Gorman Bechard

Early life

Bechard was born in Waterbury, Connecticut to Gorman "Gary" E. Bechard Jr., a bar and restaurant entrepreneur, and Lucille Claire Bechard. Lucille died when Bechard was 10 years old, so he and his sister Deborah were raised by his grandparents, William and Claire Roberts. He also has two half-brothers, Thomas and Sean.

Bechard graduated from Holy Cross High School in Waterbury. While in high school, Bechard became interested in writing after reading Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions and Richard Brautigan’s In Watermelon Sugar. He attended Western Connecticut State University, where he studied journalism.

Career

Bechard worked as the music critic for the Waterbury Republican & American newspaper and started a local music fanzine called Imagine.

In 1981, Bechard took a course on director Alfred Hitchcock at the New School for Social Research in New York City, and shortly thereafter found himself studying 16mm film production and taking uncredited courses part time there.

Early Films

In 1983, Bechard shot his first feature film, Disconnected, while still studying film in New York City. Made on a budget of $40,000 and filmed in his native Waterbury, it was a creepy take on the horror movement of the time.

Bechard's next film, 1986's Psychos in Love, was a horror comedy that has been called "the first Scream." Conceived as a slasher film in the style of Woody Allen, Monty Python and the Marx Brothers, Bechard’s film went on to play a midnight run at the famed Bleecker Street Cinema in Greenwich Village before being released on video by Empire Pictures. In HorrorNews.Net, Todd Martin wrote, "It’s violent and gory while being sweet and funny at the same time and after everything was said and done I ended up digging it a lot more than I ever thought that I would." A restored version of Psychos In Love is being released on bluray from Vinegar Syndrome on September 26, 2017.

Bechard entered into a four-picture deal with Empire Pictures that was fraught with conflict. Empire went out of business, and Bechard, having had enough, shifted his career to writing novels and scripts.

Novels

Bechard’s first novel, The Second Greatest Story Ever Told, was published by Citadel Underground in 1991 and was called "a very, very funny book" by the Los Angeles Times. It tells the tale of God sending his quirky teenaged daughter to save the world. The book has been optioned by Hollywood numerous times, and has had many leading actress attached to play the role including Winona Ryder, who in the Hot issue of Rolling Stone magazine proclaimed her next role was playing the female Jesus, to most recently Rooney Mara, who can be seen on the cover of the paperback release of the novel.

In 1993, long before the widespread availability of broadband internet, he produced a multi-media web novel called The Hazmat Diary, which featured images, video clips, and music programmed in Flash. The site was eventually taken down in 2007, and the story was published in paperback form in 2010.

His next novel Balls was published by Penguin Books in 1995. It tells the fictional story of the first woman to play major league baseball. The book was optioned by 20th Century Fox but never made into a film.

Next came Good Neighbors, published by Carroll & Graf in 1998, followed by Ninth Square (Forge, 2003) and Unwound, written under the pseudonym Jonathan Baine, and published by Onyx in 2007.

Recent Narrative Films

In 2002, Bechard returned to filmmaking with The Kiss, starring Terence Stamp and Eliza Dushku. But once again the process made him question whether directing was a career path he wanted to travel.

In 2005, Bechard decided to take one last stab at filmmaking. He would do a micro-budget film where all the control was in his hands. The film, You Are Alone, a dark drama exploring how far some people will go to feel less alone, went on to play numerous film festivals and win many "best-of" awards before being released on DVD.

Bechard’s next independent feature was 2009’s Friends (With Benefits). The film likewise played many film festivals and is being distributed by Cinetic Media.

His last narrative film, 2013's Broken Side of Time, was released on DVD and streaming media in May 2014. In Blurt, Danny Phillips wrote, "Watching Dolce’s slip into the abyss is somewhat like watching a car stranded on the tracks as a train barrels towards it. You really want to help, to scream “Get out of the way!” but deep inside we want to see what happens next. Broken Side of Time is a look at a journey and a destination, a glimpse at what happens when you give all yourself to something and are used, tossed aside in return. Dolce is a train wreck personified and I could not stop watching."

