Taken PEZ by PEZ, the world of the iconic candy toy seems small, and perhaps to many people insignificant, but looking on a larger scale, the world of PEZ is expansive, running the lines of global influence. For collectors, the chase for the priceless PEZ is worth all its waiting time and research, but it’s ultimately the supportive community of PEZheads that renders the hobby unique, a fact explored in director Chris Marshall and producers Chris and Kendra Skeene’s debut feature documentary PEZheads-the Movie. “Some people get overwhelmed by the fact that, “Oh, I can’t actually ever finish? Well, that’s way too much commitment. I’ve got to step away,” Chris Skeene says. “(Kendra) gets overwhelmed—she, my wife, because you have a recording—gets overwhelmed by the enormity of it. She would have given up long ago if it wasn’t for me.”

“I only had eight when I met you,” she protests and laughs. Now with a collection ranging in 900 PEZ, the Skeenes transformed their love for the hobby, and with the creative vision of Marshall, documented on film a sub-culture little recognized for its generosity and humanity. During down time between screenings at the Atlanta Film Festival, with Kendra busy working during this portion of the interview, Marshall and Skeene shared time to talk about PEZ, its collectors and what they learned along the journey of making the film. 

SM: As this is your first feature documentary, what has the festival process been like for you, navigating that?

CS: Having never made a feature film, much less promoting it at festivals, I’ve had to learn from scratch the whole way. Withoutabox is great. In the beginning, you find the list of the best festivals, and you submit to all those. But, if you have a film that doesn’t get into all the best festivals, you have to learn, “What now?” and you go from there…It’s really hard for every large group of festivals you submit to, you might get into one. Every festival’s different; a lot of them want serious documentaries. Then a lot of them are saying, “I’m tired of serious documentaries. I want something a little more light-hearted, just a little more fun that says there is stuff going on in the world that’s not completely bad and sucks. The festivals we have gotten into have told us that; they were just so happy that there’s a documentary that’s not sad.

SM: It looks as if you guys had a lot of fun during the production process. What fun stories do you have that didn’t make the final cut?

CS: Robbie from The Goo-Goo Dolls used to fill up all his dispensers with candy then ants completely came in and ate everything. Then he tells the story about figuring out how to go and clean them because you can clean them wrong and ruin them. The springs are metal and will rust, and over time, the rusted spring will break. You had to go, figure out the best way to clean it without ruining the dispenser.

SM: How did he go about cleaning them without destroying them?

CS: There are several different schools of thought on how to do that. I’m not sure what he used, but people will use rubbing alcohol because it doesn’t rust it and evaporates very quickly.

Here Skeene breaks for a second, looking up as Marshall, coming in from a screening, sits down with us to catch up on the conversation.

CS: We’re talking about stories that didn’t make it into the movie. I was telling Robbie’s ant story.

CM: We could have made a six-hour film—

CS: Just on Robbie.

CM: All these people’s stories.

CS: Every person in and of themselves was so interesting. It was so hard just to cut it down to a piece of this person.

SM: How did you guys go about negotiating the editing process?

CM: When we started editing it, we had all this footage, and the structure we had decided on was that Chris is going to travel to all the different conventions, get involved in the community and meet all these people. It’ll be his journey. So we had that structure, and then when we got to it and started putting it together it was like, “How are we going to organize this data? There’s so much stuff.”  It was trial and error. We used different topics in how a collector goes from being someone who collects (dispensers) and puts (them) in their closet by themselves to discovering PEZ on the Internet and discovering the community on the Internet and that leading to conventions with the people you met on the Internet. That’s how a lot of times a collector will get into the community.

CS: You’re doing it, and then you discover you’re not the only one. Then you discover the community and usually at the same time discover EBay. Then it’s another step to finally go to a convention. There’s a lot of stuff you will never see unless you go to a convention, and never have the opportunity to purchase unless you go to a convention. It’s this whole other plateau that you hit. A lot of times with collectors who’ve been around for a long time, they’ll become dealers. So there are steps to how it works.

SM: Once you got on this trajectory, how did you go about approaching people to say, “Well, we’re making a movie, and we’d like to film you,”?

