You may not have noticed that there\u2019s been very little buzz online about the 20th anniversary of Spaceman<\/i><\/span>. That\u2019s because you probably have no idea that Spaceman <\/i>exists. It\u2019s all right, though. Hardly anyone does. But perhaps they should.<\/span><\/p>\n A little background for the uninitiated, which in this case includes practically everybody. Spaceman <\/i>is a 1997 feature film in which a young boy is abducted by aliens and trained as a gladiator in an intergalactic bloodsport. When he finds himself marooned on Earth as a young man, he struggles to adapt to a day-to-day existence that doesn\u2019t include battles to the death. It\u2019s a dark sci-fi comedy with a melancholy undercurrent of existential quandary. That\u2019s a description befitting Spaceman<\/i> writer and director Scott Dikkers, best known as the co-founder of satire juggernaut The Onion<\/i>.<\/span><\/p>\n Of course, that credit didn\u2019t mean as much in 1997, when The Onion<\/i> was a cult item, a hugely funny publication still transitioning from its roots as a Midwestern college newspaper to a place of national prestige. Still, his Onion <\/i>bona fides gave Dikkers the leverage to pursue his filmmaking dreams, albeit on a very small scale. <\/span><\/p>\n \u201cSteven Spielberg was my idol in my teens,\u201d Dikkers told me in a recent interview. \u201cWhen I was a teenager, the following movies came out: Close Encounters of the Third Kind<\/i>, Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T.<\/i> Obviously Star Wars <\/i>was big, Superman <\/i>was big. It was the golden age of Hollywood B-movies produced as A-movies,\u201d Using that concept as a guideline, Dikkers set out to write Spaceman <\/i>as a throwback to both old-school sci-fi flicks and the high-minded blockbusters of his youth. Although he\u2019d attended film school at the University of Southern California and helmed a sketch comedy TV show in Madison, Wis., he was still very much a newbie when it came to making movies. Once he got started, though, the project propelled him. \u201cIt hit me as a funny fish-out-of-water story. I\u2019d never written a screenplay before, but it was one of those things that I just felt compelled to do. I really had no control over it.\u201d The end result was a well-pedigreed, ambitiously conceived, genuinely funny curiosity from the thick of the \u201890s indie boom. By all appearances, Spaceman<\/i> should be a cult classic. Heaven knows lesser films from the same period have claimed that title. Yet 20 years later it remains deeply obscure, if well-liked by the few folks who\u2019ve actually seen it. (The DVD is out of print, though not impossible to find.)\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Dikkers confirms that obscurity, and says he doesn\u2019t recall getting any feedback from fans over the years. \u201cI don\u2019t know that there\u2019s any kind of fan base. It\u2019s just a small, unknown movie.\u201d That can be chalked up at least partially to what Dikkers calls \u201cthe indie film lottery\u201d \u2014 for every Clerks<\/i> or El Mariachi<\/i>, the \u201890s yielded dozens of also-rans that didn\u2019t grab the public\u2019s fancy in quite the same way. Still, it\u2019s worth examining some of the factors that have held Spaceman <\/i>back from true cult status.<\/span><\/p>\n One reliable path to cultdom is to have someone involved go on to greater stardom. Films like Following<\/i> and Bottle Rocket<\/i> were indie hits on their own merit, but they\u2019d likely be largely forgotten today if their directors hadn\u2019t grown up to be Christopher Nolan and Wes Anderson. While Scott Dikkers carries an impressive list of credentials \u2014 beyond his print work, he also created the classic anti-comedy comic strip Jim\u2019s Journal<\/i> and produced the Peabody-Award winning Onion News Network<\/i> video series \u2014 he\u2019s a long way from being a household name. He does have another feature film to his credit, 2011\u2019s similarly overlooked Bad Meat<\/i>, but it\u2019s easy for people to write him off as a funny guy who made a couple of movies rather than a legitimate filmmaker. <\/span><\/p>\n Of the Spaceman<\/i> cast, both leading man David Ghilardi and deranged antagonist Brian Stack are accomplished writers and recognizable character actors, but not many people are going to hunt down a 20-year-old comedy because it stars the teacher from that one Buffy <\/i>episode and Jorgenson from 30 Rock<\/i>. It\u2019s very possible that Dikkers will direct a zeitgeist-grabbing movie somewhere down the line, or that Stack will become America\u2019s new favorite sitcom dad. When that happens, folks will seek out Spaceman<\/i>, but until then it\u2019s not going to get discovered via star power alone.<\/span><\/p>\n Another stumbling block for Spaceman<\/i> may be that it\u2019s actually too well-made. Although it\u2019s clearly made on the cheap by largely untested filmmakers \u2014 \u201cIt was not a low-budget, independent film. It was more like a glorified home movie,\u201d says Dikkers \u2014 it\u2019s a well-written, coherently structured piece of work built around actors who mostly know what they\u2019re doing. While it\u2019s not unheard of for legitimate forgotten gems to find their cults in the streaming era, the real drawing cards are the outsiders and oddballs. Homemade gore-jockeys like Mark and John Polonia<\/a> and DIY anarchists like Charles Pinion<\/a> command cult followings not because they overcame the limitations of their tiny budgets, but because they leaned into them and created movies so defiantly non-professional that they bristle with a strain of liveliness that no traditional film could come close to capturing. There\u2019s a whole underground of videohounds dedicated to unearthing shot-on-video weirdness and backyard slasher movies that would be justifiably hated by 98% of moviegoers and fervently embraced by the 2% for whom they resonate. <\/span><\/p>\n No one is going to mistake Spaceman<\/i> for a big-studio production, but its comparative competence ironically makes it less interesting to a certain segment of obscurity seekers. Perversely enough, there might be more of a market for Dikkers\u2019 film if he\u2019d fallen far shorter of his Spielbergian ideals. As devotees of Birdemic<\/i> and Samurai Cop<\/i> can tell you, there\u2019s always a place in the canon for audacious failures. Solidly made, modestly ambitious riffs on classic themes don\u2019t have quite the same ironic appeal.