Hamtramck’s ‘Nicolas Uncaged’ film fest marks 10 years of celebrating Hollywood’s hardest-working actor

For the upcoming tenth anniversary of the “Nicolas Uncaged” film festival set for Hamtramck’s Ant Hall this month, organizers are taking it back to the very beginning.

The quirky event typically screens double features starring the cult favorite actor scientifically proven to be the hardest working in Hollywood. This year’s will once again feature the 2006 horror film The Wicker Man, a box office bomb that was screened during the very first Nicolas Uncaged fest in 2015 and event organizer Jack Schulz believes is “the Cage-iest of all the Nic Cage movies.”

“Personally I wouldn’t call it the best in terms of quality,” Schulz says, citing its numerous plot holes and overacting. “But I would put it high on the list as far as entertainment. And I do believe it is potentially the best movie to screen before an audience, especially an audience that is unindoctrinated. If they haven’t seen it, they’re in for a treat.”

That first Nicolas Uncaged event was held at Detroit’s tiny Burton Theatre. Eventually the festival grew into the Senate Theater before settling into Ant Hall in Hamtramck, where it has become a fan favorite with attendees kept lubricated with plenty of “Picolas Cage” pickleback shots.

The festival has also become notorious thanks to the organizers’ penchants for putting a spin on the proceedings. A chance encounter in Cleveland between a cousin of Schulz and Cage stuntman Schuyler White led to the latter lending his services to the 2019 Nicolas Uncaged event by offering to light himself on fire. (That year the festival screened Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, where Cage plays a Marvel antihero who transforms into a flaming skeleton.) The 2020 event, held just days before the pandemic lockdowns, screened Snake Eyes and Leaving Las Vegas and even featured a shotgun wedding officiated by a local Elvis impersonator. The 2023 edition, which had a vampire theme to coincide with Cage playing Dracula in his then-new film Renfield, included drinks served in blood bags.

This year, The Wicker Man will be screened alongside Next, another early-2000s film set in Las Vegas in which Cage portrays a man with the ability to see the future. The event will feature a martini-heavy drink menu as well as magicians, including tarot card reading and fortune-telling.

The festival has more or less been held every year since its founding, with two sold-out events the first year. It was canceled in 2021 due to the pandemic and was not held in 2024 because the organizers needed a break, Schulz says. The event is typically held in the winter but Schulz says the team wanted more time to plan a good summertime event this year.

“We weren’t able to get our act together and get the stars aligned,” Schulz says. “But we’ve had people endlessly fielding messages of, ‘OK, when are you doing this? ... I need to get my plane ticket.’”

Schulz adds, “What we realized is the demand is there. We’ve kind of built it up in our heads that the tenth one has to be a huge production, so we wanted to make sure we had it right.”

Schulz organizes the event along with Dean Clancy, Justin Hein, and former Metro Times music editor Jerilyn Jordan.

“Doing this as an adult well into their career is not as easy as it was before,” says Schulz, who by day works as an attorney in Detroit specializing in civil rights.

For everyone involved, it’s truly a labor of love. “We’re not doing this for capitalistic reasons or the almighty dollar,” Schulz says. “We are just four random people with careers who love Nicolas Cage.”

Though often well-attended and even setting bar sales records at Planet Ant, Schulz claims the event has never made any money. “The year we set the guy on fire, I personally lost thousands of dollars,” he says.

Schulz says his two worlds once collided in a hilarious way when an attorney working on the other side of a case, from one of the largest law firms in the U.S., informed Schulz that he had commissioned a dossier on opposition research on him.

“He said, ‘I opened up your folder and the very first thing it said was that you set a man on fire,’” Schulz recalls. “And without skipping a beat I said, ‘Yeah, and I would do it again.’”

As far as we’re concerned, successful arson — and navigating with Hamtramck’s municipal government to make sure the stunt went safely and without a hitch — is a resume-building activity, not a liability. And in that Schulz and company showed good judgment.

“Originally, he wanted to set a record for the longest a man has been completely on fire without dying,” Schulz says. “Darren Shelton from Planet Ant and I watched the current record and we were like, ‘We absolutely cannot.’ I think the current record was like the exact length of the song ‘Bohemian Rhapsody.’ That’s a long time to watch a guy just burning.”

One of the conditions of securing White for the 2019 event was that he wanted to be allowed during the intermission to discuss what he viewed as a grave injustice at the Oscars, which were held the following weekend, for not having an awards category for stunts.

“But I’m proud to report that next year’s Oscars, for the first time, will have an Oscar for the best stunt,” Schulz says.

Is that because of Nicolas Uncaged? No. But Schulz says it helped change the way he views cinema. “Having that lens open for me has added a new analytical way of watching movies,” he says.

Another dimension of Cage’s movies that Schulz has come to appreciate over the years is that despite his reputation as a B-movie actor, he has often starred alongside some of the hottest A-list actresses.

“I’m always just amazed by the various love interests that Cage has in these movies,” Schulz says. “If you go back in time, it’s really a who’s who of women in Hollywood. In Next, his love interest is Jessica Biel. And in The Wicker Man, Leelee Sobieski was like the ‘it girl’ of the aughts. Going back, it’s like, Gone in 60 Seconds, Angelina Jolie; Drive Angry, Amber Heard; Ghost Rider, Eva Mendes. Has anyone really documented this at any point?”

Even though the man of the hour has still never made an appearance at the event (despite the best efforts of the organizers), according to Schulz, the festival is rewarding in its own way.

“When we started this we were in our 20s, and now I’m 41,” he says. “Finding the time to put together a Nicolas Cage festival has been difficult, but alas, it’s one of the great passions of my life. I’m really excited about what we’ve put together this year.”

Nicolas Uncaged X starts at 7 p.m. on Saturday, July 12 at Ant Hall; 2320 Caniff St., Hamtramck; planetant.com. Tickets start at $39.19.