''I'm Bullshitting as Fast as I Can''

Then comes a bandannaed and, by comparison, subdued Rodriguez. "Heavily glazed, very sweet, a little yeasty," he deadpans. "But I liked it," he adds, with a close-mouthed smile. "It was good."

The print reviews were mixed. The Austin Chronicle called Donut Men a "hilarious, gonzo rocket ride straight into the greasy maw of urban bureaucracy" and found "Quick's comic flair and cinematic sensibilities astonishingly on-target." The Austin American-Statesman saw the film as a "lively, RoboCop-esque social satire" that is "punchy and pithy" and believed Quick to be a filmmaker of "wit and deep wisdom." But Varietywas far less enthusiastic, calling Donut Men "a disappointing effort to apply a postmodern sensibility," "episodic and exceedingly fractured and ultimately more irritating than entertaining." The reviewer found the film's "self-reflexiveness and deliberately exaggerated drollery . . . tiresome" and predicted that Donut Men "is destined to travel the festival road." Soon after, the film won for Best Dramatic Comedy at the Long Island Film Festival.

In 10 years your butt will get larger and your head will get smaller, allowing you to stick your head up your ass with little incident.

QUICK HAS NO INTENTION OF SITTING around waiting for Donut Men to take off. He recently decided to break with his policy of not duplicating his work, in order to fulfill a commission for a replica of Chrome Man -- the automated guy riding the noisy bike. The buyer, he boasts, is a dealer with a new Beverly Hills gallery who is paying a price "in the six figures." It turns out that the buyer is actually Dennis Boses, the proprietor of Off the Wall Antiques, a Melrose mainstay for 18 years specializing in "antiques and weird stuff," who commissioned Chrome Man for OTW, his new, upscale store on La Cienega in L.A. Boses says that Quick "suggested to me that people had offered him as much as $50,000 for the piece, which was not a surprise, but it was not a price I would be able to afford. He gave it to me for a price I could pay."

Boses, who says that in his 35 years in L.A. he has "met every huckster and producer with a card in his pocket," first encountered Quick a few months ago. "I was fascinated by the art and his general approach to life," he says. "It's not often that I'm totally hypnotized." Boses invited Beeaje and Lorinda to spend a weekend at his beach house in an exclusive gated surfer community north of Ventura. And he commissioned Chrome Man, the only non-antique piece in the store. He was attracted, he says, to the combination of old and new -- the futuristic chrome figure sitting atop an Exercycle, which was manufactured sometime between the '30s and the '50s. "When I look at it, I don't think 'newly made,'" he says. "I'm fascinated by its motion." Boses doesn't seem bothered by questions of artistic value. "What is genuine in Hollywood?" he asks. "Beeaje is a person with an agenda. Sure, he'd like to become successful. But his art is fascinating, and he's more interesting than most people I come in contact with."

Quick has several other projects under way. He's pitching his next screenplay, Paradise and Purgatory, a period piece set in Greece in 1946 that he likens to both Wuthering Heights (the movie) and Breaking the Waves. He'd like to write a novelized version of the script, even though he says he's only read two books in his life -- one of them the novelization of Rocky. He'd also like to open a café next to the theater, and launch a line of fortune cookies.

There's more. Next fall, the AFI Film Festival will for the first time be held entirely in Hollywood -- at the Egyptian, the Chinese, El Capitan and the Vogue. And the AFI has asked Quick to serve on the committee that will pick the films by new American independent filmmakers. He's also going to help produce the accompanying auction -- he's donated pieces the past two years. "The AFI doesn't know much about art," Quick says, then quickly adds, "I don't know much about art either, but I can keep them from repeating some of the same mistakes they've made in the past."

An inspired piece needs to include an action-figure doll you can market.

RANA JOY GLICKMAN SITS CROSS-legged on a cushion on the floor of her living room and sips a cup of milky tea. The walls of the house, inside and out, are done in the same bright yellows, purples, â blues and greens as her clothing. There is no furniture in the room, though there is an elaborately painted upright piano and a bass guitar. She acknowledges that Donut Men "is very weak from a narrative perspective. The storyline isn't that deep. It's more of an editorial or commentary." But she doesn't see that as a detriment. "It's almost like you have to watch it several times to appreciate it," she says. "It's like an album that way."

With that in mind, she says, she's in the process of revamping the film's soundtrack to give the music more prominence. "In a lot of ways the film is almost a series of music videos," she says. "We're approaching different bands to come onboard."