The 53rd edition of the San Francisco International Film Festival (SFIFF) came to a close on May 6, having sold out 92 screenings during its successful 15-day run. While I'm still mulling over the three dozen films I saw during those two weeks—all of which I hope to write about—here's a look back at five of this year's special events.
I've been coming to the SFIFF for a few decades now, and 2010 was only the second time I've attended the opening night festivities. Someday I might grow to feel blasé about the event, but for now I still get caught up in the glamour of it all. My suit came out of the closet for the first time since last year's opening night, and despite a major MUNI snafu I was second in line and able to secure myself a choice, unreserved aisle seat in the Castro Theater. After perusing the contents of my goodie bag—which I placed under my seat and regrettably forgot at evening's end—I spent 90 minutes chatting with friends who were equally amped up for two weeks of movies, movies, movies.
The program started 20 minutes late, presumably to accommodate late arrivals from the aforementioned MUNI delay. Late that afternoon, a man either jumped or fell onto the Castro St. Station subway tracks and was killed, effectively terminating all train service until mid-evening. Finally at 7:20PM, SF Film Society Executive Director Graham Leggat took the stage and welcomed everyone, reminding us that this was his fifth year at the festival's helm—"the best five years of my life." The resounding applause and cheers hopefully told Leggat that the feeling is mutual.
This year's opening night film was Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Micmacs, which the director assured us had nothing to do with Big Macs, and everything to do with his new favorite English word, shenanigans. I've enjoyed all of Jeunet's films, except the one everybody adores (yes, Amelie, I'm talking about you). Reviews for Micmacs have been mixed, but it turned out to be a perfect opening night film—inventive, fast-paced, comical, crowd pleasing. I couldn't remember much about it the next day, but I did recall how much fun I had while watching it. After the screening, the festival's new Director of Programming Rachel Rosen interviewed Jeunet and conducted an audience Q&A. We learned that the director "wanted to put everything I love in this film," which ranged from animator Tex Avery to Mission Impossible, and that he's "not interested in realism." When asked if he might ever work again with Marc Caro (co-director of Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children), Jeunet diplomatically replied, "it's so good to work alone." With the final question, Jeunet got off the best line of the evening in regards to Micmacs poor reception on his home front: "In France they love to hate what they loved before." With that, the ebullient crowd adjourned to the Regency Center for a swinging after-party. The nibbly things I sampled there were delicious, and I washed them down with the beer everyone who frequents Landmark Theaters loves to hate.
I hadn't attended the festival's Founder's Directing Award program since it was given to Arturo Ripstein in 1999 (when it was still known as the Akira Kurosawa Award). In the interim years I've skipped honorees both deserving (Coppola, Leigh, Lee, Herzog, Forman, Altman, Kiarostami) and, imho, questionable (Eastwood, Beatty, Hackford). When I unexpectedly found myself with a free night on April 28, I high-tailed it over to the Sundance Kabuki Cinema for this year's tribute to Brazilian director Walter Salles (Central Station, The Motorcycle Diaries).
Firstly, I wish someone had clued me in on how handsome this guy is so I could have ogled him from the front row. But from my seat in the Kabuki's large House One it was easy to perceive the man's warmth and self-effacing intelligence. The evening began with introductory remarks by Leggat, followed by a clips reel of career highlights. Then came the on-stage conversation with Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu, who started things off by saying, "Let's put the guns down before we start, and talk about the sex life of Mr. Walter Salles." Hear, hear! I loved hearing about Salles' early life as a diplomat's son living atop a Parisian arthouse theater. Twelve-year-old Walter frequented that cinema so often, the ticket seller began letting him in for free. But he longed for Brazil: "I hated the drizzle, the cold, the croissants." During the talk it was also revealed that Salles spent a full year casting the boy in Central Station, that Latin Americans do not make good genre films (i.e., his own remake of Hideo Nakata's Dark Water), and that Argentina currently has the strongest cinema in Latin America (little to argue about there). He also acknowledged that "Antonioni is the director who brought me to cinema," specifically 1975's The Passenger.
Before getting to the evening's main event, Salles shared a short film that had been screened only once before—for the 60th anniversary of the Cannes Film Festival. In it, he addresses his six-month-old son, saying, "If I could choose just one film for you to see before any other, it would be this one." Then we saw an infant entranced by Chaplin dancing with the globe balloon in The Great Dictator. Salles remarked that they screened a DVD projection for the first take, and his son just wasn't interested. For the second take they projected it in 35mm and this time he became fully engaged by Chaplin's antics. What a smart, discerning kid!
As a special treat made exclusively for the SFIFF, Salles next showed us a one-hour work-in-progress documentary about his efforts to film Jack Kerouac's On the Road. It was edited in just one week from 100 hours of mini-DV and super-8 interview and location footage. Salles, who first read the book as a 15-year-old, feared that showing an incomplete film about The Beats in San Francisco might be a "suicidal act," but the festival audience ate it up. In its current state, the film gives an impressionistic overview of Kerouac's work and the times from which it sprang. An off-camera Matt Dillon intermittently reads passages from the book, and contemporary figures ranging from Laurie Anderson to Johnny Depp to David Byrne reflect on its influence. There are terrific interviews with key players who are still with us (Michael McClure, Carolyn Cassady), as well as vintage screen tests by Brendan Fraser, Ashley Judd, Mathew McConaughey and others made for a previous attempt at filming the book. Directors as diverse as D.A. Pennebaker and Jean-Luc Godard have been interested in the project, but based on the evidence presented that night, Salles is clearly the man for the job. Indeed just one week after this event, it was announced that shooting for Salles' On the Road (the narrative feature) will begin in August. The next day at the festival, Salles would conduct a master class, as well as introduce a screening of his 2008 film, Linha de Passe.
