# My movie is out **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [July 19, 2003, 1:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-movie-is-out/189515 "2003-07-19T01:25:03Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 14\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Johnny\_L.A](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johnny_l.a/32/1084_2.png) [@Johnny\_L.A](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johnny_L.A)\ **Post date:** [July 19, 2003, 1:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-movie-is-out/189515/1 "2003-07-19T01:25:03Z")
Well, it’s not _my_ movie; but I _was_ first-unit photography on it. [Night for Nixie](http://www.reelprogress.com/nixie/night-for-nixie.htm) is a bizarre film about… Well, here’s what the box says: > [@](#): > > Something evil has escaped from Sanmento Genetics Research Laboratories. Soon after, a series of bizarre incidents plague a small coastal town culminating in the disappearance of a well known local political science professor. > > Second rate detective Lee Bowers is assigned to the case, and soon finds himself on a weird trail of mutants, sinister government plots and a large spider with an unsavory appetite for human souls. > > Madness, destruction and big happy faces…where will it end? As the sun sets on this unsuspecting town, soon it will be Night For Nixie. It helps if you know some Conspiracy Theory. For example, [the real Lee Bowers](http://www.bcholmes.org/jfk/bowers.html) 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](http://www.nexusmagazine.com/Bilderbergers.html). 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… 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![vivalostwages](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/v/d07c76/32.png) [@vivalostwages](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/vivalostwages)\ **Post date:** [July 19, 2003, 1:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-movie-is-out/189515/2 "2003-07-19T01:45:46Z")
Well, I couldn’t get any sound, but the images looked great. And since I just saw _28 Days Later_, I was in the right mood. I’ll go and check on it again. ---
**Author:** ![tracer](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tracer/32/20578_2.png) [@tracer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tracer)\ **Post date:** [July 19, 2003, 1:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-movie-is-out/189515/3 "2003-07-19T01:46:27Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![Johnny\_L.A](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johnny_l.a/32/1084_2.png) [@Johnny\_L.A](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johnny_L.A)\ **Post date:** [July 19, 2003, 1:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-movie-is-out/189515/4 "2003-07-19T01:50:28Z")
**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. ---
**Author:** ![Johnny\_L.A](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johnny_l.a/32/1084_2.png) [@Johnny\_L.A](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johnny_L.A)\ **Post date:** [July 19, 2003, 2:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-movie-is-out/189515/5 "2003-07-19T02:41:52Z")
Re: The trailer. [This page](http://www.reelprogress.com/nixie/nixie-movie-trailers.htm) 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](http://www.reelprogress.com/nixie/nixie-final-master.asf) 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](http://www.reelprogress.com/nixie/nixie-qt-trailer1.mov) 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. ---
**Author:** ![DMark](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/e68b1a/32.png) [@DMark](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DMark)\ **Post date:** [July 19, 2003, 6:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-movie-is-out/189515/6 "2003-07-19T06:43:58Z")
Congratulations! Major cool being a part of a film. Looking forward to when you make millions and decide to cast the teeming millions in your next film. ---
**Author:** ![vivalostwages](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/v/d07c76/32.png) [@vivalostwages](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/vivalostwages)\ **Post date:** [July 19, 2003, 8:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-movie-is-out/189515/7 "2003-07-19T20:56:06Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![Gozu\_Tashoya](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/7993a0/32.png) [@Gozu\_Tashoya](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gozu_Tashoya)\ **Post date:** [July 20, 2003, 3:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-movie-is-out/189515/8 "2003-07-20T03:32:06Z")
Just DLed the trailer and it looks like fun. I’ll make sure to watch it, well, not tonight, but soon. ---
**Author:** ![jackelope](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/a6a055/32.png) [@jackelope](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jackelope)\ **Post date:** [July 20, 2003, 8:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-movie-is-out/189515/9 "2003-07-20T08:13:51Z")
Congratulations! 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. ---
**Author:** ![tracer](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tracer/32/20578_2.png) [@tracer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tracer)\ **Post date:** [July 20, 2003, 4:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-movie-is-out/189515/10 "2003-07-20T16:24:07Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Johnny L.A. \* > **tracer** : Actually it’s the corporations that are evil. 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.) ---
**Author:** ![Johnny\_L.A](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johnny_l.a/32/1084_2.png) [@Johnny\_L.A](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johnny_L.A)\ **Post date:** [July 21, 2003, 11:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-movie-is-out/189515/11 "2003-07-21T11:42:37Z")
> [@](#): > > Is _Night for Nixie_ due for the kind of release that would get a copy of it in some form to Memphis? 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”). ---
**Author:** ![Johnny\_L.A](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johnny_l.a/32/1084_2.png) [@Johnny\_L.A](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johnny_L.A)\ **Post date:** [July 21, 2003, 11:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-movie-is-out/189515/12 "2003-07-21T11:56:11Z")
**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. ---
**Author:** ![Johnny\_L.A](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johnny_l.a/32/1084_2.png) [@Johnny\_L.A](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johnny_L.A)\ **Post date:** [July 27, 2003, 10:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-movie-is-out/189515/13 "2003-07-27T22:51:43Z")
I got the DVD. Very strange film. 😉 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. ---
**Author:** ![jimpatro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/b9e5f3/32.png) [@jimpatro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jimpatro)\ **Post date:** [July 28, 2003, 4:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-movie-is-out/189515/14 "2003-07-28T04:05:53Z")
Way to go Johnny! Keep the momentum going.