GHOSTBOX COWBOY
2018 / 98 minutes / Feature Narrative / John Maringouin




Produced in Association with Lightshow Creative
SYNOPSIS
A dullard Texas entrepreneur reinvents himself as a cowboy in China's tech wild west, but finds himself at the mercy of corrupt American expats looking to reinvent him once more.
Ghostbox Cowboy, from filmmaker John Maringouin, is a cinematic adventure like no other -- the first U.S narrative feature shot entirely in one of the world's most secretive and essential places: Chinese Tech Manufacturing.
From MUBI.com’s Uncas Blythe:
“I wonder. Do people really understand what crazed Herzogian scheme it is to shoot a film unauthorized and guerrilla style on tourist visas in China? It was mad enough when Jia Zhangke and his generation did it, but this is in some ways beyond that. The film is the first fiction feature from John Maringouin, known as a formally and sonically experimental documentarian. Ghostbox Cowboy is a montage film, a film very much created in the edit, but that’s not to say that Maringouin isn’t a good hunter or on-the-fly composer of material, because there are parts of it that are as elemental in their poetic surrealism as anything I’ve ever seen. And he’s interested in subjects that produce some sort of unfamiliar, queasy vertigo, either ideological or interpersonal. I have to admire this fearlessness. Because it is faithful and true to its fragments, Ghostbox Cowboy is a film that needs to be post-mise en scène. Increasingly, mise en scène feels too formed, too inadequate for liquid modernity. Among other things, it’s a film about the normally esoteric process of creating what economists and Starbucks hustlers call a value chain in a global frame. This is a rather skittish thing to capture. The ethnographer Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, in her 2015 book, The Mushroom at the End of the World, spends almost 300 pages doing this same thing for matsutake. And I don’t think a film has shown this particular aspect of it—that this process is about creating and abandoning and creating again fictions out of people and objects. In other words, the process of creating a value chain is self-reflexive; not that different from a filmmaker making a documentary. In this way, even though it features two “name” professionals, Robert Longstreet and David Zellner, Ghostbox Cowboy is a collective work of ethnofiction.
The film is broken roughly into two halves. The first part is like a hybrid of the Olivier Assayas of demonlover and Boarding Gate and Wim Wenders’ The American Friend, in other words a DeLillo-esque film about the dangerous schemes, languages, and sociologies of globalized capital. This is the polyphonic part of the story. That’s the “sexy” part of the movie. This half is very good, and Soderberghian, but it’s not as interesting, searching and epiphanic as what comes in the second half.
Jimmy Van Horn has taken the last of his money, $40,000 in crypto-currency, and come to China to bet it all on a prototype of a fake electronic dowsing rod that he calls Ghostr. This box is supposed to help the living communicate with the dead, and Van Horn believes he can, with the help of Chinese venture capital, unleash it on the Chinese market and sit back and bathe in money. It’s a sensible but naive hustle, a globalized version of shark tank. But he’s underestimated the sharks, who have a razor-edged familiarity with American weaknesses, and with a cruel slowness they banquet on him, taking his intellectual property, his cash, his labor, and eventually and more mysteriously his sense of direction and selfhood. As he gets schooled, Van Horn’s sentimental education is a descent into a nowhereland. What might have been an artied-up genre film now takes the turn-off to the existential oblique, the same poetic surfaced territory as the Antonioni of Red Desert and The Passenger. A surfing of surfaces.”
SYNOPSIS
A dullard Texas entrepreneur reinvents himself as a cowboy in China's tech wild west, but finds himself at the mercy of corrupt American expats looking to reinvent him once more.
ABOUT
Ghostbox Cowboy, from filmmaker John Maringouin, is a cinematic adventure like no other -- the first U.S narrative feature shot entirely in one of the world's most secretive and essential places: Chinese Tech Manufacturing.
