SFIFF53 2010: Michael Hawley Wraps Up the Special Events

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.

SFIFF53 2010—Michael Hawley Previews the Press Announcements

In a matter of days, the full line-up for the 53rd San Francisco International Film Festival (April 22 to May 8) will be revealed. If you're a San Francisco Film Society member, look for an e-mail this Friday with instructions for downloading a PDF of the fest’s mini-guide (and all tickets go on sale to members that same day). Non-members will be kept in the dark until after the official press conference next Tuesday, and can start buying tickets April 1. In the meantime, plenty of good stuff has already been announced. Here's a recap, followed by my personal 20-film wish list for the fest's 2010 edition.

For devotees of Midnight Mass hostess Peaches Christ (aka Joshua Grannell), the World Premiere of her/his feature directorial debut, All About Evil, will be the must-see event of this year's festival. Peaches seizes control of the Castro Theater on Saturday, May 1 at 10:45PM "with a fully realized stage-show spooktacular hosted by Peaches Christ, starring members of the cast including Mink Stole, Thomas Dekker, Martiny and more."

The SFIFF event I anticipate most each year is programmer Sean Uyehara's pairing of a silent film with a new live score written and performed by a contemporary music artist. You'd think last year's The Lost World/Dengue Fever combo would be an impossible act to follow, but I think Sean's done it again. On Tuesday, May 4, songwriter Stephin Merritt of the group The Magnetic Fields will premiere a new score to Stuart Paton's 1916 adaptation of Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Joining Merritt will be Castro Theater organist David Hegarty, author Daniel Handler (aka Lemony Snicket) on accordion and others TBA.

Brazilian director Walter Salles (Central Station, The Motorcycle Diaries) will be the recipient of 2010's Founder’s Directing Award. His tribute takes place on Wednesday, April 28 and will feature a clip-reel of career highlights, an on-stage interview and "a special screening of In Search of On the Road (a Work in Progress), an hour-long edit prepared specifically for the Festival of a documentary about Salles's effort to make a documentary about Jack Kerouac." The following day Salles will offer a Master Class, plus attend a screening of his 2008 Cannes Competition film, Linha de Passe, which won a prize for its lead actress Sandra Corveloni. Hopefully, someone will ask the director why it has taken two years for this film to reach us (I believe this screening might even be the U.S. premiere?) Linha de Passe shows again at the Pacific Film Archive on Friday, April 30.

Receiving this year's Peter J. Owens Award for acting will be none other than legendary screen vet Robert Duvall. At the Friday, April 30 tribute, he'll be feted with a career clip reel, on-stage interview and a screening of his latest film Get Low, co-starring Bill Murray and Sissy Spacek.

Each year the festival gives its Mel Novikoff to "an individual or institution whose work has enhanced the filmgoing public's knowledge and appreciation of world cinema." Could anyone be more deserving of such an award than Roger Ebert? On Saturday, May 1, Ebert will appear on-stage in conversation (employing his extraordinary, new computerized text-to-speech speaking voice) with directors Terry Zwigoff, Jason Reitman and others TBA. Following the tribute, the festival will screen one of Ebert's favorite films of 2009, Erick Zonca's Julia, featuring a balls-to-the-wall performance by Tilda Swinton. If you missed this film when it screened at the SF Film Society's Kabuki Screen (R.I.P.?) last summer, or its subsequent run at the Roxie, you're lucky to have this additional opportunity.

The SFIFF's 2010 Kanbar Award for excellence in screenwriting will be given to writer/producer/Focus Features CEO James Shamus on Saturday, May 1. Shamus is best known for the films he's written and produced for Ang Lee, including Brokeback Mountain, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, The Ice Storm and Lust, Caution. Following an on-stage interview with critic B. Ruby Rich, the festival will host the West Coast premiere of a new director's cut of Ang Lee's underappreciated 1999 Civil War film, Ride With the Devil.

Every year the festival screens newly restored prints of some select cinema classics. For SFIFF53 we'll get to take another look at Satyajit Ray's 1958 The Music Room at the Castro on Saturday, May 1, as well as Luchino Visconti's 1954 film Senso (date TBA).

