Flipside (2023)

In the feature documentary Flipside (2023), filmmaker Chris Wilcha tries making sense of a spaghetti plate of unfinished film projects left hanging when he made the transition from documentary maker to television commercial director.

Flipside is Wilcha’s attempt at tying these loose ends together while seeking answers to bigger mid-life questions about the purpose of work and about letting go of a lifetime of accumulated stuff. Yeah, these are third-world problems and at times the narrative grows a little too self-absorbed, but Flipside’s main attraction is its documentary-within-a-documentary about the record store Wilcha worked in as a teenager, Flipside Records in Pompton Lakes, N.J.

Chris Wilcha outside Flipside Records

Shopping at Flipside, which I sometimes did way back when, took persistence as you worked your way through its overwhelming crush of inventory. Described in the film as a “hoarder’s runaway train,” if Flipside Records was a Brooklyn storefront instead of in suburban Pompton Lakes, vinyl freaks from throughout the tri-state area would be beating a path to its door.

The store, as Wilcha says, preserves a piece of the world that’s gone and it’s no surprise that Uncle Floyd Vivino, the New Jersey entertainer with one foot in the modern world and the other in a long-lost land of vaudeville and pre-war American pop, was a Flipside customer. He’s shown kibitzing around the store and, dramatically lit, improvising a Flipside Records theme song; a touching moment now that Floyd has left us.

Uncle Floyd improvises

(At one point Floyd comes across an ancient-looking Sesame Street busy box sitting among the records and wonders out loud when the toy was last cleaned. I took my three-year old son to Flipside once – he’s 35 now – and I swear the owner brought out the same toy for him to play with).

By movie’s end, Wilcha has found new homes for much of his childhood and teenage stuff and weaved together a satisfying ending to several of the parallel storylines and unfinished projects that have plagued him over the years. As we watch him close the closet door on his childhood bedroom, it’s a literal and figurative closet cleaning.

(Tellingly, when he sells off his record collection it’s not to Flipside, where he fears his records will be lost forever, but to a rival shop also located in Pompton Lakes).

I’ve been making steady progress on also reducing a lifetime of accumulations which, as he says, “can “transport you back but simultaneously make a suffocating mess that reminds you of how much time has passed,” says Wilcha.

I can totally agree. Recently I sold more than 300 LPs that I’d been hunting and gathering since middle school. It took more than a year to clear that mental runway, but when I was ready, I didn’t hesitate. Now to face down the four cartons of old sports magazines in the attic.