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Winner

Winner is a fictional interview gone awry, featuring a reticent sweepstakes winner who doggedly avoids receiving her prize and manages to morph an ad spot into a mini documentary about her art work.

Shot in a day and largely improvised, Winner is the first collaborative video by Dodge and Kahn. Featuring Kahn as "Lois," an attention-starved Angeleno, and Dodge as the cameraman who indulges her, Winner established a formative role-playing between them: a symbiotic relationship between camera and subject, indigenous to the world's entertainment capital. In Winner, Lois gets her fifteen minutes in the spotlight when she wins a cruise through a radio call-in show. The sponsoring station deploys a cameraman, "Peter," to record a clip of her thanking them for the prize, but Lois is more intent on showing him her sculptures, on display in the trunk of her car. They look like assemblages of flotsam, clumsily held together with duct tape. Peter initially tries to steer Lois back to the task at hand, but her desperation to have an audience—any audience—is so achingly palpable that he doesn't have the heart to shut her out. He drifts with her into a nearby park, where Lois begins to talk of future film collaborations, and divulges a project in development, an adaptation of Michael Jackson's Thriller music video, with wind and bird sounds layered over it. More than a parody of a L.A. wannabe, Lois is a complex character, as dangerously zealous and needy as Robert De Niro's Rupert Pupkin in The King of Comedy.