This year's State of Cinema Address will be delivered on Sunday, April 25 by film editor/sound designer extraordinaire Walter Murch (The Conversation, Apocalypse Now). Titled "Three Fathers of Cinema: Beethoven, Flaubert, Edison," the address will "contemplate what would have happened if motion pictures had been invented in 1789. He will present various theories on the evolution of filmmaking, investigating the cultural origins of cinema in the 19th century and the implications for the future of cinema in the 21st century."

The festival has also announced the 11 films that will be competing for Golden Gate Awards Documentary Competition. There are three I'm especially looking forward to. Lixin Fan's Last Train Home won the Sundance Grand Jury Prize for Best Documentary (World Cinema), and looks at the phenomenon of China's annual New Year's mass migration. Winning the documentary Jury Prize just last week at SXSW is Jeff Malmberg's Merwencol, in which a brain-damaged survivor of a bar attack copes by setting up a complete WWII-era town in his backyard. In Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington's Sundance Grand Jury Prize Documentary winner Restrepo, we follow a group of soldiers fighting the Taliban in the mountains of Afghanistan. The other eight titles are Colony, The Invention of Dr. Nakamats, Mugabe and the White African, The Peddler, PianoMania, Presumed Guilty, Russian Lessons and Simonal: No One Knows How Tough It Was.

Twelve filmmakers will compete for this year's New Directors Prize. I saw Ounie Lecomte's South Korean adoption drama A Brand New Life at the Palm Springs International Film Festival and would definitely recommend it. I've also heard very good things about Pedro González-Rubio's Alamar, which won a coveted Tiger Award at this year's Rotterdam Film Festival. The remaining 10 titles are Animal Heart, The Day God Walked Away, The Famous and the Dead, Night Catches Us, Northless, La Pivellina, Shirley Adams, Susa, Tehroun and—I've gotta see this one for the title alone—You Think You're the Prettiest, but You Are the Sluttiest.

This year's Persistence of Vision Award will go to Fremont-born, Oscar-nominated short-film animator Don Hertzfeldt on Friday, April 23 in a program titled "Life, Death and Very Large Utensils."

Finally, SFIFF53 will close on May 6 with a screening of Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg's documentary Joan Rivers—A Piece of Work. It is anticipated that Rivers will attend the screening, along with director Stern. At the closing night party at 1015 Folsom, "partygoers will celebrate the culmination of SFIFF53 with festive drinks, hors d'oeuvres and music inspired by the legendary comedian Joan Rivers."

Every year I draw up a list of the 20 films I most hope to find in the SFIFF line-up. They're culled from a longer wish list of approximately 100 films, spanning from 2009's Berlin Film Festival up to the present. A few have received mixed-to awful-reviews, but they're from directors who interest me nonetheless. Last year I only got seven of my 20 films, but eventually caught up with all but three. We'll soon know how SFIFF53 shakes out.

Altiplano (Belgium dir. Peter Brosens, Jessica Hope Woodworth)
The Army of Crime (France dir. Robert Guédiguian)
Enter the Void (France, dir. Gaspar Noé)
Everyone Else (Germany, dir. Maren Ade)
Face (France/Taiwan dir. Tsai Ming-liang)
Gainsbourg (vie héroïque) (France dir. Joann Sfar)
Hadewijch (France dir. Bruno Dumont)
Hiroshima (Uruguay dir. Pablo Stoll)
I Am Love (Italy dir. Luca Guadagnino)
Korkoro (France dir. Tony Gatlif)
Life During Wartime (USA dir. Todd Solondz)
Lola (Philippines dir. Brilliante Mendoza)
Lourdes (France dir. Jessica Hausner)
Min Ye (Mali dir. Souleymane Cissé)
Rapt (France/Belgium dir. Lucas Belvaux)
Revolución (Mexico dir. Mariana Chenillo, Fernando Eimbcke, Amat Escalante, Gael Garcia Bernal, Rodrigo Garcia, Diego Luna, Gerardo Naranjo, Rodrigo Plá, Carlos Reygadas, Patricia Riggen)
Scheherazade Tell Me a Story (Egypt dir. Yousry Nasrallah)
Skirt Day (France dir. Jean-Paul Lilienfeld)
The Time That Remains (Palestine dir. Elia Suleiman)
White Material (France, dir. Claire Denis)

And here are four terrific films I saw at January's Palm Springs International Film Festival—films I'd love for my Bay Area friends to see, too.

