David E. Johnston's Lush Life and Lifesaver [NOW FOUND]

Okay I think we have enough information to do a quick summary, I want to keep whatever we have in order, just like with Talking About the Weather:

Lifesaver

Not much is known about this one, except that it was made in 1994 in San Francisco, and directed, writen and starred by David E. Johnston. There is a high probability that he was also the composer. A brief sinopsis found on issuu.com describes it as "an adventure in queer cyberspace"

Lush Life

Released in 1993, and, apparently, released to home video in 1995, also shot in San Francisco. A brief review about the film which, apparently, is from the film festival it was exhibited on, says: "Dennis Conroy and David E. Johnston's beautifully shot Lush Life is a representation of voyeurism, sad-masochistic fantasy and masturbatory hallucinations. - festival program"

Cast

David E. Johnston: Co-director and composer of Lush Life. He seems to have some kind of affiliation with Gift of Tongues, he also used to do live musical spectacles during the 90's. Besides Lush Life and Lifesaver, some of his works include Talking About the Weather (1994), The Hustler (1995) and Gone Dollywood. The Hustler can be watched here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8S1028iAxY

Dennis Conroy: Co-director and film editor of Lush Life

Bob Smith: One of the stars of Lush Life. Some of his other works includes Talking About the Weather and several episodes of The Joy of Painting. He is credited in Lush Life as "sailor"

Rodney O'Neil Austin: One of the stars of Lush Life

Nao Bustamante: One of the stars of Lush Life. She seems to be pretty succesful as an actress and as a director, since she has worked with big names like Jim Parsons. She has a wide library of works, some of them including The Perfect Ones (2006), Silver & Gold (2010) and Tableau (2013), among many others

Jennifer Locke: One of the stars of Lush Life. Besides Lush Life, she also appeared on a "sot of music video" called Snap 'n' Snatch

Ryan Rubio: One of the stars of Lush Life. He is credited as "man"

Jim Winters: One of the stars of Lush Life. He is credited as "man"

Other relevant concepts

The San Fransisco International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival: A film festival which apparently still exists (although under a different name). Evidence suggest that at least Lifesaver was shown here. They also have contact info of David E. Johnston, though it's pretty old so it's probably useless for us

Frameline: We believe that this is a distributor company which released Lush Life in June 7 1995, probably in some kind of compilation

Snap 'n' Snatch: A "sort of music video" in which Jennifer Locke was featured from the year 1990. It might follow a similar style as Johnston's works. It was released along 25 other experimental shorts on a DVD called "The world of George Kuchar". Snap 'n' Snatch can be seen here (although you have to pay to watch it): www.vdb.org/titles/snap-n-snatch

Gift of Tongues: They seem to recognize and upload Johnston's live musical spectacles, they're the ones who uploaded The Hustler

issuu.com: A website which apparently has info of several film festivals, we got contact info from them (although as stated earlier, it might be useless for us)

And I think that's all for now. Clues are coming at a relatively fast pace, so I'll be doing another one of these soon, when we get more

I think I have good news!

First of all, I found a song from 2015 called Lush Life by Zara Larsson, which also has a video, so one more to the "not to be confused with" list

With that out of the way, I decided to make a little deeper investigation on Lush Life's cast

I had no results for Jim Winters, apparently there's a musician with the same name, but I don't think that's our guy

No results for Ryan Rubio either

Nothing for Jennifer Locke, although I found an actress with the same name, and the Chair and Curator of the Armed Forces History Division, who's name is also Jennifer Locke, and also a writer called Jennifer Locke, though I don't think any of these three are our Jennifer either

No results for Rodney O'Neil Austin either

However, I remembered that Nao Bustamante seems to be a successful personality, and apparently she is, since google matched a lot of results just by searching her name

