Performer returns to hometown for a little movie, poetry and other fun

Filmmaker, musician and raconteur Chad Simmons, who grew up in Las Vegas, graduated from Eldorado High School and got his degree from UNLV, says he left town because sometimes, "you've just got to move away from your hometown."

But Sin City's former son will return to regale a local audience with stories, potentially bad poetry and his cinematic interpretation of the alphabet in "The Short Version of Chad Simmons" at 7 p.m. today at the West Las Vegas Library, 951 W. Lake Mead Blvd.

And, if people are lucky, he jokes, he won't sing.

Simmons, 38, moved to Portland, Ore., five years ago, but his parents still live in Las Vegas, where he developed his tongue-in-cheek, self-deprecating attitude. It has led to his shtick as a performer: making audiences think, understand and act by inspiring them through short films, spontaneous poetry, jokes and the occasional song.

"That's probably a pretty grandiose statement. I think all art does that," Simmons says. "I cringe when I call myself an artist. A lot of who I am and the way I express myself comes from the punk scene. I like to think that some of the things I make can engage people."

Simmons is an enigma and a whirlwind, a guy who's hard to define and difficult to pin down. But have a short conversation with him and you'll probably come away with the feeling that you know what he's about. He's driven by the need to create something meaningful and help people in the process.

He's a veteran of the stage, getting his first taste of performing in high school as a singer with the pseudo-punk band Part-time Whore.

"We were part of a pretty good punk scene," Simmons recalls. They even put out an LP with funding from the Nevada Arts Council, he says.

Simmons has always been around music, the performing arts and activism. During college, he studied communications and filmmaking and worked as a disc jockey. He worked as a production assistant for the Las Vegas-Clark County Library District's theater program and currently works for Local 28 Stagehands Union in Portland. In 1999, he even helped create a nonprofit, Nevadans Organized to Better Address Diversity, or NOTBAD. Simmons is no longer involved but NOTBAD is still going, he says.

Though he has continued singing with bands, Simmons focused his energies on filmmaking in 1999, when he received a fellowship award from the Nevada Arts Council to make a film.

The idea was to tell the whole history of the United States in 15 minutes. Simmons says his goal was to make a really bad, pretentious film in the style of filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard.

It was bad. So bad, he says it stopped him from making films for a few years.

"I had too big of an idea," he says, wiser after the experience. "I'm glad I did it, I'm glad that I'll never do it again. It's all about learning and growing and admitting you make mistakes. "

Simmons won't be showing that film to local audiences. Instead, he plans to present "Simples," a 15-minute movie about the alphabet. The name is a play on the word "symbols," and the movie consists of 30-second films about each letter. In it, he uses a word to represent letters: anxiety is for A; Bowie, as in David Bowie, for B; intersection is for I.

"I had an actor stand on a corner and I filmed him from across the street," Simmons explains. "I had him do a monologue about how he's at an intersection in his life."

Like a lot of his creations, "Simples" is experimental.

"I really have a hard time saying that because a lot of experimental stuff I've seen I don't care for very much," Simmons says. "Experimental means to me, 'I don't know what I'm doing so I'm trying this out. ' "

Admission to "The Short Version with Chad Simmons" is free. For more information, call the library at 507-3989.

Contact reporter Sonya Padgett at spadgett@reviewjournal.com or 702-380-4564.