Dogtooth (Greece dir. Giorgos Lanthimos)
I Killed My Mother (Canada dir. Xavier Dolan)
The Milk of Sorrow (Peru dir. Claudia Lhosa)
To Die Like a Man (Portugal dir. João Pedro Rodrigues)

Cross-published on film-415 and Twitch.

Adam Polakoff Makes the Cover of 7x7!

Adam Polakoff and I met when we were doing extra work on Peaches Christ's film All About Evil. We've since run into each other waiting in line for Midnight Mass and most recently in the Mission where he advised that he won the cover of the current issue of 7x7 magazine. Congratulations, Adam!!

MIDNIGHT MASS 2009—Linda Blair on The Exorcist

The spirit of Christ compelled me to attend opening night weekend of the 12th edition of Midnight Mass. I'm speaking of the spirit of Peaches Christ, of course, who scored a sold-out crowd for her Saturday midnight screening of The Exorcist, preceded by a dazzling pre-show number "Peaches Will Funk You" (with such provocative lyrics as: "I don't care if your mother sucks cock as long as they be lining up around the block") and enough Regan look-alikes both on stage and in the audience to make your head spin. Idol Worship racked one up for the eternal battle between good and evil by hosting the iconic Linda Blair, who—in conversation with Peaches—revealed some sweet anecdotes about filming The Exorcist.

On the "Cold Room" Special Effects

It took many many months to—first of all—even hire me because of the special effects and the make-up. Billy Friedkin wanted to interview me many times over and talk to my mother and me to make sure I was mentally stable. He knew that was really important because he knew what he was about to do to me. Friedkin befriended my mother; they were like mother and son. The movie couldn't have been done without the friendship he had bonded—he was very crafty, that Billy Friedkin!—but, he befriended my mother and won her trust. She was never on the physical set.

The Exorcist took about a year and a half to film. As a child, I didn't know, "Is this my life? Am I always going to be trapped in this disgusting make-up?" So there I was 13-14 years old, sad and lonely, dressed as the little demon. We were filming in a building in New York and my dressing room was on the second or third floor. The sets were down below. [So on my off-time,] I'd go down and talk to the receptionist about her animals and I'd try and talk to another gal who was a Michael Jackson fan; I was a Donny Osmond fan. I was a child; I needed a friend. So I was looking out the glass doors at the front of the building at the people passing by. Nobody stopped me because at this point there was really no security. It was just me at these glass doors looking out.

All of a sudden there was a homeless person who went by the window. He's looking at me. I'm looking at him. He's looking at me. I'll never forget the look on his face [Blair mimics someone screaming in horror] and that's when I realized he was drunk and what he was looking at! Maybe I set him straight and he never drank again? Or drank a lot?

The cold room in The Exorcist [where you could see my breath] was a set where for three months we filmed in the morning when it would be zero degrees. By the time they lit it—the lights were so hot back then—it would be 17° above and then it would go to 30°. At 30° we would have to stop filming and turn all of the freezer fans back on. So we didn't really have "special effects" per se, like CGI breath coming out of my mouth. The room was genuinely cold and that was real breath coming out of my mouth. Billy Friedkin pushed the effects technicians to be the best that they could be. It was hard.

On the Guns On Set

Many of you have heard the stories about the guns and the swearing and the this and the that and it's all true. The guys were not allowed to have fun on the set. It was a small crew on a closed set. No one was allowed on. No one could see me. There were about 30 crew members who worked probably throughout but only 10 allowed on set at any given time.

Billy had these different guns hidden in different places. He would always tell me when he was going to shoot a gun off and it was really to get shock and awe out of the actors. He'd yell and scream at them, degrade them and do horrible things and I'd be lying in bed, y'know, [in her best demon voice] all strapped up. I'm watching with those contacts and that face and he'd be telling somebody off like you can't believe: "You low piece of shit motherfuckin' cocksuckin' son of a pig!" I'd be thinking, "That sounds pretty bad." He was purposely unnerving them and then he'd shoot a gun. Poor Jason Miller! His having a nervous breakdown on the set was pretty much real.

One day one of the crew threw a rubber duck back over into the set after Billy shot off the gun. It didn't go over well and everyone was fired. Everyone was fired all the time. Even I was fired. We'd all just walk away and a couple of hours later we'd all come back. It was just something Billy did. Every day. It was a lovely, loving set to work on. I'm lucky to be here.

