![]() ![]() News outlets across the country - and even overseas - splayed clips and photos in critical reports.Īs the film’s popularity grew, advocacy groups lashed out against it. But that’s not exactly true.Īccording to Slyman, a mention of the video on The Howard Stern Show led to a crashing of the server the team used to sell the DVD online. Many believe the founding members of Indecline were the driving force behind the early media blitz around Bumfights, proud to have pulled the wool over the eyes of so many homeless people who got hurt for the price of a few beers. McPherson’s Bumfights subjects, meanwhile, would experience a dizzied mix of both redemption and tragedy. McPherson was eventually incarcerated for three months in connection to the DVD, and the civil suit filed against him by the three homeless men leveed a settlement upward of $300,000. Released in the spring of 2002, the first film in the Bumfights series would prove quite a profitable commodity, punching its way into the cultural zeitgeist while branding the filmmakers as manipulative violence mongers. To optimize visceral consumer reaction to the product, they called it Bumfights. Viewers now saw homeless characters risking bodily harm by performing stunts, as well as brawling, abusing drugs and engaging in all sorts of extreme tomfoolery. They decided to combine their risqué footage into an hourlong DVD compilation, inspired by Jackass but with added shock value. Jacksonville Shooter Was Under 72-Hour Mental Evaluation in 2017, Call With FBI, Local Officials Reveals Instead, McPherson characterizes those funds as helpful dollars given to friends in need. ![]() McPherson admits to giving Brennan and Hannah money at various points, but not necessarily as compensation for their time in front of the camera. One Thanksgiving night, McPherson brought Brennan and Hannah plates of leftovers from his family’s dinner, sitting with them outside a grocery store while they ate. In that same civil-suit statement, Hannah said McPherson cared about him, and showed concern over his excessive drinking. But McPherson and Hannah, on the other hand, became tight. To this day, McPherson and Brennan say they were never the closest of friends, more like amiable acquaintances. Regardless, it was the first of many acts performed by homeless people that McPherson taped - most prolifically with Hannah, memorialized in his films as “Rufus the Stunt Bum.” Hannah agreed because he was drunk, he said, and wanted the money to buy more beer. During a deposition for a civil suit Brennan, Hannah and another homeless man filed against McPherson years later, Hannah said that McPherson, shortly after meeting him, offered him $5 to head-butt a stack of milk crates on camera. “We just hit it off,” McPherson says of their first encounter.īut here is where their respective stories begin to diverge. He hung out with Brennan and Hannah one day behind a supermarket, where the two would cash in recyclable cans they’d found. ![]() McPherson felt he should chronicle such activity. “People were coming up to me, telling me there’s a homeless guy running his head into trees,” McPherson says, referring to Hannah. McPherson says he heard about the duo, particularly Hannah, and their hijinks from friends. But McPherson’s unlikely connection with Brennan and Hannah - for better and worse - would propel them all into the media limelight, and reshape their lives completely.īack then, McPherson, now 35, frequently filmed his skateboarding peers attempting daring tricks across La Mesa, like in the then-popular CKY videos - the skater-centric series with stunts and pranks, co-produced by Bam Margera, who’d go on to star in MTV’s Jackass. People in La Mesa, namely the police, would let them be. ![]() Both men, who’d struggled with alcoholism for years, were recognizable in the area, a quiet place the two sought out after briefly living on the streets of San Diego. Army, with Brennan serving in the Vietnam War. Brennan and Hannah had each spent time in the U.S. McPherson, an aspiring filmmaker, was always tooling around town with a video camera. In the late 1990s, when Ryen McPherson was a teenager living in the idyllic San Diego suburb of La Mesa, California, he met two middle-aged homeless men named Donnie Brennan and Rufus Hannah. ![]()
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