A Reason to Live

George Kuchar (born August 31, 1942, New York City) is an American film director, known for his “low-fi” aesthetic, playful use of no-talent actors, plotless plots, and themeless themes. Trained as a commercial artist in a vocational high school, the School of Industrial Art, he drew weather maps for a local news show. During this period, he and his twin brother Mike Kuchar were making 8mm movies which were showcased in the then-burgeoning underground film scene alongside films by Andy Warhol, Kenneth Anger, and Stan Brakhage.

After being laid off from a commercial art job in New York City, Kuchar was offered a teaching job in the film department of the San Francisco Art Institute, where he has taught since 1971. It was in San Francisco that he became involved with underground comics via his neighbors Art Spiegelman and Bill Griffith. They both wound up in his movies and George wound up in their publications.

Planet Kuchar, a biopic of the life of George Kuchar, is being developed by Los Angeles production company Automat Pictures and producer Jeffrey Schwarz.

It Came From Kuchar, a documentary film of the life of George and Mike Kuchar by Jennifer Kroot, premiered at the South by Southwest Film Festival on 14 March 2009.

In 1997, the Kuchar brothers collaborated on a book, Reflections from a Cinematic Cesspool, a humorous memoir discussing four decades of filmmaking with an introduction by filmmaker John Waters. —Wikipedia