SLAUGHTER NICK FOR PRESIDENT directed by Rob Stewart, Lisa Vespi and Marc Vespi. A Vagrant Films release. 72 minutes. Opens Friday (May 10). For venues and times, see listings.
Great things have humble beginnings. So do first-person documentaries about Canadian actors who discover they’re famous in Serbia for a crappy TV show they did two decades earlier. Or at least that’s what Rob Stewart discovered – and caught on video – in his movie Slaughter Nick For President.
Once upon a time, Stewart (no relation to the maker of Sharkwater and Revolution) starred in a cheesy detective series called Sweating Bullets, distributed around the world as Tropical Heat.
“I did that show in the 90s,” Stewart recalls over a beer at Gabby’s on Bloor. “Terrible show. Big embarrassment. But I was a bartender [before] and then I wasn’t, so that was cool.”
Actually, Stewart was a filmmaker who’d run into a creative wall and turned to acting to pay the bills. And though he didn’t know it at the time, his Sweating Bullets character, Nick Slaughter, was embraced by Serbian audiences as a symbol of resistance against the Milosevic regime, even inspiring a song by punk band Atheist written in his honour.
Years later, having moved back to Brampton with his son, Stewart found out about his character’s fame.
“My son got me on Facebook,” he says. “That’s where I found out about the whole thing. I did a little vanity searching, and that was it.”
With his old friends (and neighbours) Marc and Lisa Vespi, Stewart set out to explore his impact on Serbia. It wasn’t as simple as going back online.
“Marc emailed the band, but he kept calling me ‘Mr. Stewart,’ and they ignored it. I was like, ‘Dude, it’s a fuckin’ punk band – just say It’s Rob!” So he did, and they ignored that, too. Then my son – he’s a guitarist – saw the YouTube video of them playing the song they wrote about the character, and he wrote to them. ‘Nice lick there. I’m Nick Slaughter’s son. That’s a really good fuckin’ song.’ And they wrote back.”
From there, Stewart and his partners plotted, scrounged and hustled their way to Serbia in the hopes of appearing with the band at a concert.
Again, not that simple.
“It was a shit-show,” he laughs. “The punk guitarist who was our only connection said, ‘Listen, you’ve gotta understand this is Macondo [referring to the surreal world of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years Of Solitude]. Nothing’s gonna make sense until you get here.’
“We couldn’t plan anything. We booked flights two weeks before, and the money came in for us to be able to go – a loan we’re still paying for – a week before. It was a disaster till we landed.”
What happened then… well, you kind of have to see it to believe it. But it’s not a spoiler to say that Serbia has been waiting a very long time to meet Nick Slaughter in the flesh.
“Maybe it’s because I’m a Leo,” Stewart smiles, playing up the moment, “but it seemed completely natural.”
normw@nowtoronto.com | @wilnervision
