Fiends

Fiends is a live-action-style AI comedy shot like a 1990s American network sitcom. Famous figures from science, art, literature and politics - each with a documented history of drug use - hang out in a lavender-purple New York apartment: a white sofa, a wooden coffee table, a purple front door with a small yellow frame around the peephole, a turquoise kitchen and a tall curtained window. Elon Musk and Albert Einstein argue about the physics of farts while Albert Hofmann drops by on his bicycle; Sigmund Freud and the surgeon William Halsted share cocaine and a couch; Sartre is followed by a lobster only he can see; Ayn Rand writes on Benzedrine; Salvador Dali is the sober neighbour. The comedy comes from real, documented habits played as ordinary sitcom domestic life: bright even sitcom lighting, cuts between set-ups, characters talking to each other, never to the camera. Satire; every drug reference is drawn from the person's own words or settled history.