DETROIT — Tom Putnam is originally from Oregon, but he's a Detroit filmmaker.
Putnam has spent more than 10 years telling Detroit stories. Along with his creative partner, Detroit native Brenna Sanchez, he directed 2012's Detroit firefighter documentary "Burn," as well as its upcoming sequel, "Burn X," which recently wrapped and is due out next year.
"I would make movies in Detroit for the rest of my life if I can," says Putnam, on the phone recently from Los Angeles. "You can knock on any door and there's a feature documentary waiting behind it."
The last door he knocked on was that of the Insane Clown Posse, the notorious Detroit horrorcore rap duo. Putnam and Sanchez spent more than six years filming ICP, focusing on the group's battle with the FBI, which is the foundation of their documentary "The United States of Insanity."
Putnam and Sanchez reached out to ICP in 2014. It was the day before the group filed a lawsuit against the FBI — the group's fans, known as Juggalos, had been designated by the FBI as a "loosely organized hybrid gang" three years prior — at the downtown Detroit offices of the the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan. They filmed the press conference the next day and met with ICP afterward, and together they agreed to go forward on the project.
"The United States of Insanity" — a digital release for the film is planned by year's end — features interviews with ICP's Joseph "Violent J" Bruce and Joseph "Shaggy 2 Dope" Utsler, the pair's family members and its fans. It's centered on the lawsuit but it tells the larger story of the group's fandom, its 30-plus year history and how quickly the group's success was jeopardized.
"It's a reminder of what a real American success story looks like, and how easily that can get destroyed for no good reason," says Putnam, who grew up outside Portland, Oregon. "I hope it's a reminder not to judge people just because they like something that's different than what you liked. And I think it's a cautionary tale: I think people walk out of the film realizing, oh wow, this isn't a story about something that's happening to someone else. This is a story about something that could really easily happen to me because of the very vague criteria that the FBI uses, which can be applied to any fan base: sports fans, fans of horror movies, fans of any other band."
Putnam, says people also walk out of the film realizing, deep down, they may be Juggalos themselves. But he also sees the film as a look at the biases society has against people at the lower rungs of the socioeconomic ladder, and the ways those people can be vilified and even criminalized.
"ICP got singled out because they were hated and nobody would come to their defense. They've always been an easy target," he says. "And if you were going to pick a group of people, a fan base, their fans are among the most vulnerable because nobody's going to come to their aid. And that is, for the most part, what happened."
Over the years he worked with them — the final interviews were completed in September 2020 — Putnam found ICP to be very open and honest interview subjects, and found he had more in common with them personally than he initially expected. The same way they had created their own reality by immersing themselves in their own creative universe, he did, too, by getting into filmmaking and surrounding himself with his work.
And through his continued work with Detroit firefighters, he found commonalities with the ICP and the Detroit Fire Department as well.
"It's probably the one entity in the world that has had as much bad press as the Insane Clown Posse," he says of the DFD.
But the projects gave him an immense amount of respect for the city and its inhabitants.
"Detroit isn't like anywhere else," Putnam says, noting he now owns more Detroit-specific clothing than he does of anything from his home state. "I think there's a level of pride and tenacity in Detroit that you don't find many other places."