On Audiences Being Unable To Disassociate Between An Actor And A Character

People would ask me way back then, "Have you seen the movie?" Or even today, "Well, you didn't see the film, did you?" Of course I saw the film! They never had a premiere for The Exorcist. They wanted to qualify for the Academy Awards® so The Exorcist was released on Christmas Day in New York City. That's the perfect Christmas movie, don't you think? But here was the reaction to the film: if I wanted to go anywhere, I couldn't go anywhere. When movies were released back then, there were 10 movies released, not 150 like today, so I was easily recognized. Let's say I was going into The Gap to buy some pants, and people would see me and truly be frightened. I was the Devil! You could see it in their eyes. They would back up and run. They would either run to me or away from me; it was one or the other. But I did represent that possibility of demonic possession.

On Being Outcast As A Child Star

Americans were truly ... surprised by The Exorcist. No matter where I went, I had to have a lot of bodyguards because I became a freak. Many many years ago I was very good friends with Michael Jackson and we would talk about how difficult it was to be pigeonholed. We would talk about prejudice and being misunderstood. During Michael's memorial the other day, it came to mind—knowing that I was coming to San Francisco, which has such a strong gay community—that we (Michael, myself, you) have all been pigeonholed into being misunderstood, have all experienced prejudice, have all been outcast.

In one film Elizabeth Taylor played my mother and she had been a child star. I went to see Patty Duke in Wicked and she also had been a child star. Each one of us had something in common. Child stars are taught repetition, repetition, repetition, do it the same, do it the same. Child stars are trained to be like little machines. Adult stars don't learn the same way.

Cross-published on Twitch.

07/14/09 UPDATE: "Let Peaches Funk You" is now up on YouTube:



Also, here is further backstory on Linda's being cast in The Exorcist and the 25th anniversary roadshow:

MIDNIGHT MASS 2009—The Evening Class Interview With Joshua Grannell

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.]

Cross-published on Twitch.

QUEER ICON—San Francisco Premiere at Roxie Film Center

In full disclosure, I am one of the talking heads in Mike Black and Carole Summer's Queer Icon: The Cult of Bette Davis, a documentary that examines the many aspects of the gay fascination with Bette Davis, featuring film clips of Bette's most iconic moments, juxtaposed with camp burlesques of her by Matthew Martin, Charles Pierce and Arthur Blake. Featured is a profile of Martin, highlighting his long identification with Davis, and interviews with fans, entertainers, and gay cultural historians exploring the link between the gay community and Bette.

One of those interviews is with film historian Matthew Kennedy (Edmund Goulding's Dark Victory), who—when I asked him how he felt about his participation in the project—responded: "I loved having the opportunity to ponder what makes Bette Davis great and why I love her. She's so much more than easily imitated grand gestures that drag queens find so hard to resist. What a pure creature of the cinema she was—imagine if she had been born before movies were invented. It's almost unthinkable. A select few stars seem made for the camera, almost as though their very existence depends on the moving image. She was one of them."

As for having his sequence filmed in the auditorium of the Castro Theatre, Kennedy commented: "It was an honor to be interviewed in the Castro. And a little intimidating. It's hallowed ground!"

Likewise interviewed is impresario Marc Huestis, who was instrumental in facilitating the interaction between Black and Matthew Martin. "Congrats to Mike & Carole for finishing film, he offered. "Anything with/about BETTE DAVIS has to be entertaining, no?!"

But with customary aplomb, it was Peaches Christ who scored the poster pull quote: "There's a collective understanding that she is God." When I asked Joshua Grannell how Peaches became involved in the project, Joshua replied: "They emailed me about participating in the film and it was during the Midnight Mass season and I said, 'I love Bette Davis and I would love to participate and the best way to catch me is to come to the show with your camera and we'll do the interview at the Bridge Theatre.' That's what they did. They set up the camera and we did the interview. Often my brain is so dumb when I'm in drag—as far as memory goes or whatever, there's no filter over my mouth—so I'm looking forward to the screening because I have no idea what I said."

As for interacting with Matthew Martin: "Matthew has never done Midnight Mass and I've never shared the stage with him outside of performing on the same nights at Trannyshack. However, we knew of one another before we ever met. He'd seen me and I'd seen him and I was certainly an admirer of his so—when we met some years ago—it was like we had always known each other. Ironically, Matthew made his Baby Jane movie right around the same time we were making All About Evil. Here was another opportunity for him to either be in our thing or for me to be in their's; but, we were doing it all at the same time."

