Well, it’s not my movie; but I was first-unit photography on it. Night for Nixie is a bizarre film about… Well, here’s what the box says:
It helps if you know some Conspiracy Theory. For example, the real Lee Bowers was a withness to the John F. Kennedy assasination who died in a mysterious single-car wreck. An elite group in the film called the Wisenheimers are patterned after the Bilderbergers. The film’s Sanmento Corp. sounds an awful lot like a well-known company, and Naked Bicyclist shouts, “Ewige Blumenkraft!” (an Illuminati password).
Another “in-joke” pokes fun at a tire chain in the Pacific Northwest that gives away “Free beef!”.
How is it? Well, you either “get it” or you don’t. I had fun shooting it, and I think the final product is fun. But it’s one of those films where you do need to know the references and you need to pay attention to the details. One highlight of the film is Tin Can Gun by the now-defunct band Georgia Pacific. Listen to the lyrics and you’ll hear that all of them are three-letter words. My friend had a showing up in Washington (which I attended) and we had about 100 paying customers. They all loved it.
A “bonus feature” is a copy of a super-8 film we made right after high school called Mutilation Maniacs. We were sitting around one day and were wondering what kind of gore effects we could do on super-8 with no budget. I said, “Why don’t we have a script, instead of just shooting effects?” I’m told that my friend used a VHS copy on the DVD, as he didn’t know the original footage is in a storage unit just a few miles from where he lives. Oh, well; people think it’s sickly hilarious.
My friend told me a couple of weeks ago that I’d be getting a DVD soon. Any time now…
Darn it, why does genetic research always lead to evil monsters going on rampages? You’d think they could localize the gene for “enormous slavering fangs” and remove it by now.
vivalostwages: Funny, I could get the sound but not the images! (I’ve e-mailed him.)
tracer: Actually it’s the corporations that are evil. Dr. Admoster rails against Sanmento, claiming that they want to use Nixie to capture souls so they can charge money for them later.
This page has three versions to choose from. Clicking on the links below will start the downloads – so better go to the page first.
The first one is 1.3 meg and is best viewed using a cable modem.
The second one is smaller and lower-quality. 250Kb for 56k dialups.
The third one is the QuickTime version, which I only plays the music for me.
I went to the 1.3 meg version. It started and stopped as if buffered. Then I played it again and paused it until it finished buffering. That way I could watch it all the way through. It does take a long time on my dial-up! The smaller Media Player version runs pretty quickly, but the resolution is poor.
Also, I could not play them on Netscape. I had to use Explorer.
Thanks, Johnny; I had to download and run some sort of sound deal from Microsoft and then it worked just fine. Even cooler this time! And congrats on your role in making the film.
I’m due to finish shooting my first movie tomorrow. (First as writer/director/star, that is.) It’s a short slapstick silent about a guy trying to return a book to the library, with Beckettesque existential overtones. In other words, maniacally self-indulgent and nearly unwatchable, I hope.
Is Night for Nixie due for the kind of release that would get a copy of it in some form to Memphis? I’ve read your past posts on filmmaking with interest, and I’d love to see it.
Yeah, that seems to be a rule of modern film making. All large corporations are required by law to be evil, and are ruled over by CEOs in league with the Devil. (This presented serious problems when they were making the Batman movies, because Bruce Wayne was a multimillionaire due to his role as the head honcho of Wayne Enterprises.)
Not that I know of. Distribution is a bitch. Right now, my friend is self-distributing because he was not satisfied with the distribution of Cut Up and Zombie! vs. Mardi Gras (“The worst film ever made”).
tracer: Since Nixie is steeped in Conspiracy Theory references, the corporations pretty much have to be evil.
I had a lot of fun shooting this, even though I had a horrible cold. Funny story: There’s a scene with a giant black robot who is chasing Lee Bowers (the sleazy private dick). What was supposed to happen is that Bowers shuts a door. A second after he clears the door, the robot breaks through. Unfortunately the guy in the robot suit couldn’t hear a thing. He missed the part wher the director told him to wait a second before breaking down the door. So I’m set up in this little space. The actor is against the door as if he’s just closed it. The director yells, “Action!” and the actor only has time to make a half-turn before the door comes crashing onto his head. I yealled, “I think this one’s a keeper!” Man, it looked good! I wanted to do it again, for safety. I told the director, “We can tell Rusty that we’re going to have the robot wait this time…” (We didn’t do another take, and the accidental bonk-bonk-on-the-head is in the movie. The actor only had a lump for a day or two. )
Cut Up was played pretty straight and it was shown on European TV about eight years ago. Zombie! is quite definitely “cinema of the absurd” and was panned by people who didn’t “get it” (which was most critics, although audiences loved it at the New York Underground Film Festival). Nixie, I think, also falls into the “cinema of the absurd” category; but not quite as much as Zombie!. You do have to know your Conspiracy Theory to realy “get it” though.
And it was fun seeing Mutilation Maniacs again, especially the part where I get pulled off the motorcycle and get my face bashed in. Too bad the colour is so washed out.
(We didn’t do another take, and the accidental bonk-bonk-on-the-head is in the movie. The actor only had a lump for a day or two. 
)