Nuts!

Nuts! (2016)

The true story of John Romulus Brinkley, a small-town Kansas doctor who discovers in 1917 that he can cure impotence by transplanting goat testicles into men. And that’s just the tipping point in this stranger-than-fiction tale. With the balls of a P.T. Barnum, the gonads of goats, and the wishful dreams of flaccid men, Brinkley amassed a fortune, was almost elected Governor of Kansas, invented junk mail and the infomercial, and built the world’s most powerful radio station. By the time all of the twists and turns of Brinkley’s story are revealed, Nuts! certainly earns its title.

Date of release
2016-01-22
TMDB
6.7 / 10 (29)
Runtime
1h 19m
Genres
Documentary, Animation
Director
Penny Lane

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Awards: 1 · Nominations: 2. Including: Sundance Special Jury Prize Documentary

Nuts! is a 2016 partly-animated documentary film billed as the "mostly true story" about the controversial medical doctor and radio magnate John R. Brinkley. The documentary is adapted from The Life of A Man: Biography of John R. Brinkley by Clement Wood, directed by Penny Lane and edited by Penny Lane and Thom Stylinski. Nuts! won the Special Jury Award for Editing at its Sundance premiere in 2016.

Production

The idea of making Nuts! came to Lane in 2009 when she read Charlatan: America's Most Dangerous Huckster, the Man Who Pursued Him, and the Age of Flimflam by Pope Brock. She found herself wondering if Brinkley's goat testicle cure worked, a question others asked her as she recounted the story. That current-day people could still be credulous, disappointed even, when she told them it was a "total quack cure" intrigued her.

"It's important that even those who consider ourselves very skeptical and think that we walk around employing our critical capacities all the time, nonetheless, we can all get fooled."

In the film, Lane uses a variety of traditional and non-traditional documentary techniques and materials to tell Brinkley's story: animated re-creations, archival film footage (including home movies and newsreels), a narration adapter closely from The Life of a Man, and interviews with present-day experts. Voice over work is done by Andy Boswell, John Causby, Kelly Mizell, Jeff Pillars, Thom Stylinski, and Fran Taylor.

Lane deliberately structured the movie so the viewer is "in the shoes of someone who could be fooled" by Brinkley and his ability to spin a good tale. The first part of the documentary is told from Brinkley's point of view: the story Brinkley would have told. Later in the film it is revealed that the audience has been manipulated in this way.

Both Lane and writer Thom Stylinski were interested in playing with "the conventions of documentary to make a point". According to Stylinski, film makers, including those making documentaries, manipulate information and audiences need to be educated about this.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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