Vacancy in the Night
2016. 16 min. B&W and Color.
Truman checks in to the Wayfare Motel to kill himself. Instead he witnesses a murder, comes face to face with evil incarnate, and sleeps with the girl behind the reception desk.
Available for 16mm and blu-ray rental. Rivera-sennett@gmail.com.
Poster by Alex Rivera
Set Photos
The lights were wonderful. There ought to be a monument to the man who invented neon lights. Fifteen stories high, solid marble. There's a boy who really made something out of nothing.
-Raymond Chandler, The Little Sister
California, Labor Day weekend . . . early, with ocean fog still in the streets, outlaw motorcyclists wearing chains, shades and greasy Levis roll out from damp garages, all-night diners and cast-off on-night pads in Frisco, Hollywood, Berdoo and East Oakland, heading for the Monterey peninsula, north of Big Sur . . . The Menace is loose again, the Hell's Angels, the hundred-carat headline, running fast and loud on the early morning freeway, low in the saddle, nobody smiles, jamming crazy through traffic and ninety miles an hour down the center stripe, missing by inches . . . like Genghis Khan on an iron horse, a monster steed with a fiery anus, flat out through the eye of a beer can and up your daughter's leg with no quarter asked and none given; show the squares some class, give em a whiff of those kicks they'll never know . . . Ah, these righteous dudes, they love to screw it on . . . Little Jesus, The Gimp, Chocolate George, Buzzard, Zorro, Hambone, Clean Cut, Tiny, Terry The Tramp, Frenchy, Mouldy Marvin, Mother Miles, Dirty Ed, Chuck The Duck, Fat Freddy, Filthy Phil, Charger Charley The Child Molester, Crazy Cross, Puff, Magoo, Animal and at least a hundred more . . . tense for the action, long hair in the wind, beards and bandanas flapping, earrings, armpits, chain whips, swastikas and stripped-down Harleys flashing chrome as traffic on 101 moves over, nervous, to let the formation pass like a burst of dirty thunder . . .
Hunter S. Thompson, Hells Angels
"Fully to convey how old, cracked, rotten, rickety, decayed, crippled, crooked, feeble, moribund this furniture is would require a description involving a digression from the interest of this story which impatient readers would find inexcusably long . . . In a word the drabbest poverty rules supreme; a pennypinching, concentrated, threadbare poverty. Squalor may not yet have taken over, but there are patches of it; all is not yet tattered and torn, but it is rotting away."
"These boarders hinted at dramas past or present; not the dramas performed in the glare of the footlights, against painted backcloths, but living, wordless dramas, icy dramas to stir and scar the heart, dramas without end."
Balzac, Le Père Goriot
