Local clown portrayed in lawn documentaryBack in August, 2006, a Canadian film crew was in town to shoot footage of Mark Alexander, aka Biz the Clown, principal of the lawn-care business, Two Clowns Mowing. Their documentary, “American Savannah,” which according to co-director Jean-Francois Méan, “is about lawns as an expression of American culture,” is finally finished and will be screened at the Little Art Theatre on Saturday, June 7, at 4:30 p.m. Admission is free.
According to Méan, he and co-director/cameraman Ian Lagarde met Alexander in Oct. 2005 at a mowing expo in Louisville, Kentucky, where they were looking for ideas for their film. They had originally conceived the documentary some three years before they started filming. They began by writing proposals for funding to CBC and Tele-Quebec and eventually won an annual competition for documentary makers. They hope the final product will be aired on Canadian TV, cable TV in the U.S. and shown at international festivals.
The movie wends its quirky way from Lousiville, to Las Vegas, to Fenway Park in Boston, by-way-of Yellow Springs. Some nine minutes into the film, after interviews with an anthropologist and a lawn historian and footage of lawnmower racing, the lens is turned on Alexander, who, wearing his clown pants and red bulbous nose, is driving his truck with two cow clowns on the roof to a mowing job on Kingsfield Court. In the ensuing scenes we watch him mowing, loading the clippings into his truck and clowning on mowers with clown number two, brother-in-law Rob Hoffman.
Besides poking fun at Americans love of turf and “cellular complexification,” the movie also deals with such environmental issues as insecticides and water usage.
Asked about his new-found stardom, Alexander said, “It was pretty cool, them pickin’ me and everything.” He was happy enough with the outcome to ask friend, Little Art owner Jenny Cowperthwaite-Ruka to hold a sneak preview.
A life-long resident of Yellow Springs, Alexander started his mowing operation in the spring of 2006, because he felt he wanted to run his own business. The idea for the name comes from when he and his friend, Rocky Jones, were rebuilding an old truck ten years ago. On a whim, they started referring to themselves as “two clowns working on an old truck.” When Alexander started his lawn mowing business, he decided to honor his friend, who passed away in 2005, by calling it “Two Clowns Mowing.”
One year later, the name’s promise was fulfilled when Alexander hired the recently retired Hoffman to man the second mower. In addition to mowing, they do tree work, tilling, and snowplowing. Since the filming, the business has taken off, and he now has two trucks on the road and three full-time employees and has expanded to landscaping.
A dozen years ago, Alexander took a course in clowning. Since then he has been known around town as “Biz the Clown” and is often seen entertaining the children around town. It was just natural that he combine his hobby with his work, he said.
Eight years ago, he purchased the first of his cow statues at an auction at Young’s Jersey Dairy. It sat in his living room for five years, he said, before he affixed it atop the Two Clowns truck. The second cow was purchased Young’s auction a few years later, “because the first cow was getting lonely,” he says in the film. In spite of the clowning, Alexander is serious about the lawn care business.
“We’re local and we try to do a good job for people,” he said. “We need to retain our customers.”
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