<\/span><\/p>\n Along the same lines, the vast majority of those low-budget rediscoveries are pure genre fare. There are certain genres of film that have always attracted a more dedicated fanbase \u2014 just look at the hundreds of websites and podcasts dedicated to obscure \u201880s horror and action flicks. Italian exploitation of the \u201870s has plenty of devotees, as do the nudie boom of the \u201860s and = the direct-to-video erotic thrillers of the \u201890s. While Spaceman<\/i> would seem to have some genre clout behind it as a sci-fi action movie birthed at the end of the \u201890s indie cinema boom, it\u2019s also a cerebral satire with elements of romantic comedy. The bandwagon for that particular genre is exceedingly small. Comedies in general have a harder row to hoe here. It\u2019s rare to see a low-budget, star-free comedy break the cult barrier. After all, even a bad horror or action movie often yields some unintentional laughs or ironic fun. A bad comedy, on the other hand, is a truly painful thing, so perhaps viewers are more reluctant to take the gamble.<\/span><\/p>\n So does all of this mean that Spaceman <\/i>is doomed to remain an ultra-obscure artifact of an overstuffed indie cinema boom? Not necessarily. Despite the long odds, it does boast a number of cult cinema hooks, starting with its title character. David Ghilardi\u2019s unwavering deadpan in the lead role brings to mind Peter Weller\u2019s Robocop played partly for laughs, but with an unnerving intensity that makes the film\u2019s fight sequences feel surprisingly high-stakes. Pair Ghilardi\u2019s performance with a memorable bit of costume design that makes Spaceman look like a mash-up of Pee-Wee Herman, Klaus Nomi, and the Good Humor Man, and you\u2019ve got the kind of iconically off-kilter character who could launch a hundred hipster Halloween costumes.<\/span><\/p>\n It\u2019s also a movie whose backstory is laden with the kind of quirky indie anecdotes that film geeks gobble up. The cast, for example, was patched together from a mix of Chicago-area actors and comedians, various Onion <\/i>staffers (including Robert D. Siegel, future writer of The Wrestler<\/i> and The Founder<\/i>), and assorted homeless people who\u2019d work for the price of a room. In fact, the film\u2019s lead villain, a mob boss who wants to recruit Spaceman as a contract killer, is played by a Madison panhandler whose \u201cdevious look\u201d impressed Dikkers. The film even boasts a bit of an Entourage<\/i> tie-in, as Spaceman <\/i>had a long flirtation with notorious Hollywood super-agent Ari Emanuel, muse of Jeremy Piven and brother of Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel, who wound up dumping the project in an awkward phone call to Dikkers from a ski slope. <\/span><\/p>\n And, of course, the most important factor that could lead to a Spaceman<\/i> resurgence: it\u2019s a pretty darn good movie. It\u2019s rough around the edges, to be sure, and not all of its \u201890s signifiers have aged gracefully, but it\u2019s a very strange, very funny, oddly insightful piece of work that\u2019s decidedly not for everyone but is right on point for a select few. It\u2019s a cult classic, in other words, the type of film that would almost certainly catch the fancy of a certain audience if there were only a way to put it in front of them.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n But even if his movie never sees that kind of resurgence \u2014 and he seems justifiably skeptical that it will \u2014 Dikkers is content to regard it as a learning tool. \u201cI\u2019m a huge believer in failure as the pathway to success. I think failure is the best teacher. There are a lot of failures associated with Spaceman<\/i>, and I learned a lot from all of them.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" You may not have noticed that there\u2019s been very little buzz online about the 20th anniversary of Spaceman. That\u2019s because […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":511,"featured_media":7988,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[337,1399,1381],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7987","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-culture","category-looking-back","category-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7987","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/511"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7987"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7987\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7988"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7987"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7987"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7987"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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