Whatever Happened to Mark Borchardt of American Movie?

Remember Mark Borchardt? The Midwestern amateur filmmaker featured in the documentary “American Movie”? He was the tall, lanky dude with the mustache (pictured with his best friend, Mike Schank). I really liked the documentary by Chris Smith about Mark trying to raise the money and make his low-budget short film “Coven”, even if the film itself, well, kinda sucked. But the doc didn’t, and Mark Borchardt’s life was just so utterly fascinating. So what’s he been up to?

Scott Von Doviak over at Nerve.com wanted to know what Borchardt was up to, too, and set to find out. In short — not much.

Here’s a passage from Doviak’s article:

Nine years later, history seems to be repeating itself. On the one hand, things have certainly improved for Borchardt since his days of delivering newspapers and vacuuming crypts. He has an acting career of sorts; you may have seen him as “Skeeter” in The Godfather of Green Bay or “Al the drunk at the bar” in Zombie Island, and he has four roles lined up for 2008, including one in Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever. He’s still hoping to make Northwestern, but in the meantime he’s working on another horror film about an alcoholic writer, this one called Scare Me. And as you may not be surprised to learn, it has been in production for quite some time now.

It’s actually pretty bloody depressing, but you can read the rest of Borchardt’s ever-in-limbo movie career over at Nerve.com.

I was hoping it would be a happy ending for Mark and company, but I guess not everything works out the way they do in the movies.