The idea was simple and heartbreaking--but the results, says Brent Hoff, the curator behind the McSweeney’s DVD magazine Wholphin, were an “unmitigated disaster.” Hoff wanted to reduce reality shows “to their simplest element: a race to see who could cry first.” So he gathered four men (actors, in fact) on a Los Angeles beach and filmed them trying to cry. The rules: whistle blows and the first tear to hit the table wins. Twenty five minutes later, the men got up, dry-eyed and depressed. Not one could cry.

Then, Hoff took it one step further. He had the actors later watch themselves in The Crying Game and comment on what was going through their heads as they struggled to feel something. “I was thinking about Dukakis,” says one. “He’s terminally ill,” says another. “Really? I wish I knew that then.” Another, while watching his own cramping face “looking like I need to take a shit,” says, “This is hard to watch. This is … just … Jesus.”

The deeply awkward, poignant Crying Game is one of the gems on Wholphin’s online Screening Room, an extra available on the Internet, and typical of the Wholphin’s aesthetic: a mix of arch and deeply humane. The quarterly DVD magazine, co-founded and edited by Hoff, collects “rare and unseen” short films, animations and documentaries that “have not, for whatever reason, found wide reason.” Hoff is a former writer for The Daily Show and Best Week Ever, and a smart, light touch is apparent in the selections: Turkish and Japanese sitcoms redubbed into English by American comedians, dead pilots, vanguard science documentaries, and film festival favorites. Directors like Spike Jonze, David Russell, and Alexander Payne contribute unseen graduate student films and homegrown documentaries.

How do you acquire the films for Wholphin?

We do deals with some sales agents, like the agents for the New Zealand film Two Cars One Night. It can be difficult at times because they are only looking at the bottom line of their acquisition. But Bob Odenkirk had the rights to his failed HBO pilot, “The Pity Card.” As a failed pilot, the rights reverted to him. But there are a lot of times where we have to make the argument to business people that it somehow helps them. There are not a lot of other places that will respectfully present their work. Because there are lots of places selling shorts, I want to make sure that everything we do is interesting and surprising at some level. Nothing we do is intended to be disposable. Hopefully, they stick in your brain, like Odenkirk’s silly Holocaust-Museum-First-Date show.

How do you decide what ends up in the Screening Room online as opposed to the DVD?

Any sort of distinction is becoming ever more meaningless. We are moving toward offering downloadable versions of the DVD in different formats, and we’re helping YouTube curate their own curated section of YouTube. But initially, we would have additional films that didn’t fit the balance of the DVD. There are several musical videos online, but I never want to put music videos on Wholphin for the very specific reason that I don’t feel anything that appears to be an advertisement for a band or song belongs on Wholphin. But there are some incredible music videos out there, like Cantinero’s “Nice Day”, that are hilarious and worth seeing and they are perfect for the website.

Who do you look to as great curators? Or filters for you?

Lya Guerra from South By Southwest is amazing. Mike Plant, who does Cinevegas and Sundance, is an invaluable resource. And the True/False Film Festival is one of my most favorite. It’s in Columbia, Missouri, it’s all documentary, and it’s set up so, well, you can walk to every venue. Paul Sturtz and David Wilson from True/False I deeply respect. Their selections are incredible. They are people with such heart, and they look at everything through the prism of who they are as people and what moves them. And I think that’s why they put on such beautiful films. And believe me, everyone says it, everyone that goes universally agrees that these guys nail it like nobody else, and few people know about it. I guarantee it will become a much bigger deal. I’m outing them. I’m sure I’ve just ruined the town.

If something’s on YouTube, does that exempt it from making the Wholphin short list?

I’ve gone back and forth, and I really don’t think it does. Obviously, if 750,000 (people) have seen something on YouTube, that certainly diminishes the “rare and unseen” quality of it. What I read and hear from people and our customers is that part of the appeal is the fact that we’re finding things that they themselves can’t find. But once in a while, there are things right in front of our noses that go unnoticed. Just because a couple of thousand people have seen something on YouTube, we can present it in full resolution, with a really compelling liner note interview to explain the background of the story. Lots of things have really interesting stories behind them, like the scientific discoveries. So the liner notes are a big part of the film.

