The Boone Dawdle: A True/False Summer Tradition Returns August 17th - True/False Film Fest The Boone Dawdle: A True/False Summer Tradition Returns August 17th - True/False Film Fest

May 31, 2013

The Boone Dawdle: A True/False Summer Tradition Returns August 17th

Summer is back. As you map your plans to enjoy the sunshine, don’t forget about our modest contribution to the season. Saturday, August 17th is the fourth edition of The Boone Dawdle, a day long celebration of nature, biking, music, food and film. Tickets for the 2013 Boone Dawdle  are on sale now. Not only is this curious little expedition a great time, it also helps raise money that keeps the True/False Film Fest cruising along through the off-season.

Things will get underway at Flat Branch Park, where some of us will meet up before peddling westward down the Katy Trail. The whimsical bike ride that follows will feature numerous trail-side surprises and musical interludes. Eventually, we’ll all get together at Les Bourgeois Winery in Rocheport (those who forgo the bike ride can drive or take a shuttle) where we’ll share cuisine and libations. As the sun begins to set, we’ll find seats on the beautiful limestone bluff overlooking the Missouri River and enjoy a concert and outdoor screening of a new documentary. The evening will end with a filmmaker Q and A before we all hop a shuttle back to CoMo.

photo by Ryan Henriksen

photo by Andy Richmond

photo by Scott Patrick Myers
photo by Scott Patrick Myers

The film playing this summer’s Boone Dawdle has yet to be revealed. In the past three years, we’ve featured docs with stories both shockingly bizarre and unmistakably human.

In 2010 we watched Best Worst Movie. In it director and Boone Dawdle guest Michael Stephenson looks into both the making of and fandom surrounding Troll 2, the movie he starred in as a child and tried so very hard to forget. Widely regarded as one of the worst movies ever, the so-bad-it’s-good Troll 2 features no trolls, but is instead the story of a family vacation in Nilbog, a town whose residents are secretly militant vegetarian goblins plotting to feed the family special green food so that they can be transformed into plants and thus consumed. In Best Worst Movie, the show is stolen by our other guest, the eminently likeable small town dentist George Hardy. George always dreamed of being a star, and in Troll 2 he gives a performance for the ages as the family patriarch.

In its second year, the Boone Dawdle brought us Last Days Here. This film documents the moving resurrection of Bobby Liebling, front man of the underappreciated hard rock act Pentagram. Our guest that year was the film’s unlikely hero, metal enthusiast Sean Pelletier. Sean’s love of Pentagram‘s music led him to track down Bobby, and eventually help rescue him from the depths of drug addiction. With Sean’s help, Bobby triumphantly returned to the stage in 2011, as you can see below.


Last year we screened The Source (recently renamed The Source Family) the stranger-than-fiction story of an early 70s new age movement, led by health food guru and reformed armed robber Jim Baker, renamed in enlightenment as Father Yod. Moving into a communal home, the family attempted a radical restarting of human society, experimenting with meditation, drugs and plural marriage. The Source Family is just now scheduled to return to Mid-Missouri and will be playing at Ragtag Cinema beginning on June 17. Our Boone Dawdle guests that year were co-director Jodi Wille and family member/historian Isis Aquarian, who compiled the rich archival materials that made the film possible. Among the many other things, these include the far-out recordings of the family’s psych-rock band, the Yahowha 13.

Keep an eye out for the announcement of our 2013 film sometime soon. And we look forward to seeing you along the trail!