Beaver Trilogy: Part IV (2015)

Understanding the story of ‘The Beaver Kid’ can be difficult solely based on bill Hader’s narration as there are contextual interviews and clips that help with bridging the assembly not making sense. To understand the phenomenon at hand, it is necessary to view the episode titled ‘Extra’, which is accompanied by the short film that King ‘discovered’. The film contains Gary with Dick Griffiths, the name befitting ‘Grooving Gary’. This is how Besser discovered harries while testing the equipment near the second channel’s parking lot.

On camera, Griffiths imitated Barry Manilow and John Wayne, dubbing himself “Beaver Rich Little.” Harris, recognizing that he had witnessed something extraordinary, fell into the fantasies of the young innocent man. Later, Griffiths invited Harris to Utah so he could shoot his ‘Olivia Newton-Dawn’ drag performance at the Utah talent competition. This is how Harris and his crew were fortunate to film Griffith’s jaw-dropping reveal, but this was not the weirdest part. The jaw dropping footage was revealed at the time he got out of the mortuary.

Harris seems to have created “The Beaver Kid 2” as both a parody and critique of Griffiths, especially considering the cruel mimesis that a pre ‘Taps’ Penn displays throughout the 20-minute long footage. Still, the latter gives some insight into the hesitance the director might have had regarding the earlier project. For instance, the decision to include a scene where Griffiths, feeling utterly disgraced, shoves a shotgun into his mouth serves this aim. Harris’s film “The Orkly Kid,” which bridges on the more genuine melodramatic approach, features Griffiths’ suicide attempt and the main culprit turning the shotgun on himself yet again. This leads to the inevitable question of what truly happened to the infamous Griffiths as soon as the cameras were turned off.

All of this context is humorously revisited in the first thirty minutes of Besser’s documentary where he starts with the Harris messy headquarters in his fenced Salt Lake City office that contains everything from the bodies of his friends ashes to some old props which also include the water skiing cat of the movie Rubin and Ed. While Harris has established himself as a very intriguing person, Besser gets our interests misaligned in where he claims that Harris attempted Hollywood but then ran to the desert to unearthed to where he makes films by his own preference. However, Besser does a mistake in calculating the interest level of his audience about the tangents made regarding Harris attempts to his movie “Luna Mesa” which was released in 2011 and was a complete failure. 

The reason to watch a “Beaver Trilogy” documentary is to learn more about Groovin’ Gary: Who this person is because he was one person who was brilliant, but also eccentric? Did he really try to kill himself? Besser, while on the other hand playing the investigative journalist attempts to follow Griffith true identity and finally tracks it down through a yearbook which he was voted as Mr. Personality by his high school friends. But, on the other hand, the director is not claiming information that is contrary, but has been pulling wool over everyone’s eyes since the first day.

Due to reasons that will become clearer later on, Besser does not end up having conversations with Griffiths, and whether he actually attempted to have some words with Penn or Glover regarding their rather cringe early eminent roles remains a mystery. **Self-reflexive** approaches in the picture may make it plausible that Besser was hoping to watch the actors decline requests for interviews therefore, this leaves Harris as the only significant figure. 

With this topic, the director decides to forget about his life and his current whereabouts after 30 years and does not want to open up about “The Beaver Trilogy.” However, Harris rather clearly is still not release from the burden of the trilogy. The way his career turned gives you a sinking feeling that fate is not always as pleasant as the movies premier make fate out to be. In the preceding credits of “The Orkly Kid”, Glover, with the wig and singing “Please Don’t Keep Me Waiting”, as Griffiths, jumps into his car and drives towards Hollywood. For better or for worse, Besser has indeed figured out what is left of Grrovin’ Gary.

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