​Wilcha Drops the Needle on ‘Flipside’

By Greg Carlson

gregcarlson1@gmail.com

Chris Wilcha’s excellent documentary “Flipside,” now available to rent on major streaming platforms following a successful run of film festival appearances, is essential viewing for Gen X pop culture hounds and any artists who have abandoned more creative projects than they have finished. Despite a thriving career as a director of television spots for major corporate clients, Wilcha confesses a familiar conundrum for so many film and media makers: shelves of hard drives filled with the assets and raw footage for labors of love that never crossed the finish line. Many producers and directors, when faced with the real need to pay the bills and make rent, have accepted gigs that force dream projects to the back burner. “Flipside” addresses that quandary, with heart and soul.

Wilcha cleverly seduces us by setting up a story about a long-ago movie he began about the legendary photographer Herman Leonard, whose gorgeously lit portraits of jazz icons like Dexter Gordon, Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, and many others are among the form’s most treasured and indelible. We find out that Wilcha failed to complete his biographical tribute before Leonard died in 2010 at the age of 87. For a moment, we are as devastated and disappointed as Wilcha. Some sage wisdom from Leonard’s friend, the television writer and producer David Milch, will rewire our understanding of the situation with the lightning strike of a Zen epiphany.

As the movie unfolds, Wilcha will skip around — like a needle dropping on different songs — to many things that have piqued his interest and sparked his imagination. “Flipside” just gets better and more compelling as it goes along. It reminds me of a cartoon snowball that gets bigger and bigger as it picks up speed rolling down a mountainside. Milch will factor in, and so will other notable creators like Judd Apatow and Errol Morris and Ira Glass. But Wilcha’s love for the people in his life, including his parents, his wife, his children, and his friends, tell, in his words, “the undeniable true story of what’s important to me.” The humans, as it turns out with no real surprise, beat the accumulation of physical objects that Wilcha has hoarded for decades.

The record store that gives the movie its title is a central location for the thematic concerns addressing time and aging and business and memory. Record collectors will probably wince more than once in solidarity with Flipside proprietor Dan Dondiego Jr. and Wilcha’s high school pal and fellow music nerd Tracy Wilson, who worked as Dondiego’s store assistant following Wilcha. We also get to meet the offbeat Uncle Floyd Vivino, a regional personality name-checked by David Bowie. Many short and feature-length documentaries have tackled the obsessions of the customers and employees of independent music emporia. “Flipside” writes another heartfelt chapter with its own unique (don’t pardon the pun) spin.

The big irony of “Flipside” is that it got made. It got finished. It’s complete. Wilcha’s film draws from his own vast archive, introducing viewers to all kinds of glorious “what might have been” artifacts that now, in this time and place, finally see the light of day for a public audience. And while each of the separate ideas that were supposed to be standalone movies is deserving of a showcase, the sum of all Wilcha’s “broken” parts adds up to something even more special. There are scores of stories about movies great and small that stalled somewhere between shooting and post-production (not to mention the thousands that remained as rough drafts or polished scripts). “Flipside” argues that it is never too late to reclaim the past by finally crossing the finish line.