Wholphin DVD Magazine

Marketing:: Wholphin DVD Magazine
Radar Online also likes Wholphin...

BURNING SENSATION One of the most interesting indie magazines to come along in a while actually comes on DVD

Amid the crush of earnest-looking MFA grads at the McSweeney's headquarters in San Francisco, an editor taps away at a laptop balanced on a fold-up TV dinner tray. There just isn't any desk space left. The twee-media empire founded by Dave Eggers in 1998 is now operating at full capacity, regularly churning out art books by the likes of David Byrne and Marcel Dzama, fiction by Lydia Davis and Jonathan Lethem, and essay collections by Nick Hornby and Neal Pollack—in addition to monthly cultural magazine The Believer, and, of course, the flagship quarterly. Colonizing Park Slope's meticulously curated bookshelves isn't enough, however. Now they want your DVD player.

We have this footage I'd always heard of: Dennis Hopper trying to blow himself up with dynamite. It was this old Hollywood legend and it was filed somewhere between a gerbil story and whatever...Wholphin, a genre-defying DVD compilation of shorts, documentaries, cartoons, and found footage, occupies a modest corner of the office, but its creator, Brent Hoff, has big plans for the project. Hoff, 37, started the series after working as a writer for The Daily Show With Jon Stewart and putting in a stint at VH1, where he helped develop Best Week Ever. (Full disclosure: I worked there too.) In its first three issues, Wholphin has featured unreleased work by filmmakers like Spike Jonze, David O. Russell, Errol Morris, and Alexander Payne—side-by-side with lesser-known clips that might otherwise have been ignored by Hollywood or lost in the swirl of YouTube. Like, for example, Dennis Hopper attempting blow himself up. Hoff took a break from setting up a shoot with predator ants to talk to Radar about his latest issue.

By Matt Haber

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