On Saturday, May 1st, I must have changed my mind a dozen times. Should I spend the early evening at the Kabuki watching a French orangutan documentary (Nenette) and a Brazilian movie (The Famous and the Dead) before heading over to the Castro for the late-night world premiere of All About Evil? Or should I catch Roger Ebert receiving this year's Mel Novikoff Award at the Castro? I chose the latter and it turned out to be a smart move. The combination of Roger Ebert and Peaches Christ made for one of the most fabulous evenings I've experienced in 35 years of attending this festival.
Ebert and his wife Chaz were brought onstage and seated while four directors delivered heartfelt and hilarious tributes to the man they call "The Thumb." Terry Zwigoff recalled Ebert being the first person in line for a 1985 Telluride screening of Louis Bluie, and later sold him a soundtrack LP in the theater lobby. He also told a great story about a Crumb test screening. The audience survey cards were overwhelming negative—they thought the storyline about brother Charles should be dropped—so Zwigoff "fixed" the cards with the help of Wite-Out and a late-night trip to Kinko's. Ebert would become a steadfast champion of the film, going so far as to record a commentary track for the DVD release (much of which would be used for the text-to-speech software that allows the now "speechless" Ebert to speak through a computer). Next, documentarian Errol Morris called Ebert, "not just a film critic, but a cultural icon." He was followed by Jason Reitman who, commenting upon Ebert's social networking prowess, declared "I know teenage girls who tweet less than Robert Ebert." Reitman would also add that, "It's hard to put Roger Ebert's work into context when it's him who puts us into context."
Last up was Philip Kaufman, who took a seat next to Ebert and Chaz and read a mayoral proclamation declaring May 1, 2010 "Roger Ebert Day" in San Francisco. Then the man himself fired up his laptop and brought the house down with his first sentence, "My little man is standing on his chair and applauding." The rest of Ebert's speech railed against Hollywood's current output of sequels and so-called blockbusters ("The studios are running like lemmings to 3-D") while films like Erick Zonka's Julia, featuring a tour de force performance by Tilda Swinton, gross a measly $65,000 in U.S. release. (Locally, the film ran for one week last summer on the SF Film Society's Kabuki Screen before moving over to the Roxie). The tribute audience then got to see and judge Julia for itself, having been specifically chosen by Ebert to accompany his appearance at the festival. A letter of regret from Swinton was read to the crowd—she had hoped to attend the screening but was stuck filming on the East coast. I was thrilled to watch it a second time, especially on the Castro's big screen. It's a tough little film and there were a few walkouts, but the applause at the end was booming.
I darted out of the Castro and was greeted by the sight of blood-splattered klieg lights clawing the night sky. Then I noticed a dead body flopped across the base of the lights and a ticketholders line already around the block a full two hours before showtime. This could only mean one thing—the world premiere of Peaches Christ's All About Evil! From my vantage point in the press line, I was able to watch the red carpet parade of outlandish costumes and mile-high hairdos, praying that none of those 'dos ended up sitting in front of me. (This was a movie theater, after all, and not a planetarium.) As Peaches would remark at some point in the evening ("Peaches" being the beloved late-night movie hostess alter-ego of one Joshua Grannell), a movie only gets one world premiere. And boy did he/she pull out the stops to ensure All About Evil's would be momentous.
The All About Evil preshow consisted of no less than four musical production numbers, the first one featuring Peaches and a dozen pom-pom shaking monstrosities performing, "I'm a Gore-Gore Girl." Afterwards, she threatened the audience with a three-hour preshow in which she would single-handedly act out the entire movie onstage. Next she brought out All About Evil cast member Mink Stole and the duo croaked out the theme song from John Water's film, Female Trouble. Peaches and Mink go way back, the latter having been the first "celebrity" to appear at Peaches' Midnight Mass film series at San Francisco's Bridge Theater. Waters was also in the house that night and stood for a round of applause. Teen heartthrob and All About Evil co-star Thomas Dekker was next on board, performing the movie's rocking theme song, "Welcome to the Horror Show." Then Natasha Lyonne, who stars as mousy theater-owner turned murderous film director Deborah Tennis (pronounced De-BOR-ah Ten-NIS) wrapped things up with a final number.
After all that hullabaloo, one almost expected the film itself to be anti-climactic. But no, All About Evil delivered the sicko thrills and chills. Two scenes in particular had all 1400 audience members screaming their collective heads off in disbelief, and neither was the film-within-the-film, A Tale of Two Severed Titties. By the time the Q&A wrapped up—with Peaches now out of drag and onstage as plain old Joshua Grannell—it was two in the morning. Everyone was handed a commemorative All About Evil world premiere poster upon exiting the theater, which I'll surely treasure for the rest of my days. It was Saturday night and the Castro Street bars were emptying out—a phenomenon I hadn't witnessed in many years. I was satisfied and spent and had no hope of making it to the next morning's surprise SF Film Society members screening.
If you weren't there that night, here's good news. Come October, Peaches will be presenting the film, complete with a preshow, at San Francisco's Victoria Theater (where All About Evil was actually filmed). She promises a full-on William Castle-like experience—I think her exact words were "we're gonna stab you and chainsaw you." Meanwhile, check out Dennis Harvey's recollection of the evening at SF360, and don't miss The Evening Class' Michael Guillén and his interviews with Grannell, special effects artist Aurora Bergere and five cast members. Now for a special treat, the evening's complete opening number.
I spent the next few days singing, "I'm a gore, I'm a whore, I'm a gore-gore girl" and desperately needed a new earworm. One came in the form of the rousing and repetitive chorus that greeted each new chapter of Stuart Paton's 1916 silent screen adaptation of Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. This May 4 Castro Theater screening was also the world premiere of a new score composed and performed by The Magnetic Fields' frontman Stephin Merritt, with help from Daniel Handler on accordion, David Hegarty on the Castro's Mighty Wurlitzer and a gentleman playing tuba and trumpet.
