INTERVIEW: Penny Lane explores life of charlatan doctor in new documentary
Penny Lane, the filmmaker behind Our Nixon, has crafted an interesting new documentary about a strange and engaging man. J.R. Brinkley was a charlatan of the highest accord. He had several claims to infamy, but none so odd as his treatment of impotence for his male patients. He would transplant goat glands into his patients, promising the men that their problems would become a thing of the past. The country doctor was so successful at the surgeries, and the publicity behind this magical “cure” was so widespread, he became a veritable institution in the Midwest, and this led to a small empire of influence in Milford, Kansas, and other parts of the country.
Nuts!, which is currently playing the Film Forum in New York City, tells Brinkley’s story with a mixture of narration, interviews with historians and clever animation sequences. The result is a 79-minute film that explores the life and lies of a man accused of being a quack.
“So in 2008 I read a book called Charlatan by Pope Brock,” Lane said recently in a phone interview. “He’s one of the main interviews subjects in the film, and I just came across it in the library. … I wasn’t looking for it, and I was very taken with the story. The story is really nuts and amazing, and I was really surprised that I had never heard this story before. And I was even kind of more surprised that no one had ever made a film about him because it just seemed like a story that he made for the movies.”
When Lane started telling people that she was adapting this story about a controversial doctor from the 1910s and 1920s, she would receive some strange responses. First off, they wanted to know if the procedure actually worked. “And I’d be like, ‘No, no, of course, it didn’t work. Of course, he’s a quack and a charlatan,'” she said. “To me it felt very clear that people wanted me to say yes, and so that was kind of the inspiring thing was the idea that people, even 100 years later, were still kind of willing to believe Brinkley’s crazy thing.”
The method of telling Brinkley’s story through a mixture of animation, reenactments and taped interviews came gradually to the director, who struggled for financing on the project and ultimately worked for eight years on the film. Lane started with the archival information of Brinkley and his two main places of residence: Kansas and Texas. She also had a wealth of information from courtroom documents and Brinkley’s supposed biography, The Life of a Man. Plus, the country doctor was an early pioneer of the radio, so she was able to tap into his legacy as a smalltime, yet influential, figure in the early days of that broadcast medium.
She initially made a cut of the film with the archival information piled together, and she didn’t think it worked. Then she added in four interview subjects who could provide context on the history, and she still wasn’t satisfied with the results. Narration came next, and yet she still needed something extra. That something extra proved to be animated reenactments of Brinkley’s life and courtroom drama.
“The courtroom scenes are largely from transcript,” Lane said. “When Morris Fishbein [of the American Medical Association] is speaking, we’re largely pulling from his written work, and a lot of Brinkley’s words come from either newspaper articles that we read or from that book, The Life of a Man. But, you know, of course, it’s all movie-ized.”
The Life of a Man was a treasure trove for Lane. This biography, which is discussed in the film, is a supposed true story of Brinkley’s rise through the medical profession as a maverick and outsider, someone who bucked the establishment and spoke to the will of the people. Its truthfulness is largely in doubt, but it still gave Lane so much material.
“It was huge,” she said. “When I found that book and I read it, I just thought, oh, wow, this book is so perfect because what Brinkley was doing, and he was so good at, was … creating the illusion of authority and trustworthiness. And so almost all of the archival material, first and foremost that book, it really is all part of his self-creation and all kind of his way of creating this illusion that he’s like a trustworthy guy. And so that book looks like a biography, smells like a biography. It says biography on the cover. It’s just basically another ad, so that came as a huge revelation.”
The director didn’t want to make a movie about a con man and his cons. Instead, she plays a little of the deception game with the audience. Brinkley and his unconventional surgical technique are presented as a story of American life, of a man fighting to survive in a close-minded medical world. Lane essentially buys into the Brinkley myth to tell Brinkley’s own story, and the results are quite clever and revealing.
“I thought a more interesting movie would be let’s find out what it’s like to be conned,” she said. “Let’s have the experience of being conned. Let’s feel that in our bodies and have that as an emotional and intellectual experience even at the risk of upsetting people and making them a little bit angry with me because I think that’s a useful experience to have. I’m not going to con you and not tell you that I’ve conned you. I’m going to con you and tell you that I’ve done that. That’s the difference between me and Brinkley, right? And I just thought that would be really interesting, and it would allow me to explore certain kind of ethical issues in documentary filmmaking that I think are very interesting and very important.”
Brinkley, despite his serious misgivings, did have an influence on American society and history. After all, he was a few votes shy of becoming the governor of Kansas. “A lot of people that are bad people have good ideas or invent things that we find useful,” Lane said. “It’s not like American history is devoid of people like this who are operating probably largely out of self-interest and greed and also happen to invent things that are useful to the world, so I actually find that kind of character very interesting. It’s sort of like the line between the sociopathic American Psycho businessman and the heroic inventor businessman is sometimes not that strong. Sometimes the boundary is not that clear.”
The eight years it took to make Nuts! is a testament to Lane’s determination to finish the project, but there were days when it appeared the documentary would never come to fruition.
“I mean it was incredibly difficult to make this film, and most of the time when I was making it, I thought I was going to fail,” she said. “The risk of failure was, I felt, quite high, and I think it’s part of what actually drives me. … I mean, why would you want to make a movie that’s definitely going to succeed? It’s probably going to be f—ing boring. To me the terror of failure was very real, but I think that that’s part of what I’m proud of is that I somehow managed to convince myself it was worth doing.”
There is a comedic element to Nuts!, and the animation sequences have a way of giving the film a deceptively light and breezy air. However, there are important and sometimes quite dark themes bubbling beneath the surface as well. Lane wants audience members to enjoy the documentary but also to learn some historical lessons, especially in a 2016 landscape where charlatanism is still in play.
“We still fall for the same stuff we fell for in Shakespeare’s times, probably even before that,” she said. “Yeah, of course, I hope people will have the sense that there’s resonance with the contemporary moment. … I certainly didn’t know the specific resonances that would be existing when the film was done, but it turns out to be a pretty fortuitous year, not for our republic but for people thinking the film has resonance.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Nuts! is currently playing the Film Forum in New York City. Click here for more information.