From MUBI.com’s Uncas Blythe:
“I wonder. Do people really understand what crazed Herzogian scheme it is to shoot a film unauthorized and guerrilla style on tourist visas in China? It was mad enough when Jia Zhangke and his generation did it, but this is in some ways beyond that. The film is the first fiction feature from John Maringouin, known as a formally and sonically experimental documentarian. Ghostbox Cowboy is a montage film, a film very much created in the edit, but that’s not to say that Maringouin isn’t a good hunter or on-the-fly composer of material, because there are parts of it that are as elemental in their poetic surrealism as anything I’ve ever seen. And he’s interested in subjects that produce some sort of unfamiliar, queasy vertigo, either ideological or interpersonal. I have to admire this fearlessness. Because it is faithful and true to its fragments, Ghostbox Cowboy is a film that needs to be post-mise en scène. Increasingly, mise en scène feels too formed, too inadequate for liquid modernity. Among other things, it’s a film about the normally esoteric process of creating what economists and Starbucks hustlers call a value chain in a global frame. This is a rather skittish thing to capture. The ethnographer Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, in her 2015 book, The Mushroom at the End of the World, spends almost 300 pages doing this same thing for matsutake. And I don’t think a film has shown this particular aspect of it—that this process is about creating and abandoning and creating again fictions out of people and objects. In other words, the process of creating a value chain is self-reflexive; not that different from a filmmaker making a documentary. In this way, even though it features two “name” professionals, Robert Longstreet and David Zellner, Ghostbox Cowboy is a collective work of ethnofiction.
The film is broken roughly into two halves. The first part is like a hybrid of the Olivier Assayas of demonlover and Boarding Gate and Wim Wenders’ The American Friend, in other words a DeLillo-esque film about the dangerous schemes, languages, and sociologies of globalized capital. This is the polyphonic part of the story. That’s the “sexy” part of the movie. This half is very good, and Soderberghian, but it’s not as interesting, searching and epiphanic as what comes in the second half.
Jimmy Van Horn has taken the last of his money, $40,000 in crypto-currency, and come to China to bet it all on a prototype of a fake electronic dowsing rod that he calls Ghostr. This box is supposed to help the living communicate with the dead, and Van Horn believes he can, with the help of Chinese venture capital, unleash it on the Chinese market and sit back and bathe in money. It’s a sensible but naive hustle, a globalized version of shark tank. But he’s underestimated the sharks, who have a razor-edged familiarity with American weaknesses, and with a cruel slowness they banquet on him, taking his intellectual property, his cash, his labor, and eventually and more mysteriously his sense of direction and selfhood. As he gets schooled, Van Horn’s sentimental education is a descent into a nowhereland. What might have been an artied-up genre film now takes the turn-off to the existential oblique, the same poetic surfaced territory as the Antonioni of Red Desert and The Passenger. A surfing of surfaces.”
CREDITS
DIRECTED BY // John Maringouin
WRITTEN BY // John Maringouin
STORY BY // John Maringouin, David Zellner, Specialist
EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS // David Zellner, Matthew Whatley
PRODUCED BY // Molly Lynch, George Rush, John Montague, John Maringouin, Sean Gillane, Billy Peterson