We’re going through this debate right now with one film by a director we really like that has been out and seen a lot. So, we’re thinking of giving him a little money to go back and shoot and re-edit the film so that he can get a couple right that he always wanted to. It will be longer, more special, more specific to Wholphin.

What is the aesthetic of Wholphin?

The only way I’ve been able to talk about it — and it sounds hopelessly dorky — is I look at intent. The intent of the filmmakers and what they were trying to get at. And that is the only real criteria I have.

I don’t care about any particular political stance or anything. I always do look for a film that has been banned or smuggled out of some country. Each issue has something like that. The next issue will have a film that was filmed in China without anyone’s approval, and smuggled out, and it’s a hilarious film. But I don’t have any aesthetic. I’m literally trying to put out the most interesting of what I can film. I’m desperately trying not waste your time.

How many submissions do you receive?

We get 20 a week maybe. Nothing crazy. We do watch them. Blind submissions are probably a smaller percentage of what’s on the DVD, but that’s not because we don’t watch them.

Why make original films?

The reason I started Wholphin was partially because I always have a lot of ideas that would just never fit in any other context. They don’t belong anywhere else in the world. They won’t end up on TV, unless you’re talking about some crazy variety show that has to go through the hellacious development process so that they can say, at the end, “We like it! If only we can do the Crying Competition with celebrities, and if they don’t end up crying and they end up humiliating each other, and someone’s top pops off!” Dave Eggers and I were talking, and saying, “Wholphin is so not like this, it's some incredibly novel ideal--this is definitely a rip-off-able by people with a lot more money who could find these original films and buy them up from under us.” So making original content, and re-scripting sitcoms, is our way to brand it. You know our tone, you have something to grasp onto. This is what you’re actually paying for, versus a random compilation of short films that you may or may not care about.

Why not just be strictly online?

Everyone loves to talk about the demise of the DVD, that it’s going away. Every panel I’m on, someone is suggesting that. I really don't care about the type of media, I don’t have any specific love for DVDs, but I do know that people love holding the DVD, having the liner notes, and having the picture of the filmmaker, having that stuff, I don’t see that going away at all. I think the liner notes are a big part of Wholphin. I see more people being interested in that.

The Wall Street Journal “repurposed” your original “Wallyball” flick on their site without crediting you. What happened?

It was in service of their article on the immigration issue, which is why I made the film in the first place. I wanted to force people to make those conclusions: Yes, it is this gigantic waste of money. In a way, it was exactly what I wanted to have happen, but of all people, the amount of page space the Wall Street Journal devotes to decrying piracy and intellectual property… For them of all people to just literally brazenly take it and be like, “Oh yeah, I guess we did just take that. Sorry!” It took an entire day of me trying to deal with it for them to say, “Oh, we’ll throw a credit up there.” They were really blasé, really nonplussed by the entire thing. I make films because nothing I do will ever influence legislators. But I’ll take that film getting ripped off to be, in some small way, part of the conversation.

Are you worried about this moment of filmmakers seeing their work get “repurposed” and losing credit?

There is such a desperation out there. Everybody is fighting to be the place to be to find the good stuff. But who is really doing it? Who can really say they are doing it? YouTube can say millions of people are looking at their site, but beyond that… Everyone wants to have the good stuff. But people are not devoting the resources to the curation. It’s that Hollywood mentality, which we saw in the writers strike: “Yeah, yeah, yeah, we’re the studio, we’ll get those ideas, whatever, later. Deal with the writing and curation later.” Even as we go forward into the digitization of media, I think Wholphin’s well positioned as establishing, hopefully, some bit of credibility as a brand. That’s the thing that everybody is desperate for and no one is achieving.

--Austin Bunn