CS: A lot of people were like, “Okay. Really?” A lot of people I think didn’t take us seriously. I knew the online community, but I’d never met most of the people in person so I’d show up and say, “Here’s what I’m doing.”  They’re like, “You don’t know us. You don’t know me. I don’t know you. How do I know you’re going to tell the story right?” They didn’t say it, but I could feel some of that was there. Then, after going to a lot of these conventions, and continuing to talk with them, they got to know us. Now I go to conventions, and they give us big hugs. They’re friends, and we talk on the phone.

CM: At the same time there were a lot of people in the community, for example, Rich Belyski who is the editor of PEZ collector news--he’s the central figure in the dissemination of information and the connectivity of the group at least for a while before the Internet—he was able to plug us in to a lot of other people.

CS: As soon as some well-respected people vouched for us, it was like, “Oh, they must be alright.”

SM: What was the traditional interview process? Were there certain questions that you wanted answers from by people?

CS: There were questions we knew that we weren’t going to use in the film, just to get the interview warmed up like, “What’s your favorite dispenser? What’s your name? Where are you from? How long have you been collecting?” All that’s just getting them thinking about their collection, get them talking. Then depending on who we were talking to and what our goal was at the time, every convention we talked about something different. Then we had a set of questions in outline that we’d base everything off of and go from there.

CM: A question we were trying to answer going through making the film was, “Why do people collect? Why do people give value to these objects?”

SM: What was the moment when you were making the film and felt, “Oh, this is important,”?

CM: I was always, as the director, trying to look at the information as it was coming in and figure out how I was going to use it. When we went to the biggest convention—which is Cleveland—we sat down with a lot of the big dealers, people who’d been in the hobby for a long time, and they were able to share with us so much information. We could really see their passion; they were there not just because they were selling PEZ but that they really wanted other people to share their love of the hobby. We just kept experiencing that more and more, and every time is was just like, “Man, there’s a passion here that really shows itself.” That was exciting for me…because there’s a real human element here, people are seeking out and yearning for connecting with other people. PEZ is this object that they can all gather around.

CS: It is weird seeing the need for people to have something to bring them together. There’re so many communities involved with a product, or liking a certain thing or certain hobby. In this case, it just happens to be PEZ.

CM: It was funny because some people were involved with collecting other things too—model trains and other toys. One thing that people would say was, “PEZ collecting is different. There’s competition in all these other collecting hobbies, and you would never say to a kid at a toy show, “Oh, you might find this cheaper somewhere else. You should go look around.” But, at a PEZ convention everyone wants to help everyone else out, help to get them the most for their money. They’re very generous. They were like, “This is unique to PEZ collecting as opposed to just collecting in general.” The one guy in the movie says, “I like PEZ because they are always happy, always smiling.” There was something inherently positive that when a community formed around this positive energy, good things were happening.

SM: How did you guys come together to say, “Oh, well let’s make this film?”

CS: There was one night that we were sitting around my house. I’d invited (Chris Marshall) and maybe a couple other people—I don’t remember—over to have some steak. We were sitting, eating underneath my collection which was displayed on the wall, and he starts asking questions, “What’s this? What’s that?” And, I would go on these stories with all these details of, “Well, that started like this…” He said, “This is crazy, all this information. We should make a movie about this.”

CM: I had no clue that people collected PEZ dispensers. Maybe I was being naïve on my part, but I had no clue. I’m not a collector. Well, I guess I am. Everyone is to some degree. But, I didn’t realize that was something people did so when he started telling me that there are people who know, who can write books on the subject, who know the subtleties of the difference between two Ninja Turtle PEZ, and they can talk for an hour about that, I was like, “There’s a depth here that the general public knows nothing about.” It was very intriguing from that standpoint. Then once we got into the community and saw the humanity of the film, it just became so much more interesting.

CS: We went to Tampa first, and then leaving Tampa I remember Chris saying, “ I really see this starting to take shape, and it’s not just a film about a bunch of people obsessing over something weird. These people are really, really nice.” They gave him expensive dispensers for free. He’s not a collector, but they were like, “Here. We want you to have this.”

SM: You mentioned before PEZ just happens to be the object this group of people has gathered around. Do you feel as if for people to connect they have to have one solid, material thing around which they are all going to form, and that then they can form human connections around this?

CM: You mean, in general?

SM: Yes, just in general.

