Approximately eight minutes before my interview with Fantasy A—the autistic rapper, the implacable self-promoter, and the star of the low-budget cult flick Fantasy A Gets a Mattress—I got the following text.
“Can we meet by Seattle center next to the Vera project instead of Gasworks Park?” The park was closed for an event, he wrote, apologetically.
I had just pulled into a parking spot. The park was definitely open. People were biking and walking their dogs. The closest thing I saw to an “event” were the four geese gathered around a plywood board spray-painted with the word “hole.”
The gates must have been taken down, he told me. He’d leave work and bus over now. But he’d have to stop at the post office first, so he wouldn’t be there until about 5:30 p.m. It was 3:42. We rescheduled. Five hours later, I saw Fantasy A had posted a photo of Gas Works Park on Instagram. He’d shown up. I wished I’d thrown out my evening plans—Vivian McCall Gets an Interview.
Fantasy A is a Seattle icon whose face has decorated lampposts and phone poles for a decade. You might recognize him from his flyers promoting his music everywhere and anywhere he could. It’s brought him friends, admirers, and a crew of hip-shooting, low-low-budget independent filmmakers whose synergistic bliss is the stuff of truly original, and important, art. And that small, scrappy crew is making their next project, capturing Seattle before it disappears.
It’s a Team Effort
I met two of Fantasy A’s friends and collaborators in the lobby of the Hotel Sorrento, the writers/directors/coproducers of Fantasy A Gets a Mattress, Noah Zoltan Sofian and David Norman Lewis. I told them about missing Fantasy A at Gas Works. Lewis, who has written for The Stranger, chuckled. That’s just Fantasy A, he told me, and I’d been “Fantasy A’d,” which is when you get a very strange excuse for why Fantasy A isn’t somewhere or isn’t doing something. Where he is “depends on the bikini barista schedule,” Lewis said.
“He says they’re better out of the city,” he said. “He’ll take a bus out to Everett, go talk to a bikini barista about, like, zoning law, and then he comes back.”
Lewis sees Fantasy A, aka Alex Hubbard, as a man in total control of his life, who does what he wants and knows what he wants. If he can’t get it, he pursues it anyway, Lewis says. Fantasy A lives like “Charlie Sheen,” he says, regaling me with Hubbard’s exploits: He landscapes all over the city and brings his Weedwacker and mower on the bus. He sells bikinis with his face on the cups and the crotch. He brought strippers to a screening of Fantasy A Gets a Mattress at the Egyptian on Capitol Hill (former strippers, Hubbard said later). He doesn’t sleep much, but naps often. Lewis’s admiration was as clear as the smile on his face.
Before our second attempt to talk, Hubbard told me to call while he was on vacation in New York. He answered the phone outside Citi Field before the Mariners played the Mets. I could not make him out over the garbled cacophony of the crowd. I’d been Fantasy A’d again, but this time I was smiling. Baseball is loud. We agreed to meet when he got home.
A few days later, I arrived at the public library in Lake City to meet Fantasy A. He texted me that “we” were waiting in the meeting room. “We” turned out to be Hubbard and Matt, a budgeting specialist who helps people with disabilities manage their finances. Matt offered to wait in the other room.
Zoltan Sofian and Lewis told me they never had to make Hubbard a star, that he just was one. I understood what they meant. I don’t ever feel “starstruck,” but when I shook his hand, gravity shifted. Whatever “it” is, he’s got it. Everyone at his two jobs—one in a mailroom, another at the stadium—knows his persona, he said with a wide smile. He didn’t used to like it, but notoriety has grown on him.
“As a local celebrity, I get really happy,” he said.
Star Power
Zoltan Sofian and Lewis met Fantasy A through their artsy alternative Seattle high school, the Center School.
“He was so captivating, instantaneously,” says Zoltan Sofian.
Hubbard gifted girls he liked new shoes in empty Lucky Charms boxes. He sold plastic bead jewelry (Alex’s Famous Jewelry) on a balcony above the food court for $40 a pop (Hubbard says $4). Hubbard still gives shoes to his friends.
They didn’t start working with Hubbard until 2015, when he started covering Seattle with his Fantasy A posters. Lewis co-hosted* a podcast at the time. Hubbard asked to be on it “to promote his stuff.” Lewis, enraptured, knew he “had to make a movie with this guy.” He thought he could be a movie star.
