Special Report · Film year 2025
Butthole Surfers: The Hole Truth and Nothing Butt (2025)
- Special Guest
- Tom Stern
Show notes
Mike talks with director Tom Stern about Butthole Surfers: The Hole Truth and Nothing Butt (2025), a documentary built to recreate the derangement of a Butthole Surfers show and then quietly answer what made Gibby Haynes this way.
Stern first filmed the band at CBGB’s in 1986 and later folded their music into Freaked (1993); for this film he spent five years chasing an emotionally vulnerable interview with Haynes, finally landing one at a traumatic site in Dallas that unlocks the film’s whole throughline. Puppeteer Drew Massey built latex caricatures of the band to stage their own stories — Paul Leary secretly taping the riff that became “Graveyard,” Haynes charging a Nick Cave show naked — and the production’s own disaster became footage in the film’s climax, after Stern’s house, and the puppet studio inside it, burned down mid-shoot.
Premiering at South by Southwest and now rolling out through Alamo Drafthouse’s new Alamo Exclusives label, the film asks a band built on “no regrets” what regret actually means.
Visit the film’s official website (opens in a new tab) for playdates and news on the upcoming Blu-ray.
Stern first filmed the band at CBGB’s in 1986 and later folded their music into Freaked (1993); for this film he spent five years chasing an emotionally vulnerable interview with Haynes, finally landing one at a traumatic site in Dallas that unlocks the film’s whole throughline. Puppeteer Drew Massey built latex caricatures of the band to stage their own stories — Paul Leary secretly taping the riff that became “Graveyard,” Haynes charging a Nick Cave show naked — and the production’s own disaster became footage in the film’s climax, after Stern’s house, and the puppet studio inside it, burned down mid-shoot.
Premiering at South by Southwest and now rolling out through Alamo Drafthouse’s new Alamo Exclusives label, the film asks a band built on “no regrets” what regret actually means.
Visit the film’s official website (opens in a new tab) for playdates and news on the upcoming Blu-ray.
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