Bumfights was a controversial video series from the early 2000s that showcased homeless individuals engaging in fights and performing dangerous stunts in exchange for money, alcohol, or other incentives. The series was produced by Ryen McPherson, Zachary Bubeck, Daniel J. Tanner, and Michael Slyman under the label Indecline Films.The birth of crappy mean-spirited prank videos.
Who is Ryan and how did Bumfights start?
So this teenager got rich by paying homeless people to fight each other. Now, the teenager's name is Ryan, with an E. And Ryan's 13, and he's going to school in San Diego, and he has a camcorder, and he likes to film things. So one day in the 90s, he starts filming his friends skateboarding, like doing kickflips and stuff. And over time, he meets a couple of homeless guys in the area.
And these two unhoused guys, they're addicts, and they're intoxicated all the time, And they're sort of known locally for their antics. And at some point, Ryan and his friends start paying these two guys to do stunts and to sometimes fight each other. And they'll film it. And they offer them a little money or sometimes they offer them just free beer.
Hey, you want a dollar? Can you do some stuff for video? What's that? What do you want me to do?
Um, there's some crates back there you can walk into. Yeah! And so over the next few years, Ryan and his friends collect all this crazy footage of themselves messing with these homeless guys or just paying them a few bucks to do crazy shit on camera. Now, this footage will eventually go on to be the movie Bumfights. And the stuff they film is absolutely atrocious.
Like they light one of the homeless guys on fire. They pay one homeless guy to spray paint another homeless guy while he's asleep. What do you get away from me, motherfuckers? They pay one of the guys to get the word bum fight tattooed across his knuckles. They pay another one of the guys to get the word bum fights tattooed in big letters across his forehead.
And they sometimes just pay these guys to beat the shit out of each other.
They even have a diabolical segment called bum hunters.
And this is where they have an actor dressed like Steve Irwin and he goes out and they will capture homeless guys and like duct tape them up. And yeah, it's some of the most disgusting behavior you could see, like filming addicts and people who are mentally unwell. I am mentally disturbed. Oh, and I'm only describing a fraction of it. There's way worse stuff than that that they filmed.
But anyway, in 2001, I think Ryan is 18 at this point, he and three of his friends, they form a production company. And they combine the footage of the homeless guy's stunts with footage they got of high school kids fighting. I guess they filmed a bunch of schoolyard fights when they were in high school. And they cut all of this footage together into a movie called Bumfights Volume 1.
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