Nixon: An Ode to the Weirdos
“What do you think people want? What do you think the people need? A sloppy Nixon, or a clean Nixon?”
There’s nothing funnier to me than the mundane routines of ordinary life. I think that’s why I’ve always been drawn to comedies like Napoleon Dynamite, Waiting for Guffman, or any of Tim Robinson’s work. Just take a look at any of my reposts on Tik Tok and you’ll peer inside my twisted mind: Michael Jackson impersonators performing at strip malls, a man in a motorized scooter staring at a set of crashing waves, or a “performance artist” swinging from the ceilings of a subway car in New York. I am utterly fascinated with the highs and lows of the human experience… particularly the lows.
When I first made Dobby a year ago, I wanted to make something that felt like eavesdropping on a stranger’s private conversation. Hearing this poor woman’s struggle to successfully use her bus pass and make it to work on time felt both specific and universally understandable. It’s weird, yes, but it’s recognizable.
This character stuck with me in the past year due in part to friends and viewers asking me questions like “what was that” and “what is a Dobby” (some people have never seen Harry Potter before…I blame strict parents). However, I often wondered if there was more story to be told. If this character is a seasonal “scare actor”, surely it’s not out of the question that she woud be hired for jobs throughout the year, right?
That’s how Nixon came to be. I wanted to continue the story that was being told in Dobby and expand the world, the characters, and her issues. What if this character finally saved up enough money for a bike only for the tire to pop on her way to work? What does her relationship with her work rival, Nolan Hauser, look like a few months later? How much worse could life get for her?
The decision to have her “play” Richard Nixon was a fairly easy one.
I was shooting around the 4th of July holiday (‘tis the season)
Richard Nixon masks are $20 on Amazon
I’m fond of the Richard Nixon Library in Yorba Linda. They do a great job there. History comes to life!
What remains the same in Nixon is the framing device: a character frantically calling people on the phone in an attempt to solve her problems. The idiosyncratic terms she uses in the first film remain similar, with the exception of a few new buzz words: “immersive”, “Nixon homework”, “sloppy Nixon”, and “Ben and Jerry’s Big Fat Fudgy Boy Nightmare Explosion”, the flavor of choice for our main character that sadly, does not exist.
But Nixon differs from Dobby (side note, that phrase has never been uttered by a human being before) in its world-building. I feel as though we really get to know more about our unnamed hero in this installment. I knew that if I was to make another one of these, I wanted to end it on a more positive note. A metaphorical “riding off into the sunset”. Though he was an adversary in Dobby, I wanted to transform Nolan Hauser from just a disembodied voice on the phone into a “knight in shining armor”, saving the day, riding in on a motorcycle to save Nixon.
This allowed me to have twice the Nixon’s: one frumpy and meek, the other muscular and heroic. My friend, Vince, had a motorcycle, and runs an Instagram account dedicated to fitness, so the casting was quite easy for Nolan Hauser. The two ride off into the sunset at the end of Nixon, putting their friendly rivalry to the side for one glorious moment, scored brilliantly by Joseph Regier.
I’m not one to over-analyze my own movies but if I could dissect meaning from this one, I think there’s themes of redemption throughout. A weird, little character, down on her luck, unable to verify her identity for AAA or convince her boss that she’s not “sloppy”, is rescued from wherever she is and brought on time to her Nixon rehearsal by someone she once thought of as an enemy.
Two characters, Nolan Hauser and… to be honest, I haven’t come up with a real name for her yet, so I’ll just call her…Nixon, who could not be more different on the outside, are brought together by their shared niche interest, acting at immersive walkthrough events. Just two little weirdos with a common bond.
Maybe I’ll make one more short film revolving around this character (since “trilogy” sounds way cooler than “duology”). I will admit that I am several pages into a feature film based on this “Dobby” character so don’t be surprised if I reach out to you about crowdfunding in a few years. Overall, I want to continue telling stories about quirky characters with niche interests because I think it best represents human nature: our triumphs, our idiosyncrasies, and our failures.
We are all Sloppy Nixon’s in one way or another if you think about it.
And if you were expecting a short film based on the life of our 37th president, Richard M. Nixon, I offer my deepest and most sincere apologies.
