Episode
EP051 - Terrified Of Cheese w/ Bryan Storkel
- Podcast
- Doc Walks
- Published
- Apr 30, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 2953
- Processing state
not_requested
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Summary
We walk South by Southwest with director Bryan Storkel—HOLY ROLLERS, THE LEGEND OF COCAINE ISLAND, THE PEZ OUTLAW, ALABAMA SNAKE—in town to premiere I GOT BOMBED AT HARVEY'S, his new feature about the man who built a thousand-pound bomb and walked it into a Lake Tahoe casino in 1980. Keith's on vacation, so it's just Ben and Bryan, two directors aiming cameras at each other ("this is like a Beastie Boys video"). Ben's catcher finger is wrecked from yesterday's Sandlot game. Bryan's been on a pickleball tear in LA. We dig into how Bryan keeps making so many films—a Ken Griffey Jr. doc that fell apart the night before his first interview with Sir Mix-A-Lot, the AMC anthology TRUE CRIME STORY: SMUGSHOT (umbrella: "crimes of entitlement"), and a Hulk Hogan series now released to acclaim for Netflix. We trace his exodus from Oral Roberts University through HOLY ROLLERS (card-counting Christian pastors), FIGHT CHURCH (cage-fighting pastors), and ALABAMA SNAKE (the Pentecostal who tried to kill his wife with a rattlesnake)—each film quietly walking him further out of the faith he grew up in. The reenactment talk is the heart of it. Bryan walks us through the COCAINE ISLAND / PEZ OUTLAW method—cast the actual subject in their own reenactments, build a scripted-feeling rough cut from a documentary edit, then shoot the recreations like a narrative. The secret: be terrified the whole time it'll be cheesy. "That terror is the thing that makes it good." HARVEY'S, he tells us, snuck up on him as a father-son story underneath the heist. Plus: an annual dog-on-a-table photoshoot ambushes the walk, the empathy-machine theory of documentary, and why every prolific filmmaker should learn to edit first. DISCUSSION LINKS: AMERICAN MOVIE (1999) | OKIE NOODLING (2001) | HOME MOVIE (2001) | S…