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  How to Draw a Bunny explores the fascinating, often hilarious, and always enigmatic
world of artist and underground icon Ray Johnson. A "Pop Art mystery movie", the film is framed
by Johnson's mysterious suicide on Friday, January 13th 1995, the puzzling circumstances of which
left both his intimate admirers and the general public wondering if this was a final "performance".
Little has been written about him, yet the man who many have dubbed "the most famous unknown artist"
was considered a genius whose career spanned nearly fifty years and whose collages have been
exhibited in major museums around the world.
Ray Johnson, "collagist extraordinaire, correspondent of the first rank, and founding father
of mail art" who has until now eluded biography, was at Black Mountain College 1945-1948. He
went to New York, and, along with John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns,
played an early, pivotal role in the development of Pop and performance art. Johnson's inimitable,
often irreverent blend of art, humor and life prompted comparisons to Duchamp. Johnson created
extraordinary collages and invented mail art, but it was his life that was really his art. As Billy
Name says in one of his interviews: "Rauschenberg was a person making art, so was Andy (Warhol).
Ray wasn't a person. Ray was art... That's why he's artist's artist..."
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 Ironically, Johnson's death in January 1995 permitted the first glimpse of the work he had been
doing for some twenty-five years. Johnson's death threw him into the spotlight, perhaps by design.
Artists, collectors, critics and eccentrics that knew him suddenly felt compelled to come forward to
tell their particular "Ray Johnson story." New York Times critic Roberta Smith announced, "Make room
for Ray Johnson, whose place in history has been only vaguely defined...Johnson's beguiling, challenging
art shows the true complexity of such an achievement...[The work] has an exquisite dexterity and
emotional intensity that makes it much more than simply a remarkable mirror of its time, although it is that, too."
As both investigated and represented by filmmakers John Walter and Andrew Moore, How to Draw a
Bunny is itself a collage of photographs, art works, interviews and letters, home movies and video,
that flow at the viewer like a jazz ensemble. With exceptionally toned care and constructions, the
filmmakers penetrate into a "rabbit hole of an art world wonderland" and reveals not only an artist's
fragmented life, but also the universe of his peers, friends, critics, and colleagues. With interviews
from Roy Lichtenstein and Christo, Chuck Close and James Rosenquist, and the artist himself, the
film offers a real understanding of the origins of present-day art and the confusions of the postmodern
world, as well as the experience of an artist who wore many different faces and treated the art scene
as a game without a prize.
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John Walter (Director, Co-Producer) is a filmmaker from Detroit. In 1995 he directed, wrote
and edited an hour-long documentary on Thomas Edison for PBS' The American Experience series. His credits
include three episodes of The American Experience, supervising sound editor on the six-part series Making
Sense of the Sixties, as well as other documentaries for public television. His sound and picture editorial
work also extends to independent features, short films and various documentary projects including Ken Burns'
nine-part documentary series, Baseball.
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Andrew Moore (Cinematographer, Co-Producer) is a fine art photographer and filmmaker, and Visiting Lecturer
in the Council of Humanities and the Visual Arts Program at Princeton University. Moore's large format color
prints are represented in collections around the world, including the International Museum of Photography; the
Library of Congress; the Israel Museum, Jerusalem; the Canadian Centre for Architecture; the Philadelphia Museum
of Art; and the Yale University Art Gallery. A book of photographs, Inside Havana, was published in the Fall of
2002. He is presently working on a new book of photographs of Russia to be published in the Fall of 2005.
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Frances Beatty (Co - Executive Producer) is Vice-President of Richard L. Feigen & Co. She has a Ph.D. from
Columbia University and is a scholar of Surrealist Art. She first met Ray Johnson in the seventies and spent s
eventeen years trying to convince Ray to have a public exhibition. She curated the Ray Johnson memorial exhibition
in 1995 at Feigen and worked, as the Director of the Estate of Ray Johnson, on the retrospective, Ray Johnson:
Correspondences, shown in 1999 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York and the Wexner Center for the Arts,
Columbus, Ohio.
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