Merritt was clearly having a goof with it, blending his customary old-timey vibe with injections of electronic bleeping and screechy freakouts. Speaking and singing through megaphones, Handler gave voice to the female roles in an abrasive Olive Oyl-y falsetto while Merritt handled the male parts in a low register that was mostly inaudible. The film itself is kind of unremarkable—a flatly directed mash-up of Verne's 20,000 Leagues and The Mysterious Island, with underwater photography that was stunning for its time but is now merely quaint. Merritt exploited the film's campier aspects, such as a sarong-clad "child of nature" who sings a ditty about not wanting to wear pants and who turns out to be Captain Nemo's long lost daughter. I thought it was all good-natured fun and Merritt's legion of fans seemed satisfied, but I know some likened the performance to a bad episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000. I was glad I went, but it paled compared to last year when Dengue Fever blew the dome off the Castro with their score for the stop-motion dinosaur epic, The Lost World.
Cross-published on film-415 and Twitch. Photos by Pamela Gentile and Pat Mazzera courtesy of the San Francisco Film Society and SF360.
Take a walk around midnight in the city / Young blood is hiding there somewhere / And if you're lookin' for somethin' to do / There's always somethin' happening there.—Ricki Lee Jones
Scott Boswell's first feature The Stranger In Us faces the street with considerable compassion, observing the youthful exploration of urban night life with generous honesty and tact.
Scott Boswell is production coordinator at San Francisco State University; a hybrid position where he teaches half-time, while lending production support for all the media needs of the film students the rest of the time. Having graduated with an MFA from San Francisco State in 2004, the shorts he produced while he was a graduate student were the first shorts he distributed, with some success. His film came to me in an interim cut by way of Frako Loden who felt I would appreciate its subtleties. She handed me her screener, which I watched, and which intrigued me enough to contact Boswell to see if he would be willing to discuss the project. We met up for coffee at Bean There in the Lower Haight.
* * *
Michael Guillén: You're in post-production for The Stranger In Us; working on color correction?
Scott Boswell: We are right now, yeah. In the Fall we decided to do some focus test screenings of the film with small groups of people who didn't know anything about the project and mostly didn't know me. The result pinpointed where people were finding the plot confusing. We decided there were maybe five or six issues we needed to address and so we've done that.
Guillén: Thus, the screener I've watched is not as the film stands today?
Boswell: What you've seen is before we did a re-cut, yeah.
Guillén: I was intrigued by your film's narrative structure, which—admittedly—I "got" more upon second viewing than the first. It took me a bit to understand that your main character Anthony was remembering earlier events while on a bus to find his friend Gavin. So I'm wondering now if that's been shifted in your recent edit?
Boswell: No, that basic structure remains intact. But we actually added chapter cards to give the film seasonal stamps to help distinguish that these are two different tracks in Anthony's life. There's actually three. There's the track of him on the bus, where he's having memories of these two people who have come into his life and who he's lost. There were lots of questions around that in the focus screenings. People typically by the end of the film pretty much understood the structure; but, the questions always landed in the first act.
Guillén: To be honest, I didn't fully catch the structure until Anthony showed up with a black eye….
Boswell: Which is easily an hour into the film.
Guillén: …and then I thought, "Oh. That's why I'm not following certain things here. The sequence is being shuffled." I liked that, however, because that's truer to how people actually remember things. People don't remember things in a linear fashion.
Boswell: That was the idea behind it. The trick with editing this project was finding the balance between people enjoying the puzzle while figuring out the structure and being annoyed by it.
Guillén: I was never "annoyed."
Boswell: I'm glad to know that.
Guillén: I've watched enough films to know there are many different ways to structure a narrative and none of them are essentially wrong; it's whatever the filmmaker wants to do. Let's back up a bit to the title: The Stranger In Us. Why that title?
Boswell: By and large the film is about self-discovery and the character—this actually comes up in his poetry—is exploring the relationship between himself and strangers, but also the discovery of what he doesn't know about himself. For example, most people who find themselves in a situation where their partner is not treating them well and is being abusive surprises them. We don't go out into the world on a daily basis thinking that that's going to happen to us, normally, right? This particular character comes from a sheltered world and enters this urban area to discover that he's doing things that he may never have thought that he would do, on the streets with Gavin, the homeless character, experimenting with drugs and those kinds of things.
Guillén: While I was watching this again this morning in preparation for our talk, I found myself considering that an alternate title to this film could have been Face the Street. Where your film spoke to me was in my own experience of growing up on the streets of San Francisco. I arrived here in 1975 at the age of 21 during that incredible Castro Florescence where it seemed we had all been summoned by some kind of homing beacon. Anthony's experience in your film was my experience and—I might venture—will be every young gay man's experience coming to a metropolitan center like San Francisco. In some ways your film was difficult for me to watch—i.e., remember—because, of course, I'm so much more mature now. [Laughs.] I'm more centered, more grounded, and it was difficult to relive that awkward and necessary pain that a young man has to experience in order to familiarize himself with the stranger within. I appreciated how this was expressed not only through Anthony's struggles to become a poet but in the poetic vision of the film itself. Are you a poet?
Boswell: No, not in the traditional sense.
Guillén: So this isn't a situation of a closet poet coming out as a filmmaker?
Boswell: No, but I'm drawn to it. I appreciate slam poetry, which the current generation of young people have embraced and—in many ways—they're expert at it. Before I worked at SF State, I ran a digital filmmaking program for teenagers in Oakland and, of course, I started to meet all the different worlds I ran in and all the different arts that they create. Slam poetry was one step away from what we were doing.
Slam poetry has become so popular and has received so much attention that now they feature slam poets on HBO and they're hosting national competitions. But myself, no, I'm not a poet. What you said earlier about coming to the city and sharing Anthony's experience I find particularly interesting because—since I've been working on this project—I've found a number of gay men who have told me that. There's a lot of mythology around San Francisco, especially for gay men. Hence, when we arrive here we don't quite know what to expect but we're driven by some sort of optimism.
Quite a few people have told me that they relate to Anthony's experience of feeling alien in the city at first and having trouble making connections with people while discovering this more urban, gritty street life. I love that. For me, I didn't quite know what to expect from the Castro but somehow it was disappointing.
