Beacon filmmaker chronicles origins of raucous crawl

Sitting in an East Village watering hole around the holidays several years ago, Seth Porges and his friend, Scott Beale, began talking about Santacon, the international bar crawl where men and women dress in Santa suits and related holiday apparel. It often gets a bad rap for the "Santanic" mayhem that happens every December when crowds collide with too much alcohol.

"I figured it began with some drunken frat boys," says Porges, a filmmaker who moved to Beacon in 2016. "But Scott tells me, no, he and his friends started it in the mid-1990s, and he had the videotapes."

Porges says he thought it sounded like "the stupidest thing in the world," but he discovered that the footage was "like the Zapruder tape - if it had no meaning or bearing in history."

In his new documentary, Santacon, which premiered in November at the NYC DOC festival, Porges stays classy by covering the obligatory shots of fighting, puking and public urination by people in Santa suits with concision and hilarity via sensationalist TV news clips.

Then he lets an amazing story breathe by lingering on the extensive video documentation of the founders' first Santacons, which took place in four cities during the mid-1990s, including the alleged theft of a mall stanchion's velvet rope at the initial event that tarnished the concept.

As the U.S. became more homogenized and corporatized after the greedy 1980s, a group of weirdos in San Francisco created the Cacophony Society, which devised outlandish ideas and sometimes acted them out. In one incendiary incident that teetered toward performance art, they mocked PETA by throwing pig heads and chicken guts into the crowd during a staged parade.

The group spread to other cities without any organizational structure, but the San Francisco chapter published a zine, Roughdraft. "Reading through old copies, you'd see little items and go, 'Whoa, that's the original idea for Burning Man, or that's the one for Santacon,' " says Porges.

Burning Man became a commercial venture disavowed almost immediately by Cacophony. Santacon blew up into something they never intended to control or copyright, a decentralized phenomenon that benefits bars, restaurants and clothing stores.

It began after Rob Schmitt, a member of the Cacophony Society, saw a postcard of Santas playing pool and said, "We should do this." A prescient post in the December 1994 issue of Roughdraft reads: "Imagine a bunch of cheap-suit Santas singing bawdy carols, staggering drunk, fighting in the street, mooning cable cars and other such mischief."

On Dec. 20 of that year, participants paid $35 for a Santa costume and a seat on the "specially decorated" bus. BYOB and "don't forget the elf-throwing contest."

Handheld camcorders captured the bewildered faces of bystanders as the Santas invaded a mall and a high-end restaurant. The cops clamped down during the second go-round, so Cacophony moved it from San Francisco to Portland, where the police shadowed them and warned against entering Macy's. One scene in the film shows the fat red line deciding not to mess with the thin blue line.

The footage felt like "unlocking the Rosetta Stone for this underground movement that led to things like Jackass and The Rehearsal," says Porges. "They invented the flash mob, and Santacon is one of the first things to go viral worldwide."

During the final Cacophony-sponsored soiree in 1998, Santas are shown in New York City joking around with the police. The event ended on a high note when some lunatic Santas climbed the Brooklyn Bridge.

"It had nothing to do with fame or fortune," says Porges. "They were just merry pranksters seeking tribes of odd people to do new and interesting things and have fun in the moment with their friends. Back then, they did prank culture for art's sake. Now it's for clicks."

For more info, see santacondoc.com. The film is making the festival circuit, but two of Porges' documentaries can be streamed: Cla...