Sleep Is for Sissies

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Sleep Is for Sissies is a 1980 short film written and directed by Alex Cox. Cox made it as his student film while at UCLA from 1978 to 1980.

At one stage the film was 55 minutes in length. The director cut it down to 40 minutes "because it seemed too comprehensible at 55." The result is an obscure tale of drugs, a drowned woman, mysterious pictures, and the flight into the desert which is an essential element in most of Cox's films.

The film stars Cox himself (as the inevitable young artist in society), Bob Rosen (a critical studies professor at UCLA who is now Dean of the films school), Bill Wood (a friend of Cox's from his undergraduate days at Oxford) and Christine Burton. The camerawork was by Michael Miner (later one of the creators of ROBOCOP) and Tom Richmond, with whom Cox has worked frequently since. Other traces of the director's subsequent work include a demonstration by Nicaraguans in downtown Los Angeles, and the Sid Vicious version of "My Way" - which accompanies the final scene and end credits. Though there are one or two long takes, the film is frenetically edited - more in the style of Nicholas Roeg than any of Cox's less-cutty, later films.