Call Me Lucky

Bobcat Goldthwait made this about Barry Crimmins, the comedian who mentored him in the eighties. It first establishes Crimmins's legendary severity on the Boston scene and the way he steered figures like Patton Oswalt and Marc Maron, and then it splits in two. In the early nineties Crimmins disclosed that he had been raped repeatedly at the age of four or five by a man his babysitter brought into the house. After going public he began tracking child abusers in internet chat rooms. Following six months of research he testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on 24 July 1995, describing the internet as a superstore for predators and naming America Online as an indispensable link in the network. A month later the FBI closed a two-year investigation called Innocent Images with more than a dozen arrests and searches of a hundred and twenty homes, several of the arrested being people Crimmins had tracked himself. Goldthwait declines to turn this into a hero story. He shows where the anger came from. Who it is for: viewers interested in stand-up history and in accounts of rage converted into work. Who it is not for: anyone unable to sit with detailed discussion of child sexual abuse, which the film addresses directly.