Nuts! (film)

Plot

Nuts!, narrated by Gene Tognicci, documents the life and career of John R. Brinkley (1885-1942), a Milford, Kansas druggist-turned physician who, purportedly, discovered a cure for male impotence by implanting goat testicles into the scrotums of his human patients. Largely through the testimonials of his "satisfied" customers, Brinkley enjoyed a period of fame and fortune before drawing the attention of Morris Fishbein, editor of the Journal of American Medicine, and the American Medical Association, which revoked his license.

"It's because people want to believe that something as magical and as weird as this could be true. So I was less interested in telling Brinkley's story and more interested in investigating that aspect."

Brinkley is credited for building the world's most powerful radio station for the time, KFKB (Kansas Folk Know Better), popularizing country or "hillbilly" music, and inventing the infomercial with his own diatribes about public health. Brinkley ran into trouble with the Federal Radio Commission (now the Federal Communications Commission), which shut down his radio station. In response, Brinkley build the "million-watt-regulation-skirting border-blaster", XERA, in Mexico and continued broadcasting.

Brinkley ran for governor of Kansas in 1930 as a write-in candidate. It was reported he might have won had thousands of votes not been disqualified, possibly illegally, by his opponents.

Brinkley's fame and fortune deteriorated when Fishbein sued him for libel. It is revealed late in the movie that Brinkley also faced numerous wrongful death suits, had dubious academic credentials, and had an arrest record.

Cast and Crew

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 movie Nuts!, Lane uses a variety of traditional documentary techniques and materials to tell Brinkley's story: animated re-creations, archival film footage (including home movies and newsreels), readings from The Life of a Man, and interviews with present-day historians. 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.

Both Lane and 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. On the website which accompanies the film, Lane provides readers and viewers with an outline so they can check her facts: where she stayed true to the factual record, altered the chronology of events, or "simply made things up out of whole cloth".

Reception

Reviewers called Nuts! humorous, entertaining, stranger than fiction, and "catnip for audiences of a certain type".

Dennis Harvey wrote in Variety, "Lane and company created a sort of prankish ode to the classic American Dream of hard work and high ideals leading inevitably to fame, fortune and happiness. That's what Brinkley was really selling, and he mastered its packaging even if the content turned out to be mostly fraudulent".

Robert Abele wrote in the Los Angeles Times, "...if there is a chilling takeaway, it lies in the residue of consternation Lane leaves behind. You may think falling for goat glands is a pre-Interet age, snake-oil era folly. But call it something else, and who knows what you'll believe if the spiel is powerful enough?"

Ann Hornaday expressed concern in her review of the movie that the fact-checking appendix appeared months after the movie's release, allowing "plenty of time for viewers to internalize the filmmaker's imaginary characters and outright fictions of historical truth".