Fireworks Logo

Trailers...

  • Kiss of the Spider Woman
  • Babystar
  • Hola Frida
  • American Schemers
  • Oxygen Masks Will (Not) Drop Automatically
  • Life Inside Me (A)
  • Love Me Tender
  • Doin' It
  • Thirty Years with the Whip
  • Nest (The)
  • Flat Girls
  • Fréwaka
  • See You
  • Compulsion
  • Inside Amir
  • Peter Hujar's Day
  • Captive (The)
  • Constantinopoliad
  • Weapons
  • Follies
  • I Have Never Been on an Airplane
  • Nova 78'
  • Alexina B. Composing Lives
  • Long Road to the Director's Chair (The)
  • Griffin in Summer
  • Girls & Boys
  • Premiere (The)
  • Unforgivable
  • Wayward
  • Cutaways
  • My Sunnyside
  • Brigitte’s Planet B
  • How Far Does The Dark Go?
  • Brief History of the LGBT+ Press in Brazil (A)
  • Internal Comms
  • Ghost Empire § Mauritius-Chagos
  • Mothers, Lovers and Others
  • Labyrinth of Lost Boys
  • Gunyo Cholo: The Dress
  • Days of August

Japanese Sandman (The)

Country: USA, Language: English, 12 mins

  • Director: Ed Buhr
  • Writer: William S. Burroughs

CGiii Comment

Burroughs was distinctive...that whiney drawl with hatchet-job words.

This is an impersonation...and, it works, in part...that is, until the director flips from black & white into colour...for reasons best known to himself.

An impersonated Burroughs is an acquired taste...despite the obvious amount of work that went into this...it falls short of a true imagining of a Burroughs  drug-fuelled debacle.


Watch...

The(ir) Blurb...

Both wry travelogue and heartbreaking tale of love lost, The Japanese Sandman adapts a letter William S. Burroughs wrote to Allen Ginsberg in 1953. Told in Burroughs' caustically funny voice, cocaine snorting in Panama and post-prom handjobs in 1931 St. Louis dissolve into a meditation on memory and loss.Actor/performance artist John Fleck leads a stand-out cast through Burroughs' recounting of scoring opiates and boys in Panama and, in the letter's P.S., a love affair with farm boy Billy Brandshinkel in the Ozark's of his youth. Imperial Teen's Roddy Bottum provides the lively and compelling score.

Cast & Characters

Ferd Eggan as Jones the Cab Driver;
Eleanor Estes as Officer's Wife;
Amanda Ferguson as Officer's Wife;
John Fleck as William S. Burroughs;
Darcey Leonard as Panamanian Whore;
Raymond Lopez Jr. as Panamanian Civil Servant;
Cristina Nava as Panamanian Whore;
Nick Niven as Billy Bradshinkel;
Amy O'Neill as Mother / Officer's Wife;
Keston Ridley as The Hip Spade;
Leigh Rose as Grandmother;
Sam Slovick as Bill Gains;
Stephen Twardokus as Young William Burroughs