Guillén: When did you arrive in San Francisco?
Boswell: I arrived here in 1997.
Guillén: Ah, so what you entered was the commodified Castro?
Boswell: I did! I experienced a commodified, more gentrified Castro and—at least on the surface—what I was seeing were more materialistic values and things that weren't interesting to me. I came looking for an alternative and, instead, felt alien in this enormous gay world. But I also came to discover that there were lots of us like that.
Guillén: Definitely. I have often said that the meanest men I have ever met were gay men in the Castro. Which was quite a shock to me when I arrived in San Francisco from the conservative Mormon belt of southern Idaho. I came expecting brotherhood and found brutal hierarchies of sexism and—much to my alarm—racism.
Which leads me to one of the distressing topics in Strangers In Us: that of partner abuse, a subject that's not usually addressed in gay narratives. The self-loathing that capsizes relationships among gay men was skillfully handled in your film. Likewise, inversely, the genuine relationship Anthony had with Gavin the street kid pulled me right in for feeling so resoundingly honest. Truthfully, I learned to know myself as a young man by hanging on the streets. Anthony's desultory late night wanderings and how he learns to navigate the city—down to the broken glass and shit on the sidewalk—struck me as an urban poetic aesthetic of a young man's coming into being. I have to ask then: where did this story come from?
Boswell: The story is autobiographical and very much reflective of my experience coming to this city. Of course, whenever you work on a piece of fiction it becomes more and more fictionalized; but, the lead characters are based on people that I knew and experienced. I was largely trying to capture that experience, which is unique to people like yourself and I who have come from smaller, more conservative regions….
Guillén: Where are you from?
Boswell: I'm from central Illinois, a town called Normal. I literally grew up tasseling corn in the summertime. Normal was very much in the Midwestern Bible Belt. I moved here sight unseen. I just decided to pick up and go West. I don't regret it for a minute; but, I will say that you find yourself in this entirely new world and it's exciting and scary and makes you question everything about yourself. Ultimately, you either find your place in it or you don't.
In terms of domestic violence between gay men, you're right, I haven't seen that portrayed much in "gay" movies, or between same-sex couples at least. But it's always been of interest to me on a political level as well as a personal level and that's one of the reasons that I wanted to explore it. I mean, I've seen violence portrayed between gay men such as in Brokeback Mountain where I felt they were effectively trying to beat out the homophobia, that they were both frightened for being attracted to another male, but that violence was coming from somewhere else. I was more interested in the kinds of violence integral to a relationship, whether it's between two men, two women, or a man and a woman. I feel this is a big issue in the society at large; but, I haven't seen it dealt with a lot in the gay world.
Guillén: In some ways, it's not cool timing as it seems most gay films these days are concentrating on positive images. That's okay in and of itself, although I believe it delimits the potential of queer cinema, which—unfortunately—appears to have collapsed into rom-com fantasies that I don't feel particularly further queer sensibility, other than to offer comfort through fantasies of commodification. Partner abuse isn't a comfortable subject to look at, but, it's a real one, and I commend your film for tackling the theme, and the performances of your actors for rendering it real. Can you speak to me about your three main actors who play Anthony, Gavin and Steven? Are they San Franciscan actors?
Boswell: They were when we shot the film. Let me start by saying that my initial approach to this project was completely different. I was wanting to do something a little more experimental. And if I may back up just a little? I've always been fascinated with the Polk Street neighborhood as an older, grittier, alternative to the Castro, especially the Polk Street that I knew in the late '90s. Now Polk Street's become more gentrified itself; but I was fascinated with the kinds of bars you'd find there and the diversity of people, the rent boys on the street, the tranny hookers and all of that had some sort of appeal to me. I was thinking of doing something more like a documentary set in the Polk Street area but it would be a hybrid narrative where I would bring in actors into the scenario and film it like a documentary to see what we could make. Then as I worked on it, the script became more fleshed out and traditional, and I posted earlier than usual for actors before I'd actually finished the script, because I was still thinking of a more experimental approach. I wanted there to be a lot of improv and stuff that had to be worked out before the camera rather than in pre-production.
One of the first people to respond was Raphael Barker, who appeared as Rob in Shortbus (2006). This threw me because I wasn't expecting to hear from someone who had some props. I thought, "Okay, well, let's meet." So we had coffee, hit it off immediately, and in some ways he inspired me to move forward with the project as it is.
Guillén: Let me be clear about this, when Raphael contacted you there was no finished script? How did he know what he was auditioning for? Had you posted a general story outline?
Boswell: Yeah. On the call for actors, I tried to pitch it in the way that I felt passionate about it. That's what drew him. He actually said something about how he doesn't normally respond to these but this sounded like an interesting project and he wanted to find out more about it. When I saw Shortbus in the theater, Raphael genuinely impressed me in that movie. He was one of my favorite actors in that film. Out of all the actors in that film, he's the one I would have wanted to contact me. So I was very excited that he was interested. When we met, I tried to explain to him what I was trying to do with the project and he got it. He was on board for it. There was another good eight months before we actually went into production. I did audition Raphael because I needed to know he could do it. He genuinely gave the best audition, which is apparent in his performance in the film.
Adam Perez, who plays Gavin, was one of maybe forty auditions for that role. We just kept looking at actor after actor. Ultimately, he proved to be bringing to the role what we wanted. We made him audition three times because we wanted to see that he could handle it. Raphael was kind enough to come in and do a chemistry test with him. They worked together very well, which I was excited about.
Scott Cox, who plays Steven, is a local stage actor who, incidentally, is the sweetest guy on the planet. If you've gone to plays locally, you've probably caught him at some point. I knew him because of a short I had worked on several years ago. We had been trying to find someone who could handle the difficult role of Steven. Fully qualified actors were having trouble bringing something to the role that we were looking for and I just suddenly remembered Scott and having worked with him a number of years earlier, so I contacted him and asked him, "Would you like to audition?" He was excited about it. And then it all worked out.
