Amy Davis + Jon Moritsugu
Jon Moritsugu
INSTA: @jon.moritsugu
Writer/director Jon Moritsugu, who has been making movies since 1985, has created a miasma of protopunk deconstructions of popular genres and formats with scabrous and pointedly garish results. The New York Times describes them as "funny, anarchic, provocative and exhilarating". Since 1989 he has collaborated with his wife of 25 years and creative partner, Amy Davis, when he directed her in his first feature, MY DEGENERATION, which played at Sundance and was hailed by Rolling Stone as “One of the top 25 greatest punk rock movies of all time.”
Since then, the two have evolved from the standard and all too predictable director + muse cliche to equal and unified filmmaking partners. A string of fearless and visionary features has been birthed in their union of kunst including MOD FUCK EXPLOSION, TERMINAL USA, FAME WHORE, and SCUMROCK. The most obvious collaboration is PIG DEATH MACHINE (which garned them both a JACK SMITH LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD from THE CHICAGO UNDERGROUND FILM FEST in 2013), and starred Davis, was directed by Moritsugu, and was co-written and edited by both. All the films are etheric babies of the duo as they trudge against the BATTLE OF THE SEXES as conjoined creators.
Decades have been spent destroying their egos, as well as dolloping ego disorders on their movie characters...most of which have been played by Davis, gleefully staining the celluloid in a collage of hubris/greed/pride/vanity/martyrdom and idiocy, all with campy abandon and HUMOR. These films have scorched eyeballs worldwide from MoMA to Cannes to the Guggenheim to Berlin to the Whitney.
In 2012 they received a Grammy Nomination in the “Long Form” category for a music video they co- created for the band TV ON THE RADIO. They lost to The Foo Fighters but Dave Grohl was a nice guy. Moritsugu and Davis are currently in post production for their newest feature, NUMBSKULL REVOLUTION, which was shot in Marfa and Santa Fe, NM. Starring Davis as an ultra-brilliant ”SUPER EGO” narcissistic conceptual artist (AND her sleazy ”ID” twin sister), the picture lambasts the high art scene with a twisted and hilarious elan. Acting opposite her as a competitor in high art is James Duval, who played “Frank the Bunny” in DONNIE DARKO. Moritsugu graduated from the fabled Brown University Semiotics Department and has received awards from The Rockefeller Foundation, Creative Capital Foundation, and Tribeca Film Institute.
Amy Davis
INSTA: @snoutattack
Amy Davis is a fashion illustrator AND filmmaker, most well-known for her collaboration with LeSportsac on four artist-edition bags. Hailing from Long Island, NY, she won the NEWSDAY cartooning contest at the age of nine for her winged unicorn. A few years later, she graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design with a degree in illustration. Moritsugu realized she needed a push to GO FOR IT as an artist and acted as the catalyst, mailing in a 10 cent Xerox photocopy of her artwork to PAPER MAGAZINE in New York City. They gave her a chance... with the MAY 1996 cover, a 17-page color spread, plus a monthly gig drawing and styling her STYLE FIENDS column, which ran from 1996 to 2005. She had arrived.
Davis has worked with Chanel, Reebok, Nine & Co., Urban Decay, Hard Candy, Mead, Parade Magazine, Seventeen, Cosmogirl, Beams (Japan), Ellegirl Korea, and Tout et Coup (Japan), and she has also designed a streetware line for Cosmic Debris (creators of Emily the Strange). Her work has shown at MoMA PS1, Colette (Paris), Mayor Gallery (UK), Deitch Projects (NYC), and Holly Solomon Gallery, and has also been featured in a number of books including FASHION ILLUSTRATION NOW, MORE FASHION DRAWINGS, and CURVY #4 (Yen Magazine's 100 top female illustrators worldwide).
Flown to Honolulu for her ARTIST EDITION, Hawaii-only, “Island Life” LeSPortsac signing and release, which brought in collectors from as far away as Japan and ended up lasting nine hours, her dream of being a world renowned artist had finally been achieved. And she went back to her hotel room and felt more alone than she had ever felt. She realized her destiny lay with her best friend and husband Moritsugu... because she felt ALIVE when they stood TOGETHER as artists, even though this went DIRECTLY against her feminist-only child-I’m the BEST personality. She had the epiphany that the two HAD to connect as artists to be happy. It was written in the stars. Perhaps it was/is their destiny. It has not been easy, as you can imagine, but Moritsugu and Davis wouldn’t have it any other way. They are now one artistic FORCE MAJEURE. What had initially been kindled in 1989’s MY DEGENERATION, where Davis agreed to star in the movie just to be near the boy she had a crush on, has turned into a full-on cinematic collaboration, where she has formulated with him a tawdry and wholly original strand of features.
Additional film credits include incidental and background screams for Troma’s TOXIC AVENGER 3, as her pal worked at Troma and she owed him a favor...Plus Toxie is sorta cute. Davis also fronts and leads the band LOW ON HIGH, in which she is bassist, lead singer and songwriter, with Moritsugu playing guitar. The daughter of jazz trumpet great Mel Davis (THE BEST TRUMPET PLAYER IN THE WHOLE WIDE WORLD), who toured with Benny Goodman, played the trumpet solo on THE HUSTLE, was the jazz sound of most early Woody Allen films, and played the lead horn on Billie Holidays’s “Lady in Satin,” she continues in this fine line of musicianship with this scuzzy, blisspop duo.