For starters, she's not only an actress and director, she seems to be into artsy stuff as well, since her wikipedia page describes her as "using her own body as a canva". She has also been awarded with "the prestigious Anonymous Was a Woman Award" in 2001. So, how do I know this is OUR Nao Bustamante? Well I found her profile on a website called net-worths.com, I don't know what's that about, but according to this website, she has around $950,000, and Lush Life (along with many other of her works listed on her IMDB page) appear here on the list of her works

So, since her identity is more or less confirmed (still not 100% sure until she comes and confirms it, though I'm getting ahead of myself), I decided to investigate her a bit more. Like I mentioned earlier she has a wikipedia page, and here it says that she holds a BFA/MA from the San Francisco Art Institute, don't know what "BFA/MA" is, but now we know that she was present in San Francisco at some point, and this is confirmed by an article I found on a website called roski.usc.edu (and also this information is in the "about Nao" section of her website), which says that she was born in California, but now she resides in Los Angeles, so we're in good tracks here

What about music though? Weren't we assuming that Lush Life is a music video? Well I found another article of her in a website called hemisphericinstitute.org, it has a short biography of her, and it says that two of her most common fields are video and pop music, which makes her the FOURTH member of the cast who has worked with music

Unfortunately I couldn't find any mention of Lush Life (besides that net-worths.com website), so, where's the real good news? Well guess what? I found her Twitter! and although it's a pretty average Twitter account (referring to its content), she has some artsy stuff on it, so it's definitely her. She also has a Facebook account and a YouTube channel, but the last activiy on her YouTube channel was 3 years ago, her Facebook seems to be active, but her Twitter seems to be a lot more active (her last activity on Facebook was on August 29, while in Twitter was on September 9), so I guess there's a better chance of her responding via Twitter. I sent her a tweet, asking her if she participated in David E. Johnston's Lush Life to confirm if that's our Nao Bustamante, I wish I could've been more specific and detailed but you know that Twitter has a character limit, so yeah, now we just have to wait if she responds my Tweet

For now, I'll leave the useful URLs like always:

Nao's Wikipedia page: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nao_Bustamante
Nao's net-worths.com page: net-worths.com/net-worth/nao-bustamante-net-worth/
Nao's official website: www.naobustamante.com
Nao's hemisphericinstitute.org page: hemisphericinstitute.org/hemi/es/enc09-performances/item/99-09-nao-bustamante 

(Although this last one's in spanish, so if you want more details you'll have to ask me)

Yeah he seems to be kinda young to be our Dennis Conroy to be honest, but it is worth a shot, like I said earlier is better to make sure about stuff rather than just saying "nah, no way" without confirmation

"45 RPM Love", like I also said, is definitely a strange name, so I wouldn't be surprised if it isn't referring to revolutions per minute. My dad was kind of a fan of old vinyl records back in the day, so I might ask him if he knows anything about it

Yeah like I mentioned her Twitter is not, like, super active or anything, but she seems to use it once in a while. I'll give her like a week or so, if she doesn't responds then I'll message her on Facebook, if she still doesn't responds I'll comment one of her videos or something (even though the last video was uploaded 3 years ago doesn't mean she still doesn't use her account for stuff like liking/disliking videos and such), and if she STILL doesn't responds then fuck me I guess

So both Lifesaver and Lush Life were featured on this film festival after all, it was kinda obvious at this point, but it is good to confirm it, actually if Bustamante responded to me, I was thinking about asking her about this

Yeah like I suggested earlier probably any contact info we get about these people from that source is more than useless since, well, 20+ years have passed and they probably moved or something, but any piece of information we have is technically useful, since they could lead to other pieces of information

Oh and by the way, no response from Bustamante yet, for the record

Great! Good luck.

Why do you think the Dennis Conroy on Youtube is too young?

Yeah, 20-year-olds definitely don't look like 50-year-olds. I'm just not sure I've seen his face.

