‘So, I can already see the title of this article: Don’t drive with Rusty Nails!” says Chicago festival organizer and filmmaker Rusty
Nails, creatively swerving along Western Avenue.
Much like his frenetic driving, Nails’ films pulsate with a lead-footed, kinetic energy — punk-powered velocity fueled by cinema obsession and sleepless youth.
Since his graduation from Columbia College Chicago in 1999, Nails has completed 11 short films and one feature, “Acne,” which attracted the largest crowd on record for a midnight movie at the Music Box Theatre. In the same time frame, Nails has founded or co-created three local movie festivals, including the Movieside short film festival, which celebrates its second birthday this weekend at the Biograph Theater with a special program hosted by indie director Jim Jarmusch (“Dead Man,” “Down By Law”).
Nails, 27, dressed in a blue hooded sweatshirt and gray jeans so riddled with holes the pocket liners peek out, pushes a mass of matted, red hair from his eyes. This, however, does not improve his road skills as his Toyota Camry passes under a traffic light others might interpret as “red” and, a moment later, drives over a boundary some might call a “curb.”
“Did I ever tell you about the time I nearly killed [film producer] Roger Corman and his family?” he says later, over dinner at Leona’s in Rogers Park. “I was driving them for the Chicago International Film Festival. He was talking to me the whole time . . . and I just thought, ‘relax, relax.’ This guy was a God to me. Then he starts yelling at me! And a car careens right in front of us. . . . Surprisingly, they still let me drive them after that.”
Today, less than a week before the Movieside kickoff, there are posters to drop off, programs to print and movie stills to track down. Nails does the rounds, driving to bars in Rogers Park, where he comes across friends and hands them stacks of promotional postcards to distribute. As the event approaches, time evaporates into a cluttered schedule of marathon phone calls and last-minute errands. Nails’ gas tank gauge inches dangerously close to “empty,” but he doesn’t take much notice.
Last year, filmmaker John Waters (“Hairspray,” “Serial Mom”) hosted Movieside’s first-anniversary festival, an event that showcased not only short films but punk bands, art installations, even fire eaters, puppet shows and jugglers.
“When I went to it, it was like the `Ed Sullivan Show’ gone berserk, basically,” Waters says. “It was endless, and the audience fanaticism with the event was really impressive. It’s very hard to see short films . . . so without these short-film festivals, it’s almost impossible to see them. It’s giving a showcase to a vanishing breed of films.”
At the Sundance Film Festival in 2002, Waters served on the awards jury and was struck by the audacity of Nails, an unknown young director who offered him a part in an unproduced screenplay.
“I just liked his nerve, actually,” Waters says.
“He’s driven, an entrepreneur — a carnie in a way. He’s taking showmanship — everything that we don’t have so much in show business anymore — and putting it into the underground. He’s making almost like a vaudeville show. . . . I think of him as a real carnie, and I mean that as a great compliment.”
Waters adds: “I love people that seem crazy, but actually really work hard. They always succeed.”
Perhaps it’s Nails’ carnie initiative that has kept his myriad projects afloat. After “Acne” — his ode to drive-in B-movies of the ’50s — became a breakout success with a rough-cut screening at the Music Box in 1999, Nails saw an opening.
“I felt there was not really a good place for short film in Chicago,” Nails says. “I had a lot of friends who had their films rejected from a bunch of festivals, so I thought it would be cool if there was a festival of solely short films. I just thought that short films deserved to be given their dues.”
From there, he co-founded the Undershorts film festival with friends Trevor Arnholt and Usama Alshaibi, digging up movies from the Chicago indie circuit.
“The first stuff was rough,” Arnholt says. “We had like no budget, not even a low budget. I’d be up all night at Kinko’s, and putting black-and-white fliers on people’s car windows the night before. That’s always the fun way, though — shameless promotion.”
Nails struck out on his own two years later with Movieside, the name inspired by the festival’s first event at Chicago punk spot The Fireside Bowl. As the small events grew, Movieside began to gather momentum, and a flood of submissions started to crowd his mailbox. Soon, Nails reluctantly had to charge a submission fee — $9.
“It was just getting out of control,” Nails says. “I had to pay for postage and the phone bill. I spend hours on the phone.”
