Five Nights Out (Trailer)
Channel: Five Nights Out
Date: 2021-04-01

About Five Nights Out
(Full Version Premiers May 15, 2021)

In 1993, twenty-two year old zinester Jean Railla bought a video camera with her first credit card and decided to make a documentary about her friends’ post-punk bands living and playing in LA’s Silverlake neighborhood. The result: Five Nights Out, follows Railla over the course of five nights, as she sees bands, dances in living rooms and attends backyard parties. Shot like a zine with diary entries, the film features live shows by Beck before he was Beck, as well as Possum Dixon, Mime Crime, the Able Lincoln Story, Horse Power and the poet Pleasant Gehman. The film offers an unprecedented glimpse into pre-digital hipsterism, as Railla documents the musicians, artists and hangers-on at parties, in parking lots and in cars, as they grapple with issues of “making it” in a pre-social media time.

As Railla explains: “Five Nights Out is a love letter to the underground LA indie rock scene in the early 1990’s. Being a part of that scene changed my life. Probably saved it, too.”

“Five Nights Out' is an inspired time capsule of LA’s 1993 alt-punk scene, featuring Possum Dixon, Ethyl Meatplow, Beck, Glue and the Abe Lincoln Story. The film offers an insider’s view of these bands on and off the stage, intercut with party antics such as drunken reminisces in a bathtub, a midnight heavy metal aerobics session and mambo breakdancing in Beck’s living room.” — LA Weekly Starred Review

"Five Nights Out is a document of its time, shot in the vernacular of that moment," — Stephen Duncombe, NYU Professor of Media and Culture 

While never widely released, the music documentary made the cover of LA Weekly, premiered at the influential Zine Scream Festival in Los Angeles, and was screened at the Seattle International Film Festival, as well as the Yo-Yo-A-Go-Go Festival in Olympia, WA — at that time the sine qua non of 90’s indie music and zines.