I decided to dig a bit of info about that Dennis Conroy I found on YouTube. Guess what? He's an old man, so he can totally be our Dennis Conroy. Or at least this is the profile picture from his YouTube channel:



So, why did I think he was young? I don't know, I was half sleep when I wrote that post since I had just woken up from a nap so I wasn't making that much sense, but now that I'm fully awake I see that he could totally be our Dennis Conroy (based on his age, of course)

Now, what do we know about this character? Well he only has 4 suscribers on YouTube, 2 followers on Google+, and his videos reach as far as 150 views, hell, one of them has 3 and was uploaded a year ago, so he's definitely not well known. He has no personal info on his "about" section nor on his Google+ account either, although I found a couple of his songs on iTunes and, according to the description of one of his videos, they're on amazon as well

So I really had to dig veeeery deep to get more info on this guy, but eventually I found something:

First of all, he seems to be part of a songwriting and production duo called Birds Fly South, along with some other dude called Kenny Parry. Their songs (or at least four of them) are on Spotify, and, according to their Facebook page they have worked with people like Tina Turner, so maybe they're not AS obscure as their social media suggests. Their official website doesn't seem to work, however I found a website called bandcamp.com which has some information about them (the official site which doesn't work, their Facebook page and their email). Their Facebook doesn't seem to be very active either, since they only post once in a while, their last post was on June 14, before that was in May 8, and before that was on December 11 2016, and you get the idea

Remember that you mentioned that he had a brittish accent and that he probably was from the UK? Well you were right, his last video uploaded on his YouTube channel, according to the description, was an entry for a competition called Dreamboats and Petticoats Competition (although they didn't make it into the competition), so I searched what this competition is, and apparently it is based off a jukebox musical called Dreamboats and Petticoats "based on popular songs from the fifties and early sixties" according to Wikipedia, their productions go from 2009 to 2017, and all of them were for UK Tours. Finally, on their Facebook page, they say that they're a duo from from Merseyside, which is a metropolitan county in North West England, so yeah, he is totally british

Now the important question: Is he OUR Dennis Conroy? Well, I still don't think so, there's no biography or anything that places him in San Francisco, nor anything related to filmmaking, so I highly doubt this is our guy

But that wasn't enough for me, nah I wanted more clues, something new, so I kept looking, and I found a weird book in Google Drives which mentions a Dennis Conroy, but that can't be our guy, since the guide only mentions dates from around like 1940's or something, so I highly doubt that's our Dennis Conroy either

Last but not least, the REAL clue I found: I decided to check on LinkedIn once again, although this time I decided to specify that I wanted to know about any Dennis Conroy from San Francisco, and guess what? I got one! Now, this guy has a lot of experience and I don't feel like listing everything on here, but to sum it up, he has a LOT of experience on film-related stuff, among them as contributing writer to film publications and film festival program catalogs, he implemented a campaign for the San Francisco International Film Festival's films and guests by securing publicity materials and media coverage, he assembled film prints and operated film and video equipment, among many, MANY others, all of them in San Francisco-located entities like the San Francisco Film Society, the Academy of Art University in San Francisco and as a contributor to Get Lost San Francisco: An Underground Travel Guide, among others. Finally, on his education field, it says that he studied filmmaking, cinematography and film/video production at the New York University in 1989, and communication studies and film/cinema/video studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst from 1981 to 1985

So to sum it up: His studies pre-date both Lush Life and 45 RPM Love, he has worked in San Francisco SEVERAL times, and he has TONS of experience on filmmaking, this dude totally matches with the profile of our Dennis Conroy

Finally, a couple of things that I forgot to mention: I searched on my-hit (that russian IMDB-ish website, remember?) any info about Lush Life or Lifesaver, but unfortunately I found nothing, they don't even have an article on there. And as for the Nao Bustamante matter, I'm seriously starting to believe that she's not interested in helping us. I will definitely report in case she eventually responds my tweet, but don't get upset if she doesn't. At least we could confirm that she is THE Nao Bustamante from Lush Life, so I guess that's that

And of course, very important, the URL to Dennis Conroy's LinkedIn page: