Brad Reisinger

Playing out the popular trope, disaffected college student moves into car and wanders the country landing for spells in the Adirondacks, the southern Cali coast, the Sangre De Cristo mountains, the Bronx, central Florida, and the southern Appalachian highlands. As a true method actor, in "Gutter King," Reisinger plays a homeless man who screams at a fight. That's it. He makes another appearance in one of the original trailers, which is hopefully available in the collector's edition of the film. In this scene, we learn more about the actor's acute portrayal of the homeless character, we see him as a busker strumming his guitar as he bellows out a mournful tune on the harmonica in between sips from his brown-bagged 40. As he strums from the curb, the main character gets hit by a car and beat up. It's a role, he brags, he has been preparing for his entire life: "I spent many years writing, picking, and wandering. As a down-and-out English teacher in NYC, I'd spend my weekends playing the subway tunnels for change. I used to take an old mandolin down to a long and usually empty tunnel somewhere in midtown. It had a loose neck, heads too weak to hold a standard tuning, so I tuned it down to what the strings wanted and what made sense musically, hammered out rhythms and melodies, and filled the tunnels with echoes complementing the sounds of commuters coming and going." When he is not playing a homeless person on the silver screen or performing traditional folk tunes on subway tunnels and street corners, Reisinger teaches literature, rhetoric, and composition somewhere in mountains of southern Appalachia.