CS: I don’t think it has to be a physical item. It can be emotional or spiritual. There are lots of people who meet up for emotional support groups, or think of the church community. A lot of communities have a purpose of some sort whether it’s physical or non-tangible.

CM: Well, it was funny. We kept, as we were going through, finding comparisons to this community and say a church where you have a congregation, an object of worship and gatherings. There were interesting parallels to religion. We didn’t want to go down the road of saying, “This is the religion of PEZ,” but in general I think that human beings desire something to worship whether it’s movie stars, athletes, something we really want to put our energy into that’s bigger than ourselves. One little PEZ might seem kind of innocent, but once people realize that there’s a billion of them out there, it’s something that’s hard to keep tangible, how many there are, how many variations there are; it becomes much bigger than someone can comprehend.

SM: Talking about that—and, I know that you are both from art backgrounds—do you feel that through this process, filmmaking has become that object of worship for you?

CS: I think it can, but I don’t think it has quite yet, at least not for me because this is my first film. I do want to make more films, but it hasn’t for me. I can't speak for you.

CM: As I’ve been going through school getting my master’s in film—I did my undergraduate in media arts—there are a lot of people who worship film and love films. They want to be in filmmaking because they love films. Although I really love films, I would never say, “That’s why I want to be in filmmaking.” I love filmmaking because it’s such a great medium to express ideas and emotions, and I think it’s the pinnacle of modern art—if that’s not too arrogant to say. It really is the thing that most people around the world can look at and share collectively. One of my goals in life is to be part of the world and somehow contribute to the world discussion.

SM: Here’s a fun question. What is one question you guys have never been asked about your filmmaking or art that you’ve always wanted to be asked?

CS: “Can I give you bunch of money?” That would be a great question.

Skeene and Marshall wonder about this question out loud for a few seconds, searching their thoughts for an answer.

CS: I guess no one really asked us “Why?”

SM: Why you decided to make it?

CS: No one’s really said—not so much, “Why did you make the film?”—no, maybe “Why did you make the film?” People have said, “What made you do it?” but no one’s really asked, “Why?”

SM: How would you answer that?

CM:  It was originally spectacle, and then that changed. We did all these interviews with people, and I could not help but be incredibly fascinated by each face, the uniqueness of every person. It was through this obsession that they had that was kind of revealing something about themselves: their humanity, needs and a need for passion. No one has asked us, “Why do you focus so much on the interviews?” Some people hinted at, “Why didn’t you follow a person who’s looking for the one PEZ?” That idea was brought up a lot to us while we were making it.

CS: It was something to consider.

CM: The people were so interesting just to watch and look at for themselves, what they were. We felt that that was really the strength of the film we were trying to make.

CS: A lot of collectors ask us—just jumping off what you said—why there aren’t more really, really rare PEZ, the great one-of-a-kind PEZ. Jumping off what he said, the film is about people, not about PEZ. It’s about the PEZ collector, and yeah, they’re going to have PEZ around them so you’re going to see PEZ. But, it’s not about PEZ.

CM: There are so many details that I learned about PEZ: the stems, the 3.8 USA stem. Some have USA or Hong-Kong on them, and that makes all the difference in the world. Or, this part is painted or not painted. The variety and amount of knowledge that a true collector has to have is astounding. To go into that would be a little too much. More important actually than what they were doing was who was doing it. PEZ was the backdrop for the human element. We always thought of it that way.

SM: As a branch off question from this. If you think about it, if you’d picked one person to find a PEZ, that really would have made the film about the end product. The audience would have had the anticipation of finding that product whereas this seems more about a process. I don’t know if I’m reading into that.

CS: If we’d made it about one person looking for a PEZ, once they got it, it’d be like, “Oh, great. They got it.” Then what? They go home, it sits on their shelf and they are the same person. It doesn’t take you anywhere.

CM: The never-ending quest, searching and searching is the big draw to collecting. That’s kind of what we end the film with. You can never discover all of them and at the same time you want them. It’s almost a mission you can never fulfill. The fun is in the hunt.

CS: That’s really for me what it’s about: searching for them and then displaying them. Possession of them is second-hand. I love the way they all look on the wall, and I really love looking for the ones I don’t have. I’ve had a lot of collectors say that’s why they collect. They’ll be able to collect for the rest of their lives and never run out of something to get.

For more information on the film and its screening times, visit www.pezheadsthemovie.com.