So that's how we came to working with those three and all three of them were such a pleasure to work with—and thank God!—because you hear nightmare stories sometimes.
Guillén: How much did they lend to the development of the script? Did you do a lot of improvisation with them to shape dialogue?
Boswell: We did. A fair amount. The script is 100 pages; but, the way it reads, there are paragraphs that say: "Now we're going to improv", with descriptions of what should happen for the set-up and I let them go where they wanted with it. I wanted to capture a naturalistic feel to the film and retain some sense of the original documentary impulse. Personally, it's also the kind of acting I enjoy. The truth is that 85% of the script was written but the actors were given liberty to adlib and then there were moments when we risked improvisation. We did spend quite a bit of time in auditions as well with improv to see if people could handle it. I have to say that sometimes the actors provided gold and sometimes they didn't; but, ultimately, I got what I needed. All of them brought moments to the script that I didn't compose myself. All of them also brought moments that were absolutely off base—which is what happens in improv—and that's when as a director you need to step in and bring it back to where it needs to be.
Guillén: Who are you imagining to be the audience for this film?
Boswell: That's an excellent question. I decided when I made this film that, first of all, I was just going to do it. That's not because I don't care about audience. But I wanted to make a feature for a long time and I woke up a couple of years ago and realized, "You can! Maybe you go a little bit into debt. But do you choose to buy a car or choose to make a low-budget feature film?" Once I had that thought, nothing was going to stop me. I'm a big believer in quality work and I believe that—if work is done well—it will find an audience. I don't think The Stranger In Us will appeal to all gay men. I do hope it plays in LGBT festivals. I hope it plays in international festivals too. We haven't aggressively started the distribution process yet. I suspect the audience will be somewhat diverse. We have shown it to maybe 100 people now and we've received some positive reactions from a diverse group of people and so The Stranger In Us needs to appeal to a certain aesthetic taste, to people who can appreciate the kind of film that we've shot and made. Perhaps those are film festival goers? Maybe there's an LGBT market for it? In general, audiences who can appreciate dramatic character-driven work. It's definitely in the indie vein so I imagine it would have to be something of a film festival audience.
Guillén: Though the film allows access in several different ways. For example, I've approached it by way of memory because, of course, the film reminds me of my own youth and my transformation from rural to urban. In fact, because it faces the street so honestly, I was wondering how its urbanity will speak to audiences outside an urban area? I have to reiterate that the depiction of Gavin is one of the most thrillingly authentic portraits of queer street youth I've ever seen. It was the character of Gavin, and Adam Perez's pitch-perfect performance, that enthused me about wanting to talk to you about this project. Basically I just wanted to tell you exactly that. Gavin, as a character, is such a grounded, real person. Also the bartender who Anthony solicits for help in determining Gavin's whereabouts is someone I feel I already know. And, of course, I'm very intrigued by the transgender character Sonja who serves a wise and poetic function in the film, almost like a member of a Greek chorus. What were you trying to say through her character?
Boswell: It's funny you mention Sonja. She comes up a lot in conversation, which I enjoy. My initial idea—and the way it's written in the script—is that she is another one of those lovely characters that you meet in the Tenderloin. What I love about the Tenderloin is all the crazy—and I mean that lovingly—people that you encounter. I don't think Sonja's crazy at all. I never wanted her to be a joke or a caricature or anything like that. I wanted her to be lovely. Joshua Grannell actually helped me find her. Her name is Veronica Klaus. She's a well-established local cabaret singer. I approached her and she agreed to do it and the song she sings in the film is her song. There's a studio version of her song that we'll probably incorporate into the credits in the final cut.
Sonja is a character who's a bit mystical in that she observes what's going on around her and she sees that Anthony's in pain. She offers whatever comfort she can, even by just crossing paths with him on the street. In retrospect, I might have included her more, largely because I love Veronica's performance. Of course, going into it you don't always know what you're going to get; but, in this post phase, I have often thought that I would have put her in more often.
Guillén: That's actually a question I was going to raise. Being that this is your first feature, a project that you have strived for quite a long time, and now that it's moreorless done, would you have done anything differently? What is the main thing you've learned from your first feature?
Boswell: I've learned a lot. I've learned that you must always be extremely focused and mindful of your vision for the project. If you lose sight of that, scenes aren't going to work. Only you, as the director, carries that. Meaning that it's not necessarily the responsibility of the actor. They're not the director. You might find that they tripped, especially when you're allowing improv. For instance, Raphael loves to be funny.
Guillén: He does have some cute bits he delights in.
Boswell: And thank God because it brings layers to the character.
Guillén: His humor reveals his vulnerability.
Boswell: Exactly. But if it were to drift too far in that direction, the tone of the film would be lost. So there were times that I had to pull him back. The only thing I would do differently is that I imagined this to be a piece where all of the puzzle would fall into place more clearly than it seems to. That's one of the reasons we've done some additions and re-cutting to set up more clues to guide the audience into what they're seeing. I don't like films that hit you over the head with structure and its meaning and things like that, but I failed to realize as the writer of this piece just how obtuse it is for many viewers. I will be more mindful of that in the future.
Guillén: "Obtuse" only in the sense that, I suspect, people don't really want to know themselves very well and are, thus, reluctant to do their share of the work. As you said earlier, a lot of young gay people come to the city with preconceived notions of what life is going to be like for them once they arrive here. They anticipate a fullness of experience that real life often delivers fractured. You can become hardened because of that, jaded, which was always something I was most fearful of as a young man: I didn't want to become a jaded queen.
Boswell: [Laughs.] Which, fortunately, you didn't.
Guillén: [Knocking on the table.] Fortunately, I didn't. But, even if you don't become a jaded queen, you still hazard becoming a macho mannerist hiding behind enacted virilities. Rather than concerning yourself with the imagined failure of your narrative, I would focus on how it successfully depicts a young man who doesn't even really know what he can have or become yet—though he might have a sense of what he wants—yet, by film's end, even though it's left open-ended and is not neatly tied up, you sense that Anthony is ready for the challenge of living an authentic life. It's a subtle optimism: every young person can answer the call to lead an authentic life. For gay people, especially, it's problematic because there are all that many more barriers in the way of leading an authentic life, not the least being their own preconceptions and fantasies.
