What is DOPE DEALER: A Matter of Dosage?
It’s a DoseUmentary™, a live performance documentary that transports audiences beyond the theater and into the mind of Sheldon, as he ascends and descends the spiral staircase of psychedelic consciousness.
Think How to Change Your Mind meets How to Sell Drugs Online (Fast). Or Swimming to Cambodia by way of Fear and Loathing in Los Angeles. Or George Carlin reading Go Ask Alice.
It’s a story of a boy seeking truth amid drug-war lies, enlightenment in the stoned ages, and connection while comfortably numb. It’s an ecstatic, traumatic, ribaldly funny romp, perhaps the greatest piece of psychedelic harm reduction ever conceived, so be prepared to flash back to your own deepest mind states, with a master shaman of the stage.
How it got here
Sheldon’s memoir, Confessions of a Dope Dealer (BAIPA’s Autobiography of the Year, 2000), became an extremely well-reviewed solo show that played in San Francisco and throughout the Bay Area, NorCal, Oregon, college campuses across the country, and the New York International Fringe Festival. But the Bush/Ashcroft years were not good for sensible drug commentary.
When the show went back into its road case the final time, Sheldon made a promise that one day he’d perform it once more, for his son, who was then only a toddler. When his father (who busted him for dealing) died a tragic COVID death, Sheldon turned the family home into a 30-seat black-box theater to keep that promise. Invited to direct the show, Jacob Nasim took one look and said it should be a film. Four cameras, five nights of performance, and a year of editing later, it is.
What’s left to do?
For those not familiar with film terms, our Director’s Rough Cut may be the finished version of the film in terms of scenes and shot selection, but after creating several brilliant special-effects scenes, a further level of embellishment is envisioned.
The original music used to catapult audiences into psychedelic states with Sheldon was never licensed for film, and needs to be almost entirely replaced. We do have great musicians, plus a little help from our robot overlords: AI tools that let a $10K budget do the work of $25K. And amazingly, King Crimson has licensed the most critical track! Funkadelic has offered us Maggot Brain, but that’s $7500! So until a serious backer comes along, we have to make concessions…. to reality.
Then there is all the film-world spit and polish, QC, legal, and… distribution! These are all down the road, however, and once we revise the soundtrack, we OWN the whole enchilada, and can do WTF we want with it!