Exit Through the Gift Shop (2010) on Netflix
R20101h 27mComedyCrimeDocumentaryHistory
A French shopkeeper in Los Angeles, Thierry Guetta films street artists at work, among them his cousin Invader and Shepard Fairey. He calls it a documentary but never edits the tapes.
- Netflix3.9/5
- IMDb7.9/1070,604 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes96%
Trailer
Plot summary
Thierry Guetta is a French immigrant in Los Angeles who runs a vintage clothing shop and films his life. On a 1999 trip to France he learns that his cousin is Invader, a street artist, and he tags along as Invader, Monsieur André and Zevs work at night. Invader later visits him and introduces him to Shepard Fairey, whose travels and OBEY Giant campaign Guetta films, along with other artists. He tells people he is making a documentary, but he only likes filming and never watches the tapes, which end up in boxes. He longs to film Banksy, who guards his anonymity, but cannot arrange an introduction.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Exit Through the Gift Shop (2010)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Banksy had coincidentally picked the name of an existing band, Exit Through the Gift Shop. He gave them his work Brace Yourself, valued then at £200,000, in exchange for the rights to their name; in 2023 the band sold the artwork on for over $2 million, the art itself having been valued at only $600,000.
- The editing team was tiny, and would have been even smaller if the editors had not kept having mental breakdowns. They went through over 10,000 hours of Thierry's tapes and got literally seconds of usable footage out of it.
- The photographer Glen Friedman sued Guetta after the film's release over his use of a photograph of the rap group Run-DMC. Guetta claimed he had altered the image enough to make it an original piece of art, but Judge Pregerson ruled Friedman's photograph was protected under the transformative fair use law.
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