Boswell: I agree. That has been some of my own frustration with San Francisco. I don't mean to bash the Castro; but….
Guillén: [Laughs.] Oh go ahead.
Boswell: The Castro symbolizes….
Guillén: All that went wrong!
Boswell: When I first moved here, the apartment that I found to live in—and you know how competitive and difficult it is to find housing—was in the Castro, which shocked me. I never expected that to happen as someone coming from the Midwest, and everyone knowing what the Castro is, and so on and so forth. To me the Castro symbolizes the inauthenticity that you're describing. I've always resisted it. Of course, I love the Castro Theatre and I love the sense that there's this mythological community that's always festive and safe—even though it's not always—but, my attitude has largely been to resist falling into that and, as cliché as it sounds, to not become that, to remain true to myself. That's one of the reasons I moved out of the Castro. And you may notice in the film that Anthony never goes to the Castro. He's in San Francisco but he never goes there.
Guillén: I did notice that. I noticed that the film focuses on the Civic Center, the Tenderloin and Polk Street.
Boswell: That's why. Because of what the Castro symbolizes for me. I completely agree with you. I think it's reflective of what I do want to say about this city.
Guillén: As a film journalist who watches lots of movies and monitors the fantasies that basically inform movies, I often consider which fantasies (i.e., movies) can actually help people lead an authentic life and which will throw them off the track. One of my main critiques of queer cinema is that I often feel that the stories that are being told/sold are inauthentic narratives.
Boswell: I agree.
Guillén: These are not stories that are going to help anybody achieve anything, except perhaps a momentary illusion of normalcy, which itself is fraught with error. Returning to your choice of locations, and your decision to monitor Anthony's nocturnal wanderings, are you familiar with the work of João Pedro Rodrigues?
Boswell: No.
Guillén: His debut feature was O Fantasma, and he followed that up with Odete, and most recently with To Die Like A Man. One of the aspects I most enjoy about João's work—and I've talked to him about this—is that he uses the night as his mise-èn-scene. Night becomes the realm or the domain within which his characters discover themselves. Night is their mirror. Can you speak to what night means for you in The Stranger In Us?
Boswell: First of all, I can't deny that it's based largely on real experiences. In that sense, it's purely just trying to capture something I experienced myself. There was … is a Gavin and he was someone that I used to only see at night and run into in the neighborhood, and he was someone with whom I developed a friendship when I didn't feel that I had a lot of other close relationships here, and had gone through and just come out of a difficult relationship. But I love the visual symbol of being in the dark. I also love the beauty of Polk Street at night because it's so colorful and florescent and for me it sets up what is simultaneously appealing and scary about it. Because there are all these things going on around, it's possible that you could get hurt; it's possible that you could get lost; but, it's also erotic and beautiful and there are other people out there just as lost and lonely as you are. In terms of just a place on the planet where different people meet, I found the Polk Street region a fascinating place to explore and it seems to me that happens most at night.
Guillén: I've frequently considered that what was so different in the '70s was the proportion between private and public space. So much of what was public space has become privatized since then, such that it's only at night these areas are reclaimed as public. I especially took note of this in the scene in The Stranger In Us where Anthony meets Sonja. This was filmed outside the public library?
Boswell: It's actually the Asian Art Museum, but the Civic Center area.
Guillén: I was fascinated by this because the Civic Center is truly a private sector of art and cultural institutions, a government sector with city and state institutions, and yet at night it's being reclaimed as a terrain of self-discovery for an alternative culture.
Boswell: The shot where Anthony sees Gavin for the first time is in front of City Hall.
Guillén: How did you decide where you wanted to set your film? You've talked a little bit about Polk Street already. Did you have any issues filming in these locations?
Boswell: No. For the most part we had permits.
Guillén: So you weren't shooting guerilla?
Boswell: We didn't do it all guerilla, though we did do a bit when we shot a few hours past what we were permitted for. But no one asked. It's funny, we shot for days and for hours and hours on Polk Street, in the alleys around Polk Street, and the police never once asked. Which, of course, if we hadn't secured the permits, they would have asked every time we went out there. I don't know if they had bigger fish to fry; but, we chose the locations largely for aesthetic reasons and lighting reasons. We didn't set up any outside lights. We scouted very carefully beforehand and spent a lot of time walking around and driving around that area, looking for places where light always falls at night, either from street lamps or any other artificial lights set up in the area. Then we set all of our scenes beneath those lights because it's very easy to walk just a few feet away and fall into darkness in a way that wouldn't work for the visuals. We based our locations largely on the light that we could find. Some of the scenes turned out beautiful in ways that look almost lit. If you look carefully, there's light on the shoulder, on the head, on the face.
Guillén: Which lends to its naturalistic look. It is real, without being murky as can often be the case. You've billed your film as cinema vérité, though your camera is more controlled and composed than what I would associate with cinema vérité. To wrap up here, though you're still in post-production, what is your strategy for getting the film out there once the film is finished?
Boswell: The obvious first step would be to submit to film festivals. I always find this to be a tricky step in my work because I don't just want to be a gay filmmaker; but, I get that I'm dealing primarily with gay characters and themes. I always hope that my films will screen in international film festivals as well as the LGBT festivals, and my shorts have, so hopefully this one will as well.
Guillén: Do you strategize that way? Do you aim for a general audience first and then fall back on the sure LGBT audience?
