The Tiki War

My career has consistently combined the down-to-earth aspects of history and current events with the psychedelic sensibilities of midnight movies. My current film, "The Tiki War", for instance, deals with five "expatriates" from Cuba stranded in 1961 Chicago. These three desperate nightclub owners and two luckless entertainers are not from Cuba, but are Americans who once thrived in Havana when it was an adult playground run by dictator Fulgencio Batista. On the eve of President Kennedy's inauguration, these five plot to invade the island and return Havana to its former greatness.

This is just the latest of my films to connect politics with prurience. My first feature, the German expressionist "Made in Berlin", the shooting for which took place in 1997, concerned a senator whose affair with a politically ambitious femme fatale nearly causes his personal and professional ruin. This storyline prefigured the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky scandal that emerged the following year.

"Vixen Highway", my second feature, leaned thematically on midnight movies and exploitation films, particularly the works of Russ Meyer. Nonetheless, this movie's MacGuffin - an illegal donor liver transported by competing bands of low-lifes to the house of an ailing rock star - was a humorous reflection on outrage, expressed in the media at the time of the film's production in 2000, over self-destructive celebrities being pushed to the top of organ recipient lists.

In 2003, I explored the subjects of chemical dependency and rehabilitation in my futuristic short "Proinhibition". Here, a treatment center in the year 2050 houses recovery groups based not on people's addictions, but their professions. The most notable of these is a support group for dominatrixes. This includes the main character, Mistress Maggie M., who is dragged in for involuntary treatment at the center run by the actively alcoholic Dr Rich S. With this sardonic work, I raised questions about the outdated and ineffective processes of addiction treatment - something the world certainly needs, but which also needs improvement.

Cinema and civics take equal amounts of space in my 2013 film "Citizen 'Caine". Insurance salesman Lou Phillips suffers an addiction not only to cocaine, but to the cinema of Nicolas Cage. Lou and two characters from the porno/home-maintenance movie studio whose production he interrupts - director Sir John Blunstone and security guard Ratan - are veterans of the Desert Storm, Falkland Islands and Iraq Wars, respectively. The studio's name, Deep Horizons, reflects the 2010 natural and corporate calamity involving oil in the Gulf of Mexico.

With my continuing observation of political forces around the world and, especially, my continuing enjoyment of the cinema of the weird, I plan to author many more "sociological midnight movies". "The Tiki War" will hopefully carry on this self-made tradition.