Self-financing, especially in the indie film world, requires guile and creativity. Since college, he has made films under the name Rusty Nails — the only name he’ll answer to — and focused his life on film production and festival promotion, seldom holding a 9-to-5 job. Rent is paid through odd jobs that offer a flexible schedule. (“Or I quit those jobs,” Nails says.)
“I’m just really good at saving money, and I’m willing to go into poverty for long periods of time,” Nails says. “Basically for me, to get to the position where I’m able to get financing for films that I want to make and that pay people, the best route for me is to continue working on films, keep making films and having people find out about my films.”
This month, for example, he’s hip-deep in postproduction for his first feature-length documentary, “Highway Robbery,” which chronicles a government land grab for a $17 million highway in Rockford. It’s not major studio material, certainly, but Nails loathes what he calls “business card films” — short films that mimic Hollywood plots and aesthetics in an attempt to gain attention. “People shouldn’t sell out as soon as they start. They shouldn’t give up on their creativity, or the idea of having artistic freedom right out of the gate,” Nails says. “People should make the film they want to make without making so many concessions — or any concessions, if they can.”
Born in Oregon, Nails spent his formative years in Weymouth, Mass., where his stepfather was a police officer in a neighboring town. His stepfather’s job kept the family moving for much of his childhood, making it difficult for Nails to keep a steady circle of friends. He started shooting films when he was 15, on a Super-8 camera his mother gave him. In filmmaking, he found a refuge.
“I always wanted to be in movies, basically since I was 9,” Nails says. “I loved Vincent Price and Boris Karloff; I just thought it would be cool to be in movies like `House of Wax’ and `Frankenstein.'”
With Movieside, he is stepping closer to those aspirations — he has cast himself as the ringmaster, a hybrid star/producer of short films.
“He’s not full of empty dreams about what he’s going to do in show business . . . he’s in the nitty-gritty, trying to make things happen,” says Bob Odenkirk, best known as co-host of HBO’s “Mr. Show.”
He met Nails earlier this year at Slamdance, the rebel alternative to the Sundance Film Festival in Utah, where they became friendly. On Sunday, Movieside will provide the Chicago premiere for Odenkirk’s feature debut, “Melvin Goes to Dinner.” Film festivals of all kinds thrive on networking, cobbling together contacts to fulfill moviemaking dreams.
“I wish he ran a studio,” Odenkirk says. “He wants to do interesting stuff and will run out on a limb to do it.”
Far from having a studio budget, almost everything connected to Movieside is donated, borrowed or hustled. Volunteers with day-job access to copy machines, especially color copiers, are invaluable. Nails owns neither a cell phone nor a computer, so he’s constantly borrowing them.
“His personality is energetic and excited, so he gets other people excited,” says Christy Taddeo, a fellow filmmaker who worked on his shorts “Animated Corpse” and “Grethel and Hansel.” “He’s very accommodating, even if it’s long hours . . . he has a way of keeping people interested.”
Not that Nails doesn’t push the limits occasionally. Among his friends, everyone seems to have stories rooted in exasperation, but they all stem from demanding film schedules, transportation issues, negotiating contracts — carnie stuff.
“When you’re ready to kill him, when you can’t take it anymore, he’ll do something that’s pretty charming and you’ll realize that it’s fun,” Arnholt says. “You gotta love him, he’s funny . . . he’s not afraid at all to embarrass himself.”
And he always provides something new, says John Roe, director of operations Village Entertainment, which manages the Biograph Theater.
“Rusty is a pretty unique guy. He’s somehow able to take literally no money at all and make a pretty major film event in Chicago,” Roe says. “He’s a brilliant promoter . . . he’s very, very talented at putting things together. This is [director]Jarmusch’s first-ever appearance in Chicago, and somehow Rusty was able to pull that off.”
———-
The Movieside film festival’s second-anniversary show with Jim Jarmusch begins Saturday at 6 p.m. at the Biograph Theater, 2433 N. Lincoln Ave. Sunday’s program begins at 5 p.m. Tickets are $10 per day, $9 in advance. For more information, call 773-856-5220 or visit www.movieside.com.For a list of Rusty Nails’ films, visit www.neweyefilms.com.