Boswell: Typically, I've done them both simultaneously and just see what happens. But there are a couple of other possible trajectories. I, ultimately, would love some DVD distribution. I obviously want it to be shown as much as it can and my hope is to interest some of the distributors who would distribute a movie like this. My producer Cheryl Valenzuela has been largely looking into these possibilities. Also, independent filmmakers are dealing with the fact that there's a lot more media being produced because it's cheaper to produce now—which is why I could make this film—but, when you hear the number of submissions that festivals are getting now, it's staggering. So how does your film get attention? There's a movement of DIY filmmakers creating distribution strategies that work for them and we're just starting to look into that to try to create our own buzz around the project. This is all new territory for me so it's simultaneously mysterious and exciting and worthy of exploration in the coming months. We're in the grey zone of thinking, "Who's going to show this? And when?" That whole international vs. LGBT issue is tricky, because you don't want to turn anyone down but you also don't want to undersell.
Joshua Grannell (aka Peaches Christ) and I met up at the Duboce Park Café the Monday after Pride Weekend. As Peaches, Joshua had survived his Pilsner pork pull; an event he agreed to in support of his beloved BLT community. "Every year," Joshua admitted, "Peaches seems to do less and less [at Pride] in an attempt to reserve energy for the next eight weeks [of Midnight Mass]." Being that it's now official that this is the last year of Midnight Mass at the Bridge Theatre ("Peaches Christ: R.I.P."), I felt it compulsory to find out what's up. Although our conversation was primarily to serve my upcoming Fangoria article on Joshua's recently completed first feature All About Evil (I'll let you know when that hits the newsstands), I took time to probe about the summer swan song of the 12th season of Midnight Mass.
* * *
Michael Guillén: As Midnight Mass launches into its 12th Summer season, will there be any preferential glimpses into All About Evil?
Joshua Grannell: There is a trailer being made for All About Evil. It's going to be cool! The first people to see the trailer will be at one of the Midnight Mass shows this summer. We'll show it there before we even put it on line. The first look at the trailer will happen at one of the shows, though I can't say exactly when yet because that depends on the delivery. But during the finale of this year's Midnight Mass, it seems so appropriate to have Elvira and Peaches present the world, our world, the Midnight Mass world, with a sneak peek of at least one scene from the movie.
Guillén: What I find intriguing is your professional awareness of a measure of scale. The artistic project of Midnight Mass has its unique and appropriate scale; but, the scale of the film All About Evil is much larger and cannot be contained by Midnight Mass. Thus, it only makes sense to me that—though it might seem that All About Evil should premiere at Midnight Mass—it somehow is not appropriate to scale. A trailer at Midnight Mass, however, sounds just right.
Grannell: Being a cult film aficionado and someone who champions cult movies, we've not yet even released the film and people refer to it as something cult. That drives me nuts because we don't deserve that yet. We aren't a cult film. We're attempting to someday hopefully be a true cult movie—that would be wonderful—but, you can't make a cult movie; it becomes a cult movie. If the fans decide to embrace All About Evil and put it up on a pedestal and watch it over and over again, then maybe sometime down the line we can refer to it as a cult movie. But it's not a cult movie yet. It's brand-new and it needs to find its audience. The movies that we screen at Midnight Mass are tried and true, beloved films; but, as a segue into this feature film, you're right, yes, a trailer seems wholly appropriate. Maybe someday we'll be able to create a Midnight Mass presentation out of All About Evil; but, I would much rather have that be after people have embraced the film and decided to love it and understand it, y'know?
Guillén: I have to ask the obvious question because some people were upset when they heard the news that this is the last year of Midnight Mass at The Bridge. Was it your decision to discontinue Midnight Mass? Was it the theater's? What's happened that Midnight Mass is now shifting away from The Bridge?
Grannell: Yes, it was my decision, along with the group of people who created Midnight Mass 12 years ago. While making All About Evil, we had to start prep for this season and had to table everything until we were done shooting the film. Usually, we would have been booking movies, powwowing, creating a marketing campaign, prepping for the summer; but, we didn't have time because we were working on All About Evil. When we finally sat down to do it, there was this sense of exhaustion, a feeling of frustration, and the heaviness of having done something for 11 years, and racking our brains to keep it fresh, new, exciting and interesting and relevant not just for the fans but one another. I always said that once it stopped being fun, we would figure out a way to rechallenge, repurpose, redo it, revamp it.
We all looked at each other and I said, "There's something about this season that feels like maybe this is the last one?" Everyone nodded in agreement. It has nothing to do with anything other than that we've done it for 12 seasons of 7 to 8 weeks of back to back shows. It's been amazing. We still love it. I think this Summer's going to be so special because we know this is the last. Part of it is that—in order to rechallenge and repurpose Midnight Mass—we've gone on the road, and we loved that; but, we want to do something new for San Francisco. All I can say is the plan is to create bigger and better shows with all that work and energy that goes into the pre-show, instead of tearing it down after one or two nights and having to do something new the next week; to really enjoy it, to savor it, to let as many audiences come to see it as possible, and to not feel so rushed and hurried. Lately, we've been hitting this wall with Midnight Mass in the Summer season where we can extend all this energy on a show like Barebarella and try to create this fun, theatrical experience, we do it for one night, and then those costumes get put away and I have to wake up on Sunday morning and start thinking about the next five shows.
What it's become really is that the shows have become so special and important to us that we want to take them to the next level; but—in order to do that—we have to give ourselves instead of a week to get ready for the shows, let's give ourselves four or five weeks and do the show for two weeks. That's what's really going on. We're not abandoning Midnight Mass, we're not walking away from Midnight Mass, we're strengthening it through rechallenging ourselves, trying something new.
Guillén: In its current incarnation, Midnight Mass is kicking off in style with your opening weekend Linda Blair doublebill! Rollerboogie on Friday, July 12 and The Exorcist on Saturday, July 13. With Blair there for both screenings! How did that all come about?
Grannell: Linda Blair has been on my list of dream guests for years. In the world of cult movies and the kinds of films that we love and celebrate at Midnight Mass, I have to say that's a very short list these days. So many of the fantastic people we would have liked to bring over the years are no longer with us and we've brought John Waters, Tura Satana, Mink Stole.... Linda Blair's a household name. She was so young when she started making movies. She's so vital and fabulous and made all these amazing incredible films that we love and she's just someone who's been on that list. We actually approached her about coming last year and she expressed interest. Unfortunately, we had a schedule conflict. The weekend I had open, she was on the East Coast. So we tabled the idea to see if we couldn't make it work this year and I was super-thrilled to find out that—not only are we going to be able to do it—but, she's excited about it.
