Amateur on Plastic - NC premiere

Butch Willis, the suburban Maryland outsider musician, gets a tribute with the documentary Amateur on Plastic,  a collage of cable access footage and video ephemera showing an artist who is transfixing and earnestly strange. (Lyrics, delivered in a stumbling cadence, include, “I’m the kitty cat/I’m the kitty cat!”) First-time director Mark Robinson is a fellow musician in a handful of bands including Unrest, and is a close friend of Willis’; he also founded famed indie label Teen-Beat, which put out Willis’ albums in the nineties, and has been quoted as saying that Willis “was probably one of the lowest selling, if not the lowest selling, Teen-Beat act.” He means it lovingly; why else would he continue to obsessively evangelize Willis’ work, even years after Willis himself retired from music? Programmer Stephen Conrad brings this film to Shadowbox Studio sight-unseen, as a longtime Teen-Beat and Willis devotee. He suggests the uninitiated start with a Willis video on YouTube called “Forestville Rocks.” “Watch for two minutes and you will be a fan,” Conrad promises. Or, at least, you will learn what “throat guitar” means. —Anna Cassell