All 9 of the 9 @ Night Films are going to play at the Harvard Film Archives, in Cambridge, Massachusetts on the Harvard College campus, 9 films in their intended order, three films per night for three straight nights, Nov. 17- 19. This is a return to the old alma mater for me but Harvard is a much different place today than it was when I graduated, class of ’61. I don’t know anyone there except Steffen Pierce, an old friend, an excellent filmmaker and a long time employee at the Archives and Ray Carney, cassavetes.com, a Professor at Boston University, another old friend and the writer of the great books on John Cassavetes which include John Cassavetes, The Adventure of Insecurity, American Dreaming, Shadows, The Films of John Cassavetes; Pragmatism, Modernism and the Movies, and Cassavetes on Cassavetes. I am proud to announce that Ray, also the author of books on Carl Dreyer and Mike Leigh is going to be on hand to introduce each of our films and I suspect that many of his supporters from the Boston area will also be there. Ray promoted our Mill Valley Festival openings and has written an insightful preface to our films for the Archives newsletter.

But this is no home town screening for us. I presented films at the Harvard Archives a decade ago but have not been in Boston since. Maybe we could expect to fill four houses at Mill Valley. I grew up there. I’ve lived in the Bay Area most of my life. We made the 9 @ Night Films there. But Harvard is a different animal. We’re going to need all the help we can get to help the Harvard Archives promote this event.

Remember this is going to be the first time that all 9 of the 9 @ Night films are going to play, one through nine, three films a night for three successive nights. This is an historic occasion and we need to let others know that these extraordinary films, produced with the Tenderloin yGroup’s Player’s Ensemble, filmed from the ground up and featuring the character, passion and skill of players. homeless and ex-homeless, street people, inner city residents, professional actors and all-comers, constitute a one- of- a- kind artistic achievement. Please also let people know that there is going to be a Screening Club set up at the Archives so that those who sign up to see all 9 films with me will get discounted tickets and special discussion sessions before and after selected screenings. Each member of the Screening Club will also receive a DVD of their favorite 9 @ Night film.

“Watching Rob Nilsson’s film “‘Need”, I became aware that I was watching an entirely new kind of film. Shockingly new the way cinema verite was new in its time, the way “Easy Rider” was new, the way the impressionists were outcasts because no one had seen the world through a painter’s eyes that way ever before. And new in the way that once these new forms of art were seen, nothing could ever be the same again.” -Karen Black

“If there were any justice in the world, Rob Nilsson’s actors from the Tenderloin yGroup would be as widely recognized and hailed as any of the current crop of nobodies gracing the pages of People and US magazine. In Rob’s new film, NEED, the latest in his nine-picture series, the performances are every bit as bold, daring, unremittingly true and startling as they have been in all the others. Do whatever you have to do to see these films and these actors.” -Peter Coyote

“The “9 @ Night” series, which will be presented for the first time in its entirety at Harvard, is his most ambitious and controversial project to date. Nilsson has created a master–narrative more than 14 hours in length, made up of nine interlocking yet independent fictional films focusing on the lives of the drifters, scam–artists, hustlers, sex–trade workers, and others who exist on the tattered fringes of American society and populate San Francisco’s poorest and most deprived neighborhood, the Tenderloin District.” -Ray Carney

But all the praise and publicity means nothing if people don’t come and see for themselves. Please let people, friends colleagues, acquaintances, friend and foe on the East Coast know the importance of this event. Encourage them to get the word out through the Internet, through personal calls and endorsements. Remember that Hollywood and Indiewood have the media, money, and legions of publicists and flaks to tell the public to go to the movie theatres. We have The 15,000, people who by choice alone, have found our films important and worthwhile.

Hollywood doesn’t need everyone they know to go their films. But we do. Our audience, at this point may not be huge but it is passionate. And that’s what it’s going to take to make this event a success: the passion to get the word out about a different look, a different meaning, and a different mission. This is not entertainment which encourages you to lean back and forget your cares. This is expression which wants you to lean forward and remember what it means to be alive in the face of the world’s contradictions and conundrums, to remember the needs and longings, the joys and sorrows, the dark and the light of human existence. These are films about people from the shadows but they might just well be you and me, only in tighter straits and closer to life’s bottom lines.

By chance, by luck, by choice and by the unknown whims of fate, the 40- 50 fictional characters in 9 @ Night exist in places far from bourgeois comfort, but close to edges where the difference between living and dying can highlight a common humanity. It is condescending to think of them as victims. It is pompous to think of them as beneath our notice. The scam artists, petty thieves and con- men of the Tenderloin do what governments do, but with fewer resources and less to lose and gain. The prostitutes and AIDS sufferers, drug addicts and alcoholics, may live closer to honest need than the world of straight business with its fake advertising creating superficial wants and unworthy desires. There may be more truths to tell on a piss-soaked street corner, than on an antiseptic, marble balustrade in front of a court house. Nobility and kindness may be more common in a homeless encampment down by the tracks, than in a legislative hall filled with lawmakers on the make. Maybe.

But there will also be bad choices and unwise actions committed by those far from the bastions of middle class American life. There will be hatred in a hovel, even as there is murder in a mansion. It is up to the curious, the committed, the empathetic and the judgmental alike to bear witness to the lives presented in these films. Our players from the Tenderloin yGroup do not create their characters within the safety of carefully cultivated film biz “locations.” They work out in the open, unshielded from everyday life on streets not cordoned off with yellow tape, rubbing shoulders with people at large who go about their business and sometimes stop, and almost without thinking, join our troupe “on the midnight” and then move on as if it were no big deal, as if filmmaking were just another way of daily speaking and playing out who we are, who we were, or who we want to be.

Please tell people that they will never see another group of films like 9 @ Night, and that if they come in numbers, they will greatly increase the chance that those who haven’t heard the word will be inspired to see them in the future. After more than 15 years of filming on the street corners, in the alleys, alongside the tracks, on landfills and under the freeways of America, this is our chance. Let’s show the world what we’ve done and who we are!