Zoltan Sofian and Lewis attract, and are attracted to, people who are different. Their first movie together (“you can tell 18-year-olds made it,” Lewis says) was a documentary about a local named Saab Lofton, a communist activist and former Las Vegas CityLife contributor adjusting to life in Seattle after the paper let him go. (The film bug clearly runs in the family—Lewis’s brother is former City Councilmember Andrew Lewis, who helped secure the public funds to help the Seattle International Film Festival buy Cinerama.)
Fantasy A was a bigger success. Zoltan Sofian and Lewis have made two films with Hubbard, the short film Fantasy A Gets Jacked, and a feature, Fantasy A Gets a Mattress, which they shot on a threadbare $3,800 budget. Loosely based on Hubbard’s 2012 self-published autobiography, Life in the Eyes of an Autistic Person, the film follows a fictionalized version of Hubbard living in an authoritarian, dilapidated group home and getting a mattress so he doesn’t have to share one with his roommate Grady.
It’s an affectionate critique of an expensive city rocked by a tech boom that’s forcing out vibrant people on the margins. It’s innately political because it’s a movie about a city “that values itself for being a home to outsiders while at the same time being no home to outsiders” in the midst of the mid-2010s “hustle culture.”
They just followed the trajectory of Hubbard’s life, the stuff that made Hubbard an artist. “I’ve been through family problems,” he says.
Like, “tough times?” I ask.
“Yeah, tough times make me an artist. Tough times”
Hubbard says he was almost kicked out of his controlling group home and could have ended up homeless. The group home itself wasn’t run down, but his parents’ place had a hole in the ceiling. It’s the reason he started putting up fliers. It was somewhere to go and something to do. Hubbard is living on his own now, he says, but is still shuffling from place to place. They haven’t “worked out,” he says. He’s moving from Capitol Hill to First Hill soon. He invited me to stop by.
Fantasy A Gets a Mattress premiered to rave reviews at the Seattle Black Film Festival in 2023, catching the attention of Beacon Cinema owner Tommy Swenson, who wanted to screen the film. Swenson had recognized Fantasy A from his years of flyer-ing. The film showed a side of the city that was never shown, in an authentic way. It connected, selling out the theater 20 times, a Beacon record only beaten by Spirit Award winner Uncut Gems. Even Sir Mix-a-Lot got into it. He held a private screening at the Beacon.
The film took them on a journey across America. To the TASH disability advocacy convention in Baltimore, where they met Chris Burke, an actor with Down syndrome who played Charles “Corky” Thatcher on the ’80s TV show Life Goes On. They sold out a weeklong run at Spectacle Theater in Williamsburg, where they met a huge influence on the film: Charlie Ahearn, the director of the first hip-hop movie, Wild Style. Hubbard goes to almost every screening (if he can’t make it, he’ll tape a video message for the audience).
The success made clear the film wasn’t just for locals who knew all the local landmarks. “It hasn’t appealed to [just] one type of person,” Zoltan Sofian says. “The disability community likes it. Hipsters like it, trans people like it, all sorts of people like it.”
I’d tell you, too, to drop everything and watch this film now, but you can’t. Fantasy A Gets a Mattress still has no film distributor. It’s not streaming on any service.
Hubbard finds the lack of a distributor frustrating, but Zoltan Sofian and Lewis are in no rush to find one. They’re willing to wait for the right person who wants to take a risk on a movie that’s not just unconventional, it’s nearly uncategorizable. Besides, they’re gazing into the future. They’ve already crowdfunded and started shooting their next project: CRYSTAL BALL!
This Film Does Not Exist
Zoltan Sofian slid a purple magazine across the table. Dr. Clean Magazine. Hubbard is on the cover, mean-mugging me. A woman is embracing him. Wait a second. It was my friend’s partner, Khamiyra James. She’s hilarious, but I didn’t know she acted. Turns out she didn’t—she was a fan who turned out to be, like Hubbard, another natural actor.
Lewis co-wrote the first draft of the script, but Zoltan Sofian’s main collaborator is director/writer/producer Safiye Şentürk. She met Zoltan Sofian and Lewis in Mr. Fung’s math class at the Center School, she says. Şentürk says any non-actor is a non-professional actor, it’s just that nobody has approached them. James produced real tears on the first night she filmed, Şentürk and Zoltan Sofian tell me separately.
