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Quirky favorite sets tone of cinema celebration

'Nothing Lasts Forever': Film kicks off festival Friday

MOLLY GILMORE; For The Olympian | • Published November 05, 2009

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Imagine a science-fiction film made by the co-creator of "Saturday Night Live."

Imagine it tells the story of a young aspiring artist who takes a bus trip to the moon with Bill Murray, Imogene Coca and Eddie Fisher (playing himself).

That is the film, the 25-year-old “Nothing Lasts Forever,” that will open the 26th annual Olympia Film Festival on Friday.

If the film sounds highly unusual, that’s no surprise to its director, Tom Schiller, best known as the creator of “Saturday Night Live’s” Schiller’s Reel films. Four of those short films also will be shown Friday.

“I decided to completely ignore any traditional film story elements whatsoever,” said Schiller of New York, who’ll be at the festival to talk about “Nothing Lasts Forever.”

“I used a lot of favorite movie clippings, and I imitated a lot of lines from other movies, and I think maybe only two people understood it when I was through, me and my brother, and I don’t even think my brother understood it fully.”

If you haven’t heard of the film, you needn’t relinquish your Olympia Film Society membership card: It played only in an almost-forgotten two-week test run at Seattle’s Crest Cinema.

“It’s the 25th anniversary of that two-week premiere,” said Shade Rupe of Littlerock, the film programmer for this year’s festival.

Rupe’s film-buff cred is impeccable: He saw “Nothing Lasts Forever” at the Crest.

“I took buses there from Mercer Island,” he said. “I was 15.”

His assessment? “It’s fun, it’s funny, it’s cute, but it’s not unintelligent. It’s a very different, special, odd little movie that at one time in America probably could have played but not today.”

The film got lost, Schiller said, because even at the time, it was not commercial enough – and perhaps because it includes archival footage from a number of old films, which would have made its release more expensive and difficult.

However, it became a cult favorite in Europe – and more recently has been shown at a number of festivals as well as at the Lincoln Center in New York. Several of the screenings were organized by Rupe, who befriended Schiller through letters about the time he first saw the film.

“It went directly to European TV, in Germany and France and Holland and Spain and Venezuela and England and Holland,” Schiller said. “I was secretly delighted about that because I’d always wanted to be a foreign-film director. I prefer the European sensibility of film rather than the American.”

Since his days at “SNL” and making the film, Schiller has been doing commercials. Would he like to make another feature?

“The movie is about 83 minutes,” he said, “and my shorts were about 4 minutes, and advertising was about 30 seconds. So I think I should do some three-second things from now on. Short till it practically diminishes to a pinpoint.”