration for John Waters’s early micro-budget comedies.
The brothers collaborated until the mid-1960s, after which they produced films independently for the subsequent decades. Though their work continued to bear many similarities-a wholehearted embrace of non-acting, a comic-strip palette, soaring soundtracks lifted from dime-store record albums-one of the most noticeable distinctions between the two was their attitude toward sex.