Documentaries

Next came Color Me Obsessed, his documentary about legendary 80s indie rock band the Replacements. Called "the rock version of Rashomon" by the Village Voice, and one of "the seven best new music documentaries of the year" by Rolling Stone, the film has been playing the film festival and arthouse circuit since its premiere in March 2011. It was released on DVD in November 2012. Though the film "hasn't a single second of their music, zero interviews with surviving band members and only briefly shows a few photos of the band at its ending, Color Me Obsessed: A Film About the Replacements manages to be one of the best documentaries on any subject I've seen this year."

Bechard’s film What Did You Expect? is a concert documentary capturing Archers of Loaf on their recent reunion tour. The film had its world premiere at the NXNE Festival in Toronto in June 2012, and was released on DVD in November 2012. In 2015, the band released the double album Curse of the Loaf, which is the Brian Paulson-produced concert audio from Bechard's documentary. The deluxe package also featured a copy of the film.

He directed two features that premiered in 2013. The first, Broken Side of Time, premiered at VisionFest in New York City in June 2013, and won the Audience Choice Award for Best Narrative Feature at CineKink 2014, while Every Everything: The Music, Life & Times of Grant Hart, a documentary on Grant Hart of the legendary 80s indie rock band Hüsker Dü, premiered in London at the Raindance Film Festival and in New York City at the CBGB Festival in October 2013, and was the opening-night film of the Sound Unseen Film & Music Festival in Minneapolis/St. Paul in November. In Tiny Mix Tapes, Paul Bower wrote, "Grant Hart is weird because he kind of gets how important he was for rock & roll and at the same time he doesn’t understand what all the fuss is about. While it’s a cliche to even bring it up, he has a definite Minnesota Nice quality in regard to discussing what he’s done with his artistic career and how much what he’s done might have influenced the world of modern Western music. Parts of Every Everything are frustrating, but they’re frustrating because the film’s subject himself is quintessentially frustrating. Bechard has done that rare thing in documentary filmmaking. He’s fully allowed his subject to dictate the tone of the film. As an audience, we’re better off because of it." While in PopShifter, Chelsea Spear said, "Throughout Every Everything, Bechard paints a very human portrait of Grant Hart, who comes off as self-aware and clear-eyed after a series of setbacks and bad decisions. Ultimately, the film could illustrate another truism: 'living well is the best revenge.'"

In 2015 Bechard directed and co-produced with his wife Kristine Bechard the feature A Dog Named Gucci, a documentary about animal abuse and the laws regarding such abuse in the United States, The story of Gucci is set in Mobile, Alabama, where "some local thugs got angry at a 15-year-old runaway girl because she wouldn’t do sexual favors for them. So they set her 10-week-old dog on fire. A professor down the street, Doug James, saw the flames and saved the dog, Gucci, by dousing them. Then he took in the dog, nursing him back to health with the help of a veterinarian. The thugs were caught, but the ringleader got a prison sentence of just six months. James was so incensed that he fought to get a state law passed to make such an offense a felony. Six years later, he succeeded." The film had its world premiere at the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival in February 2015. The film was released on DVD from MVD Entertainment in April 2016. The end-credits song from the film, "One Voice," features the talents of Norah Jones, Aimee Mann, Susanna Hoffs, Lydia Loveless, Neko Case, Kathryn Calder, and Brian May. The single was released on Record Store Day, April 16, 2016, with the proceeds going to benefit animal charities.

In July 2015, a Seed&Spark campaign was launched for a new documentary, Normal Valid Lives, a film about the Anoka-Hennepin school district bullying case which made national headlines.

Bechard has also just completed a documentary on singer-songwriter Lydia Loveless called Who is Lydia Loveless?, in which he documents the making of Loveless's album Real (2016), as well as following her on the road and looking into what life is life for a band at her level in the music industry. "I also wanted to look at stuff we normally don’t see a lot of. What are the finances for a band like this? Where does the money go? Who gets the money? Is Spotify good? Is Spotify bad? How does piracy affect you? What about the fans? I really wanted to go into all of that for a band that can sell out 200- or 250-seat venues and bars but is still traveling in an old Ford van. A good night is when they have a couple of hotel rooms. No one is rolling in the dough, so to speak. So what is it at that point when you have amazing critical success and acclaim but you’re not there yet?" In October 2015, Bechard and his crew filmed a live Lydia Loveless concert at Skully's in her hometown of Columbus for the documentary. The film had its world premiere at the Columbus International Film & Video Festival on April 7, 2016. The documentary is being released on DVD and streaming media on November 24, 2017.

