The thing about Hollywood director Harmony Korine that's frustrating is "he's incredibly hard to get a hold of," said Hayden Pedigo, a 25-year-old Amarillo native and big-time fan of the filmmaker, whose latest movie The Beach Bum, starring Matthew McConaughey, came out in March. Pedigo hasn't seen it yet, but he plans to.

After stumbling upon clips of Korine's work on YouTube at about age 15, he watched Gummo, Korine's 1997 directorial debut about a group of oddball teenagers living in small-town Ohio, and felt something that didn't go away. "I wanted to talk to him for a long time," Pedigo said of the filmmaker.

Unlike your average superfan, however, Pedigo didn't just want to rub elbows with his idol. He was convinced that Amarillo, his hometown, would be an ideal place for Korine to shoot his next film, and he wanted to tell him so. "I think it's perfect for Harmony because Amarillo's full of bizarre characters on top of an interesting Texas landscape," he said. Last year, he got up the nerve to reach out to the Korine via Facebook, but he didn't hear back.

Hayden Pedigo wore this outfit in the series of absurd campaign videos he produced during his run for Amarillo City Council. (Marc Triplett / Special Contributor)

"So I had this idea," said Pedigo, "What if there was a billboard telling him to come here?" Last month, he got ahold of the man whose business is the digital displays up along Amarillo's highways. "As a joke, I was like, 'Hey will you put this billboard up?'" said Pedigo. "I guess he thought it was funny, and the next day he was like, 'Yeah, I'll do it."

A few days later, there were two of them: One on I-27 facing north toward the city center, the other on I-40 facing west in the direction of Cadillac Ranch and the acres of Panhandle beyond it. Both bore recent photos of the director along with the earnest plea (in all caps): "HARMONY KORINE PLEASE COME TO AMARILLO, TEXAS."

"I couldn't believe that the guy actually agreed to do it because he didn't know who Harmony was," said Pedigo, but that was beside the point. For a week, Pedigo waited in the hopes that Korine might ping him somehow. He heard nothing. Then, on May 30, his phone rang. "It was Harmony giving me a call," he said. As images of the billboards circulated online, one of Korine's past collaborators had noticed it and passed it along to the director.

Korine told Pedigo he was hoping to be in Texas this summer and would try to stop by Amarillo during his trip. "So hopefully, Harmony Korine does come to Amarillo, but he did call me," Pedigo said cooly, speaking for the record. "He was very nice, and we had a great discussion about Amarillo." Although it's no contract, it's an extraordinary punchline to what began as a gimmick. Somehow, Pedigo's shot in the dark had reached its far-away target. (Korine lives in Miami.)

Pedigo's nonchalance about the whole thing might be explained by the fact that this isn't his first brush with fame. As a guitarist, keyboardist and composer, several of his ambient albums have caught the attention of critics in Texas and beyond. (His latest, Valley of the Sun is out now on L.A. record label Driftless Recordings).

Hayden Pedigo plays guitar and has performed at South by Southwest. (Chevis LaBelle / Special Contributor)

Last year, he raised his profile further when he announced his surprise candidacy for one of the four positions on Amarillo's City Council. He was 24, with no previous experience in politics.

To get the word out, he created a bizarre campaign video — inspired in part by Korine's work, he said — that showed him performing random tasks in a suit and tie, and then, after publishing it on Aug. 5, followed it up with four more.

They went viral, and Pedigo decided to run with it, showing up for candidates' forums and appearing on local to TV to expound on his platform, a progressive one he says he still believes in. He wanted to get rid of Amarillo's system of at-large representation and replace it, he said, with electoral districts for council members. He spoke also about supporting trade labor in Amarillo, telling local NBC-affiliate KAMR he worried about losing young people without college degrees to bigger job markets outside the city. He kept his day job at a credit union in town. "I did the work, so I could be taken seriously," he said. "Because I did it with the intention, like, 'What if I did win?'"

He didn't. The incumbent Elaine Hays won last month with 67 percent of the vote. But Pedigo did gain national media attention and pull in more than 2,000 ballots with his name on them. "And I beat a guy that spent $15,000 on a campaign," he said, adding that his own efforts cost him nothing. "I had no yard signs, I had no mailers, I had no business cards, I had nothing. Just me out there, my words and my social media presence, that was it," he said. (Even Korine seems to have had some awareness of what Pedigo was up to on the campaign trail: "Didn't you run for mayor or something?" he asked during their recent phone call.)

His next goal is to do something with the base of support he's rallied in Amarillo, made up of people he described as "young, disenfranchised, artistic, bored," like the friend who painted a massive mural of him in town, one of the biggest he'd ever done. It's still up. "People that feel absolutely ignored and underrepresented is the demographic I felt like I engaged," he said. "That group previously felt like they had no say in what was going on."

Of course, Pedigo is well aware that some just can't take him seriously. "I laughed to my wife," he said, "I was like, 'Rolling Stone will write about me but the local paper won't.'" On this point, he doubled down. "Even right now," he said, "I'm talking to somebody writing for The Dallas Morning News but the local paper has never written anything about me, which I find humorous."

The irony here speaks to the tension at the core of his fame: It began with a joke, and to some, it still is one.

But Pedigo knows this, and to some degree, appears to have seen it coming. "I was interested in the idea of doing something legitimate that starts off kind of absurd," he said. "It kind of acknowledges the power of absurdity and how it can be used," he said, "if used right."

Dan Singer is a Dallas-based freelance writer.