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When film director and Vancouver, Wash., native Nick Richey returned to Portland this month to screen 1-800-Hot-Nite, the husk that is Lloyd Center made an impression on him.
“It’s almost like you’re inside someone else’s memory of what a mall is, and they haven’t finished placing the stores,” says Richey, who was showing his sophomore feature at the Portland Film Festival. “All they can remember is Hot Topic, the ice skating rink, Orange Julius.”
That’s not dissimilar from how Richey describes the eerily nostalgic concrete backdrops of his film, which hits video on demand Nov. 4. 1-800-Hot-Nite follows three adolescent boys bouncing around the streets of Los Angeles after protagonist Tommy’s parents are suddenly arrested. The director calls it a one-night “urban odyssey,” as the three best friends chaotically scour their neighborhood for shelter, food, adventure, cash, a pool party, and a bizarre sense of connection with a phone sex operator.
To pull off the alien feeling of a childhood being lost in real time, Richey would scout locations like baseball diamonds and YMCAs and then film them as inaccessible to the wandering boys—”faded versions” of kids’ staples, as the director puts it.
The film is fueled by the tension, humor and solidarity of three friends on a collision course with real-world problems, with Richey citing Stand By Me (1986) and The 400 Blows (1959) as touchpoints. Tommy is played by Dallas Dupree Young (who, unbeknownst to Richey when the film was shooting in July 2021, was about to become a series regular on Netflix’s Cobra Kai).
Much like Low Low (2019), Richey’s Vancouver-set debut feature, 1-800-Hot-Nite is heavily inspired by the director’s hardscrabble youth across the Interstate Bridge. Autobiographical nuggets from a free-range childhood populate the script, but Richey’s early experience calling a phone sex hotline was the seed of the project.
Richey recalls squeezing into his apartment complex’s phone booth with his friends at age 13 and giving “1-800-HOT-FUCK” a ring. When a similar scene opens the film, we see the boys rapt with curiosity, trying to talk dirty (their attempts almost have a Mad Libs quality). Playing along with their fill-in-the-blank dialogue is Ava the operator, played by Ali Richey, who is a producer on the film (and is married to Nick).
“We had to grow up too early,” the director says. “We were kind of dancing on this knife’s edge of adulthood and boyhood, and I wanted to see if I could do that in this film over the course of one night.”
Like the story itself, the film’s L.A. production was a nocturnal improvisation. Hot Nite shot Friday through Sunday over six weekends, and the all-nighttime setting and labor restrictions for minors meant the three leads—Young, Gerrison Machado and Mylen Bradford—could work only from 9 pm to midnight. Early on, Richey says, he’d leave the set on Sunday thinking the production was doomed, but then have all week to rework the shot list.
“We were shimmying up a light post, duct-taping LED lights to the post, and saying, ‘OK kids! Walk past here,’” says Richey, adding that time is a production’s most valuable commodity. “Who gives a shit about a dolly track or a crane if you don’t have 25 days to shoot?”
With positive notices out of Festival du Cinéma Américain de Deauville, distribution by Quiver and a child star with nearly a half-million Instagram followers, Hot Nite appears to be a leveling up for Richey’s directing career. He’s ready to do it again—and he’s hoping to next film his thriller script about two Oklahoma women who kidnap a kid and go on the run, Thelma & Louise style.
Richey aims to raise a $5 million budget for that film, whereas Hot Nite topped out at $250,000, about half of which was previously earmarked as Nick and Ali’s down payment on a house. But the couple has no regrets about making a movie instead, he says.
“You never know if you’ll be able to replenish the bank account, but you feel like, yeah, it was the right decision, creating another round of opportunity,” Richey says. “That’s really all you can hope for in the film world we live in today.”
SEE IT: 1-800-Hot-Nite hits VOD on Friday, Nov. 4.