Guillén: Have you met her?
Grannell: I have not. But she is friends with Cassandra Peterson and I'm pretty sure that Mink knows her too. That helps, y'know. It's funny how in this world of show business there are pockets of it that are quite small. When you're interested in certain kinds of movies, people know each other. I was able to get a good recommendation from Cassandra. Perhaps! [Laughter.]
The 53rd edition of the San Francisco International Film Festival (SFIFF) came to a close on May 6, having sold out 92 screenings during its successful 15-day run. While I'm still mulling over the three dozen films I saw during those two weeks—all of which I hope to write about—here's a look back at five of this year's special events.
This year's opening night film was Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Micmacs, which the director assured us had nothing to do with Big Macs, and everything to do with his new favorite English word, shenanigans. I've enjoyed all of Jeunet's films, except the one everybody adores (yes, Amelie, I'm talking about you). Reviews for Micmacs have been mixed, but it turned out to be a perfect opening night film—inventive, fast-paced, comical, crowd pleasing. I couldn't remember much about it the next day, but I did recall how much fun I had while watching it. After the screening, the festival's new Director of Programming Rachel Rosen interviewed Jeunet and conducted an audience Q&A. We learned that the director "wanted to put everything I love in this film," which ranged from animator Tex Avery to Mission Impossible, and that he's "not interested in realism." When asked if he might ever work again with Marc Caro (co-director of Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children), Jeunet diplomatically replied, "it's so good to work alone." With the final question, Jeunet got off the best line of the evening in regards to Micmacs poor reception on his home front: "In France they love to hate what they loved before." With that, the ebullient crowd adjourned to the Regency Center for a swinging after-party. The nibbly things I sampled there were delicious, and I washed them down with the beer everyone who frequents Landmark Theaters loves to hate.
Firstly, I wish someone had clued me in on how handsome this guy is so I could have ogled him from the front row. But from my seat in the Kabuki's large House One it was easy to perceive the man's warmth and self-effacing intelligence. The evening began with introductory remarks by Leggat, followed by a clips reel of career highlights. Then came the on-stage conversation with Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu, who started things off by saying, "Let's put the guns down before we start, and talk about the sex life of Mr. Walter Salles." Hear, hear! I loved hearing about Salles' early life as a diplomat's son living atop a Parisian arthouse theater. Twelve-year-old Walter frequented that cinema so often, the ticket seller began letting him in for free. But he longed for Brazil: "I hated the drizzle, the cold, the croissants." During the talk it was also revealed that Salles spent a full year casting the boy in Central Station, that Latin Americans do not make good genre films (i.e., his own remake of Hideo Nakata's Dark Water), and that Argentina currently has the strongest cinema in Latin America (little to argue about there). He also acknowledged that "Antonioni is the director who brought me to cinema," specifically 1975's The Passenger.
Ebert and his wife Chaz were brought onstage and seated while four directors delivered heartfelt and hilarious tributes to the man they call "The Thumb." Terry Zwigoff recalled Ebert being the first person in line for a 1985 Telluride screening of Louis Bluie, and later sold him a soundtrack LP in the theater lobby. He also told a great story about a Crumb test screening. The audience survey cards were overwhelming negative—they thought the storyline about brother Charles should be dropped—so Zwigoff "fixed" the cards with the help of Wite-Out and a late-night trip to Kinko's. Ebert would become a steadfast champion of the film, going so far as to record a commentary track for the DVD release (much of which would be used for the text-to-speech software that allows the now "speechless" Ebert to speak through a computer). Next, documentarian Errol Morris called Ebert, "not just a film critic, but a cultural icon." He was followed by Jason Reitman who, commenting upon Ebert's social networking prowess, declared "I know teenage girls who tweet less than Robert Ebert." Reitman would also add that, "It's hard to put Roger Ebert's work into context when it's him who puts us into context."
The All About Evil preshow consisted of no less than four musical production numbers, the first one featuring Peaches and a dozen pom-pom shaking monstrosities performing, "I'm a Gore-Gore Girl." Afterwards, she threatened the audience with a three-hour preshow in which she would single-handedly act out the entire movie onstage. Next she brought out All About Evil cast member Mink Stole and the duo croaked out the theme song from John Water's film, Female Trouble. Peaches and Mink go way back, the latter having been the first "celebrity" to appear at Peaches' Midnight Mass film series at San Francisco's Bridge Theater. Waters was also in the house that night and stood for a round of applause. Teen heartthrob and All About Evil co-star Thomas Dekker was next on board, performing the movie's rocking theme song, "Welcome to the Horror Show." Then Natasha Lyonne, who stars as mousy theater-owner turned murderous film director Deborah Tennis (pronounced De-BOR-ah Ten-NIS) wrapped things up with a final number.
Merritt was clearly having a goof with it, blending his customary old-timey vibe with injections of electronic bleeping and screechy freakouts. Speaking and singing through megaphones, Handler gave voice to the female roles in an abrasive Olive Oyl-y falsetto while Merritt handled the male parts in a low register that was mostly inaudible. The film itself is kind of unremarkable—a flatly directed mash-up of Verne's 20,000 Leagues and The Mysterious Island, with underwater photography that was stunning for its time but is now merely quaint. Merritt exploited the film's campier aspects, such as a sarong-clad "child of nature" who sings a ditty about not wanting to wear pants and who turns out to be Captain Nemo's long lost daughter. I thought it was all good-natured fun and Merritt's legion of fans seemed satisfied, but I know some likened the performance to a bad episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000. I was glad I went, but it paled compared to last year when Dengue Fever blew the dome off the Castro with their score for the stop-motion dinosaur epic, The Lost World.
