WI FilmFest - Triviatown

After the Dead Sea Scrolls lectures, I headed over to the Bartell Theater to continue my Wisconsin Film Festival experience. This time around it was Triviatown. The movie is a documentary about the trivia contest up in Stevens Point. It's the largest such contest in the world and this year's contest starts on Friday. Hundreds of teams with thousands of players compete for 50+ hours for the title. Locals hole themselves up in their basements while out of towners, like me, ensconce themselves in a hotel room. Questions are asked over the radio and teams have the duration of two songs to call into the station with the correct answer. Plus there's a packet with pictures that need to be identified. In addition, there are a couple scavenger hunts which require teams to mosey around town to find things including a man wearing a plush Viking hat.

While the massive scale of the contest is notable in itself, it's all the goofy characters involved that are really the subject of the documentary. The showing I attended had a large contingent of people from Point and so many of the folks in the movie were in the audience. My own team, The Flying Zupan Brothers, play in the contest and, although I didn't play the year the movie was shot, I was hoping to catch a glimpse of some of my Brothers. Meg Hamel, the lovely Interim Director of the festival gave an introductory spiel and the lights were dimmed.



Triviatown focused on a handful of the nearly 500 teams that participate every year. Network has won the title well over a dozen times in the contest's then 34 year history and they are always favored. Led by the vague Stephen King look-alike, Barry, the team is genuinely a bunch of dorks. And I say this in the best of all possible ways. The basement in which the team plays is lined with books, including almanacs that date back to the 19th century. The atmosphere is quiet – almost somber. The quiet atmosphere at the Network headquarters in contrasted with the party atmosphere of Cakers. Their headquarters has lots of books and computers as well, but the atmosphere is totally different. Rather than quietly sipping coffee and soft drinks, there's beer aplenty. People are milling around chatting and even dancing. While Barry is shown to be rather stolid, the Cakers' Shannon (if I recall correctly) is loud, boisterous, and jovial. She chides Network for being overly serious and says that the point of the contest is to have fun and be with friends.

As I said, a few other teams are featured fairly prominently and we get to see members of them all in action. For folks who know nothing about this contest or, indeed, such contests generally, it must be amusing for them to see people get very angry over a wrong answer about something that appears on the packaging of candy or to see someone run out to their car to grab a DVD from their trunk only to find a magnifying glass is needed to glean the answer from the cover. But I can tell you that that is exactly how it is. There are so many times when you don't know the answer but know where to find it and you go running around like a chicken with its head cut off in search of the relevant issue of Time magazine or hastily thumb through a card catalog because you know one of your teammates clipped an article out of the paper and glued it to one of the index cards. In addition, Triviatown addressed the age-old dilemma of whether or not to give answers to teams with which you are friendly. (You decide.)

In addition to the contest and its cast of characters, the video looked at the social aspect of the contest. More than one person remarked that the contest was the one time of the year when he or she gets to see their teammates. The contest provides the opportunity for old friends to reunite and socialize. It's the best excuse for some folks who were raised in Point but moved away to return and see friends & family. Plus there was the story of one team, that I cannot recall, which suffered the death of one of its members shortly before the contest. They decided to play anyway and, well, I don't want to spoil anything so I'll just say that there's some very touching scenes.

Aside from the players, the film profiles the contest's organizers, Jim Oliva and Jon Eckendorf. Oliva is known as "The Oz" and clad in tie-dye with a long beard, he looks like he stepped off a Ben & Jerry's ice cream carton. The two are like Oscar and Felix from The Odd Couple. Eckendorf is calm and collected while we witness The Oz dancing and singing. At the time of shooting, I think he'd been organizing the contest for 26 years and we learn just how much he loves doing it. Not only does he testify personally but his wife also makes a comment akin to "I don't know what he'd do if he didn't have the contest."

Unfortunately, the only footage of the Zupans that made the final cut was a one-second shot of Dumb Donald roaming town during the dawn scavenger hunt. He is wearing the team's official hat (a vinyl barstool cover) as he peers into the camera and shouts "ZUPANS!!" I was so overcome with pride that I did a little yell myself.



Afterwards, one of the movie's directors, Brit McAdams (above), fielded questions from the audience. He explained how they had 8 camera crews which shot most of the footage in 2004 but that they returned in 2005 to get some more footage. He also expounded upon how great the folks of Stevens Point were – how they opened their homes to the crews and generously fed them. The filmmakers are shopping Triviatown around in hope of finding a distributor. They shot 400 hours or so of footage for this 90-minute video and we were told that the DVD release would have deleted scenes.