Special Report: This is Buzz (2026)

There’s no legal way to stream the original Buzz, Mark Pellington’s 1990 MTV collage series — so he built a documentary out of what survives of it. This Is Buzz (2026), fresh off its Slamdance premiere and newly picked up by Starboard Entertainment for a summer theatrical run, revisits that 13-episode, genreless show, which folded William S. Burroughs, Jenny Holzer, Timothy Leary, and RuPaul into a one-airing-only collage that, Pellington argues, predicted how media actually works now. Mike talks with Pellington about licensing the surviving PAL masters back from MTV decades later, the pre-Avid tape editing that gave Buzz its frantic rhythm, how the show’s DNA resurfaces in U2’s Zoo TV Tour, and why — after Arlington Road (1999) and The Mothman Prophecies (2002) — he went looking for old footage instead of a script. The film is currently touring art-house screens, some with the multi-projector immersive setups Pellington built himself.

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