He is also finishing up work on Pizza, a Love Story, a documentary about New Haven, Connecticut's three famous apizza restaurants: Sally's Apizza, Frank Pepe Pizzeria Napoletana and Modern Apizza. A trailer for the film was released in June 2015.

Bechard also revealed during an iCRVradio interview on May 2, 2017 with Robin Andreoli that he had begun work on a rock documentary about Shook and her band called What It Takes.

And in May 2017, Bechard also launched a Kickstarter for a new animal documentary, this one called Seniors, that celebrates the brains, energy & sass of some of the coolest senior dogs on this planet and the people who love them.

It was also announced that a long-thought-lost first documentary from Bechard called Twenty Questions would have its world premiere at the New Haven Documentary Film Festival in June 2017. In the 60-minute film originally shot in 1987 and never screened publicly, twenty people, from all walks of life, are each locked alone in a room for the length of one 400-foot roll of 16mm film (11 minutes). They are each given the same set of twenty questions, which they can answer at random…if they’re not completely distracted by their surroundings.

In September 2017, Bechard launched a Kickstarter campaign for his sixth rock documentary, Where are you, Jay Bennett? on the legendary guitars from the band Wilco.

Music Videos

In July 2016, two Bechard-directed music videos had their premiere in Rolling Stone magazine. The first was "Heal Me" from the album Sidelong by North Carolina musicians Sarah Shook and the Disarmers. A few days later, "Longer," from the fourth Lydia Loveless album, Real, was released. It is also the first official Loveless music video. And on August 19, the second Bechard-directed music video from Real was released for the song "Clumps." Noisey, the music division of Vice magazine, called it "simple and gorgeous."

In May 2017, another two Bechard-directed music videos were released back-to-back. The first, which was premiered by Diffuser.fm, was for “(I Just Died) Like an Aviator” for Matthew Ryan, which featured a group of teenaged girls lip-syncing and rocking out to the song. The video starred Chloe Barczak as the singer, Carina Begley as the guitar player, Chloe Lang as the bass player, and Erica Gonsiewski as the drummer. Realizing that having real teenagers behind the scenes as well as in front of the camera could only help the authenticity, Bechard brought on interns 17-year-old Charlotte Beatty and 15-year-old Isabella Germano to co-produce the video. American Songwriter Magazine wrote: "a coltish, all-girl band plays the parts of Ryan and co., rocking out in the confines of a dingy basement, and the result is oddly effective. The song takes on an added poignancy as a charismatic teenaged singer mouths lines like “I’m pouring a drink/ And smoking a smoke/ Our guts are born in that fiery trench/ Between hurt and hope” in the raspy, cigarette drawl of a middle-aged man."

The other music video for "Nothin' Feels Right But Doin' Wrong" by Sarah Shook and the Disarmers was premiered by Fader, for the Bloodshot Records re-release of the band's debut album, "Sidelong.".

NHdocs: the New Haven Documentary Film Festival

In 2014, Bechard co-founded NHdocs: the New Haven Documentary Film Festival (NHdocs), which he co-directs with Yale Film and Media Studies professor Charles Musser. The festival expanded from one day screening four films in 2014 to three days and over 20 films in 2015. In 2016, the festival expanded to 11 days, showing over 40 films, including Bechard's Who is Lydia Loveless? followed by a solo acoustic performance from Lydia Loveless. The 2017 version of the festival features a tribute to the legendary D.A. Pennebaker.

Awards

On November 12, 2015, Bechard was awarded the ASPCA Media Excellence Award for his work on the film A Dog Named Gucci and for "focusing on animal welfare and inspiring others to join the fight against animal cruelty."

Personal life

Bechard has been married to Kristine M Covello since 1992. They live in Connecticut.

Films

Short films and music videos

In addition to his feature work, Bechard has made a number of short films and music videos, many of which are available on YouTube.

Works and publications