CO-PRODUCER // Lily Fang, Wang Ke
ASSOCIATE PRODUCER // Herb Dishman, Douglas Robbins
STORY PRODUCER // Avi Zev Weider
STARRING //
David Zellner as Jimmy VanHorn
Robert Longstreet as Bob
Specialist as Himself
J.R. Cazet as Johnny Mai Thai
Carrie Gege Zhang as Herself
Steve Musselman as Himself
Tax Ninja as Himself
Angelina Liu as Joanna
Nicholas Grgich as Ronnie
Nan Lin as Donny
Alan Chu as Venture Capitalist
Christopher Fung as Venture Capitalist Jay
Larry Kitagawa as Venture Capitalist
Li Li as Event Planner
John Montague as Phantom White Guy
Billy Peterson as Foster Papadopoulis
MUSIC COMPOSED BY // Casey Wayne McAllister
DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY // John Maringouin, Justin Donais, Nate Slevin
ASSISTANT CAMERA // Ivo Maringouin, Keith Schwalenberg
EDITED BY // John Maringouin, Sean Gillane
EDITORIAL CONSULTANT // Curtiss Clayton
ADDITIONAL EDITING // Molly Lynch, Crockett Doob, Pete Lee
CASTING BY // Lily Fang, Wang Ke, Molly Lynch
PRODUCTION DESIGN BY // Molly Lynch
SET DECORATION BY // Keri Shewmaker
PROPS // Natalina Simi
DIGITAL ARTIST // The Son of a Saint
COSTUME DESIGN BY // Molly Lynch
PRODUCTION MANAGEMENT BY // Molly Lynch, Lily Fang, Wang Ke
LOCATION MANAGEMENT BY // Lily Fang [Shenzhen], John Cedric McGovern [Ordos], Gareth Johnson [Ordos]
VISUAL EFFECTS BY // Capsaicinco
COMPOSITORS // Sean Gillane, Ken Fisk, Tim Wilson
ADDITIONAL COLORIST // Harry Locke IV
PRODUCTION SOUND // Avi Zev Weider, Dan Jaspar
SOUND DESIGN BY // Sean Gillane, John Maringouin, Leslie Shatz
DIALOGUE EDITING BY // Miik Dinko
RE-RECORDING MIXER // Leslie Shatz
ADDITIONAL RE-RECORDING MIXER // Dave Nelson
MUSIC SUPERVISOR // Chloe Raynes
PAYROLL COORDINATOR // Fanny Romero
WRITTEN BY // John Maringouin
STORY BY // John Maringouin, David Zellner, Specialist
EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS // David Zellner, Matthew Whatley
PRODUCED BY // Molly Lynch, George Rush, John Montague, John Maringouin, Sean Gillane, Billy Peterson
CO-PRODUCER // Lily Fang, Wang Ke
ASSOCIATE PRODUCER // Herb Dishman, Douglas Robbins
STORY PRODUCER // Avi Zev Weider
STARRING //
David Zellner as Jimmy VanHorn
Robert Longstreet as Bob
Specialist as Himself
J.R. Cazet as Johnny Mai Thai
Carrie Gege Zhang as Herself
Steve Musselman as Himself
Tax Ninja as Himself
Angelina Liu as Joanna
Nicholas Grgich as Ronnie
Nan Lin as Donny
Alan Chu as Venture Capitalist
Christopher Fung as Venture Capitalist Jay
Larry Kitagawa as Venture Capitalist
Li Li as Event Planner
John Montague as Phantom White Guy
Billy Peterson as Foster Papadopoulis
MUSIC COMPOSED BY // Casey Wayne McAllister
DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY // John Maringouin, Justin Donais, Nate Slevin
ASSISTANT CAMERA // Ivo Maringouin, Keith Schwalenberg
EDITED BY // John Maringouin, Sean Gillane
EDITORIAL CONSULTANT // Curtiss Clayton
ADDITIONAL EDITING // Molly Lynch, Crockett Doob, Pete Lee
CASTING BY // Lily Fang, Wang Ke, Molly Lynch
PRODUCTION DESIGN BY // Molly Lynch
SET DECORATION BY // Keri Shewmaker
PROPS // Natalina Simi
DIGITAL ARTIST // The Son of a Saint
COSTUME DESIGN BY // Molly Lynch
PRODUCTION MANAGEMENT BY // Molly Lynch, Lily Fang, Wang Ke
LOCATION MANAGEMENT BY // Lily Fang [Shenzhen], John Cedric McGovern [Ordos], Gareth Johnson [Ordos]
VISUAL EFFECTS BY // Capsaicinco
COMPOSITORS // Sean Gillane, Ken Fisk, Tim Wilson
ADDITIONAL COLORIST // Harry Locke IV
PRODUCTION SOUND // Avi Zev Weider, Dan Jaspar
SOUND DESIGN BY // Sean Gillane, John Maringouin, Leslie Shatz
DIALOGUE EDITING BY // Miik Dinko
RE-RECORDING MIXER // Leslie Shatz
ADDITIONAL RE-RECORDING MIXER // Dave Nelson
MUSIC SUPERVISOR // Chloe Raynes
PAYROLL COORDINATOR // Fanny Romero