Welcome Penny Lane, co-founder of The Sanctuary for Independent Media, as she joins us to celebrate our 10th year anniversary with an in-person presentation of her new documentary NUTS! The Sundance Film Festival sensation, Lane’s documentary is her good old story about a big fat liar and some goat balls. The film presents an opportunity for viewers to actively wrestle with the ethical and epistemological issues central to the narrative nonfiction form. Because who says smart films have to be boring?

Co-sponsored by iEAR Presents! and RPI’s School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences.

About the film

NUTS! is a feature-length documentary directed by Penny Lane about Dr. John Romulus Brinkley, an eccentric genius who built an empire in Depression-era America with a goat testicle impotence cure and a million-watt radio station.

Using animated reenactments, interviews, archival footage, and a hilariously unreliable narrator, NUTS! traces Brinkley’s rise from poverty and obscurity to the heights of celebrity, wealth and influence in Depression-era America.

Along the way, he transplants tens of thousands of goat testicles; amasses an enormous fortune; is (sort of) elected Governor of Kansas; builds the world’s most powerful radio station; invents junk mail, the infomercial, the sound-truck and Border Radio; hosts some epic parties; and annoys the heck out of the establishment, until finally his audacious actions force the federal government to create regulations to stop him. How he does it, and what happens when it all comes crashing down, is the story of NUTS!

Penny Lane

Penny Lane was named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film” in 2012. Her debut feature-length documentary, Our Nixon, world premiered at Rotterdam, had its North American premiere at SXSW, won the Ken Burns Award for “Best of the Festival” at Ann Arbor, and was selected as the Closing Night Film at New Directors/New Films. The film is currently in wide distribution, and has aired on CNN, ARTE and many other television outlets worldwide. Penny’s films have also screened at AFI FEST, Antimatter, IMPAKT, Images Festival, Oberhausen, FLEX FEST, Hot Docs, Full Frame, Rooftop Films, MoMA’s Documentary Fortnight and many other venues.

Her second feature-length documentary, NUTS!, world-premiered in competition at Sundance in January 2016 where it won a Special Jury Prize for Editing.

She has been awarded grants from Creative Capital, Cinereach, TFI Documentary Fund, Jerome Foundation, LEF Foundation, NYSCA, Experimental Television Center, IFP and Puffin Foundation. She was named “Most Badass!” at the Iowa City Documentary Film Festival in 2009.

She received her MFA in Integrated Electronic Arts at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and her BA in American Culture and Media Studies at Vassar College. She has taught film, video and new media art at Bard College, Hampshire College and Williams College. She is currently a professor in the Department of Art and Art History at Colgate University, where she lives in a very old house and shows movies in her barn when she is not working on her upcoming feature documentary NUTS!. And yes, Penny Lane is her real name.

Director’s Comments

I started dreaming up a film about John Brinkley in 2009, after coming across the book Charlatan in my local public library. In conversations with friends I would mention this guy who transplanted goat testicles into men to cure impotence. And a lot of people would ask me, “Well, did it work?”

Well… no, of course it didn’t. But I began to think about how much people want to believe in miracle cures. The weirder the better, really. How “one weird trick to melt belly fat” is way better click-bait than “eat less to lose weight.” Who doesn’t sometimes wish the world was more interesting, more magical, more colorful than it really is? This is why the highest-rated Animal Planet program of all time was a fake documentary about mermaids. This is why Water Kirn falls for Clark Rockefeller. Why conspiracy theories are so compelling. And why we fall for quack doctors, time and time again: they sell us a story we want to believe.

I believe that more than any other single human quality, it is our love of great stories that makes us so endlessly susceptible to being conned. We believe the stories we want or need to believe, and we believe anyone who tells them to us. Con men know this. So do politicians, propagandists, pitchmen, cult leaders, televangelists, pick up artists and manipulators of all kinds – including documentary filmmakers.

And so, NUTS! is not a film that allows us to sit back and laugh at the dummies who fell for Brinkley’s bullshit. Instead, it’s a film that shows we are all those dummies. Unlike Brinkley, however, I seduce you, and then I show you how I did it. Brinkley’s story is not presented as the object of a neutral nonfiction gaze, but as an opportunity for viewers to actively wrestle with the ethical and epistemological issues central to the narrative nonfiction form.

And since I am on a mission to prove that watching documentary films isn’t just about eating your vegetables, the viewer is supposed to have fun while they wrestle with this stuff. Ultimately, NUTS! is still just a good old story about a big fat liar, some goat balls and a million-watt radio station. Because who says smart films have to be boring?

We are committed to lowering the barriers to access for events at The Sanctuary for Independent Media. For people who are hard of hearing or deaf, blind or low-vision, or whose physical limitations can interfere with a satisfying experience, let us know two weeks in advance so we can make appropriate arrangements.