I peeled open the magazine, which was full of essays, and flipped to an article about CRYSTAL BALL! “The images you see here are for a film that does not yet exist,” it read. I ask Zoltan Sofian what it’s about. He says it’s hard to explain, and reached over the table to turn to an alphabetical taxonomy of the film on page 67.
A: Alcohol, America, Acrylic Nails, Aurora Avenue, Authority. C: Cults, Community Centers, Crying, Crystals. F: Fantasies, Ferris Wheels, Fish Tanks, Fireworks. J: Jackal Gods. Q: Questions, the Quran. X: Xenon. Z: Zebra Stripes, Zero Introspection. Somehow, all these nouns fit on one street, Aurora Avenue, on one night, New Year’s Eve.
This time, Hubbard isn’t playing Fantasy A. He’s Ernie, a building super with an alcoholic father. Lewis and Zoltan Sofian say they’re exploring the darker side of Fantasy A. I asked Hubbard about this. He says he’s exploring facial expressions that nobody has ever seen before. He demonstrates one in the library, squinting one eye and grimacing. It’s his “grungier side” that no one has seen before, he says.
Like a supremely bizarre Love Actually that started as a romantic comedy but became something different each time they filmed (ad libs and random interactions on the street changed the plot in major ways), CRYSTAL BALL!’s interweaving plotlines follow an expanding cast of characters—a white-haired ex-cult-leader named Bruce, a lovesick psychic named Krystal, a dog-obsessed tow-truck driver, a horny pizza delivery boy, and a guy trying to open up a mocktail bar. All of these characters are “groping for answers” to resolve intractable personal problems before the clock strikes midnight, Zoltan Sofian says. They’re people in flux, in a city that’s speeding past them, walking a street that’s disappearing.
Even as they film it, Aurora Avenue is vanishing. “We’ve missed some spots that are just gone,” Zoltan Sofian says. “I wish I had gotten the 125th Street Grill before it was taken down.” He shot the last freestanding brick wall before it was demolished. “Or there was the Miller Paint company that had this incredible flashing sign [that was on the fritz]. That went away. I mean, all the old motels are gone, also, for the most part—it’s like Fantasy A Gets a Mattress—95 percent of those locations are completely gone.”
Seattle’s economic shifts, rising inequality, and the City Council–enacted anti-drug and -prostitution zones are doing the heavy lifting on Aurora. In the mirror-world of CRYSTAL BALL!, Egyptology has made a huge comeback. People are looking to godlike figures like the Eye of Ra, the ancient Egyptian god of the sun, to save them and guide their decisions. The city is set to raze 105th Avenue to 145th Avenue to erect a humongous, 45-story pyramid.
Zoltan Sofian pulled out his phone and showed still images I couldn’t show anyone else: a man with intense eyes behind stacks and stacks of VHS tapes, fireworks screaming behind the silhouette of a bridge, Hubbard standing, broom in hand, in front of a wall of graffiti. The photography, like the taxonomy, didn’t teach me a thing about the plot. It was gorgeous, though, and interesting.
I can tell you the final scene involves the ferris wheel at VanKarma, a car dealership on Aurora Avenue. It’s broken. The motor died, and someone lifted its special power cord. I asked if they had a backup plan. They don’t, but they’ve found a couple companies they hope can fix it.
“It’s the danger of whimsy, as I’ve discovered,” Zoltan Sofian says.
CRYSTAL BALL! may be the last project they wrap in Seattle (though that’s still at least a few months away). Zoltan Sofian says all he sees is glass and steel. It’s “Vancouver-izing.”
“Where would you want to go?” I ask.
“Diyarbakır,” Zoltan Sofian says.
It’s considered the Kurdish capital of the world. It’s one of the most electric places he’s ever been, he says. He scouted the city on foot in late 2022, after they finished the edit of Mattress.
“Are you going to take Fantasy A with you?”
“He’d love it there,” Lewis says.
“He might like Istanbul,” Zoltan Sofian says.
*Lewis co-hosted the podcast with Safiye Şentürk, a director/writer/producer on CRYSTAL BALL!.
