Screened as part of NZIFF 2016

Nuts! 2016

Directed by Penny Lane

Loaded with wry humour and surprising rug-pulls, Penny Lane’s supremely strange biography of 1920s impotence-cure mogul J.R. Brinkley is the documentary oddity every festival watch-list needs at least one of.

USA In English
79 minutes Blu-ray / Colour and B&W

Director

Producers

James Belfer
,
Caitlin Mae Burke
,
Penny Lane
,
Daniel Shepard

Screenplay

Thom Stylinski

Photography

Hallie Kohler
,
Penny Lane
,
Joseph Victorine
,
Mark Walley
,
Angela Walley

Editors

Penny Lane
,
Thom Stylinski

Animation

Drew Christie
,
Krystal Downs
,
Dane Herforth
,
Michael Pisano
,
Hazel Lee Santino
,
Rose Stark
,
Julia Veldman C
,
Ace & Son Moving Picture Co., Llc

Music

Brian McOmber

Narrator

Gene Tognacci

Voices

Andy Boswell
,
John Causby
,
Kelly Mizell
,
Jeff Pillars
,
Thom Stylinski
,
Fran Taylor

Festivals

Sundance
,
Rotterdam
,
San Francisco
,
Hot Docs 2016

Awards

Editing Award (Documentary), Sundance Film Festival 2016

For anyone who has found themselves morbidly fascinated by the discomfiting rise of Donald Trump in the last year, this continually surprising portrait of 1920s American entrepreneur J.R. Brinkley should work like catnip. An ambitious doctor who discovered a miracle cure for impotence by transplanting goat testicles into human scrotums, Brinkley suddenly went from local medicine-man to millionaire mogul. Contrasting the avid support of the hundreds for whom it allegedly worked, and the contemptuous scepticism of the American Medical Association, the story sets itself up as a classic David and Goliath feud between alternative medicine and the government. It grows weirder, more complicated and more involving as it moves along.

Brinkley’s biography also includes a salacious radio show, a dogged run for Governor and a hilariously re-enacted lawsuit that finally pits him against his arch-nemesis. Fashioning a canny hybrid of spirited cartoons, talking heads and Brinkley Family home movies, director Penny Lane crafts a historical adaptation that’s both an incredibly funny story and an incredibly insightful rumination on storytelling itself. It’s a wry, compelling tall tale that more than lives up to each of the multiple meanings its title inspires. — JF

“As illuminating as it is immensely entertaining, Penny Lane’s doc uses charming hand-crafted animation to trace how Brinkley ballooned a wacko epiphany into a vast media empire… It’s a chronicle of the American dream in action, and the fact that it’s all true didn't stop Lane’s film from ending with the best twist of this year’s Sundance.” — David Ehrlich, Rolling Stone