WONDERFUL WORLD OF THE WHITES TV

Julien Nitzberg: On this film we got eight different death threats. Were you scared for your personal safety at any points? I was pretty much sexually harassed and hit on by every woman in the White family, and one man who I will not mention.ĭD: Violence is a way of life for the Whites. When she had to pee I literally ran off and escaped. She dragged me to a bar where she got super drunk.

She then informed me we were fucking that night and wouldn’t let go of me. Julien Nitzberg: I was held down by Annie Mae who is way stronger than me as she put hickeys all over my neck. Paige Hill (Associate Producer): I often ran errands with the family – the first night, all I could report to Julien was that Sue Bob’s boyfriend was arrested and it involved third degree burns and a ham. We were there to document their lives and we felt that theirs was an interesting story, so we made the documentary with their blessing.ĭD: What is your most abiding memory of making this film? We didn’t encourage the Whites to act in any manner that they don’t every day. Johnny Knoxville (Executive Producer): We didn’t exploit the Whites. The Whites are 'The Whites.' Cameras or no cameras.

But drugs are sometimes fun.ĭominic Giordano (Cameraman): Nope. Some people get mad because we show drug use at certain points with no condemnation and also sometimes as fun. We show them in all their glory and all their tragedy.

WONDERFUL WORLD OF THE WHITES TV

And real life doesn’t come with morals like in TV shows. This is not a fictional story but real life. Julien Nitzberg (Director): I was not trying to make a moral film, I was trying to make an honest film that showed the Whites in all their complexity. We talked to him and his crew about their year spent with the Whites, and their subsequent death threats.ĭazed Digital: Some people have claimed the film is exploitative of the Whites, what’s your position on that? Some have criticised it as exploitative, but Nitzberg defends it as a “portrait of American bad-assdom at its best”. Almost two decades later, Julien Nitzberg, a producer on Dancing Outlaw, has spent a year filming the family for The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia, a documentary that is shocking, hilarious, thrilling and tragic roughly in equal measure, including tales of shootouts with the police and scenes of a mother who has just given birth snorting ground-up pain pills. A sprawling hillbilly family from West Virginia, the Whites first came to renown in the 1991 documentary Dancing Outlaw, which followed Jesco White, a petrol-huffing Appalachian mountain dancer struggling to follow in the clogsteps of his famous father.

Wonderful world of the whites