Penny Lane, Nuts!

After film director Penny Lane scored with Our Nixon, her fascinating study of America’s disgraced President Richard M. Nixon, she was, as she explains it, looking for another “con man liar” and stumbled across J.R. Brinkley, a Midwest “doctor” whose impotence cure via goat glands and inventive use of a powerful 1920s radio tower made him a millionaire. Comparisons to a current Republican presidential candidate are inevitable, as Lane delineates a con man’s essentials and why animation was added to archival material to tell this fascinating, tragic saga.

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