As Michael Fox has written at SF Weekly, Davis' appeal "derives from her ambisexuality in combination with such timeless personas as the holy-terror diva, the stalwart solitaire, and the camp heroine." Fox adds: "More than simply a lovefest, Queer Icon questions whether gays still need a role model like the fabulous Miss D. The film will surely find an enthusiastic audience when it plays the queer capitals of New York and Los Angeles, but [Thursday's] world premiere is bound to be an only-in-San-Francisco event. It won't be tedious, darling."

Matt Sussman concurs at Flavorpill: "That been-around-the-block moxie; that sultry sophistication; and, of course, those eyes. There are many reasons why Bette Davis was one of the greatest actresses ever to grace the silver screen, but her x-factor has long held—indeed, continues to hold—particular sway over gay men."

Queer Icon: The Cult of Bette Davis boasts its San Francisco premiere at a one-off screening at the Roxie Film Center on Thursday, July 2, 2009, at 6:00, 8:10, 10:20PM. Tickets are $15 and can be purchased in advance at www.blacksummers.com. Photos courtesy of Black Summers Productions, LLC. Photo of Matthew Martin as Bette Davis courtesy of Marc Huestis.

DEADGIRL / SOMEONE'S KNOCKING AT THE DOOR—The Evening Class Interview With Noah Segan

Having already spoken with Gadi Harel when he accompanied Deadgirl to San Francisco's IndieFest earlier this Spring, I welcomed the opportunity to follow through with Noah Segan who was in town filming Peaches Christ's All About Evil. During down time on the set at San Francisco's Victoria Theatre, Noah and I sat down to talk.

* * *

Michael Guillén: It's a great pleasure to meet you, Noah. I've become a fan of your work by way of Deadgirl. Recently I interviewed Gadi for that film. Then I went back and caught Brick.

Noah Segan: Have you had a chance to see Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever?

Guillén: Not yet.

Segan: I'll tell ya, I've seen the current cut and it's fantastic! I was invited to a Fangoria panel at their last convention for the Cabin Fever film. Of course, there were a few people who had seen Deadgirl at the time; it hadn't really gotten out there yet. It started with a festival run. A lot of people had seen Brick. So there was some overlapping of people who thought they might be fans of the Cabin Fever film. I feel really good about it. I feel it will slot in nicely.

Guillén: You've done about nine films in the last year or two.

Segan: In the last couple of years I've done about 10 movies, yeah; I'm lucky. And I produced my first film last year. Are you familiar with Chad Ferrin and his work? He did the Troma film Unspeakable, The Ghouls, Easter Bunny, Kill! Kill!, and I produced his last film and starred in it as well: Someone's Knocking At the Door.

Guillén: Paul Sado—who wrote your mini-biography for IMdb—said that you were self-educated and too intelligent to graduate from high school. Is that true?

Segan: No. Sado was intelligent enough to write that. He's an old buddy of mine from New York and a very smart writer who imparted a love of Terry Southern, Sam Peckinpah, Monte Hellman, Warren Oates, and '60s counterculture upon me. He put that up on IMdb years ago before I had even done Brick. Over the last few years as I've worked more and become a little more well-known, and done press, and had proper biographies printed, I keep expecting that IMdb biography to be pulled down. It's hilarious; but, it's not professional. I keep expecting some business person to yank it down. I keep telling people I work with not to take it down. I want to see how long I can go with this absurd bio on IMdb. My favorite quote is: "Noah's favorite actor is Warren Oates, who died, as Noah expects to do one day as well."

Guillén: I truly admired your performance as JT in Deadgirl. I recognize it as a difficult performance. Do you tend to accept roles where the characters are barely likeable?

Segan: [Chuckles.] I think I'm the most likeable character in the world in Brick. I'm the sweetest guy in the universe. Dode is one of the most heartfelt people in the world.

Guillén: JT, however, is another story. Are unlikeable characters challenging for you? Is that why you choose them?

Segan: I don't know. I tend to not look at the roles in terms of likeability or even in terms of good and evil. I've been lucky in that the roles I've performed that I find the most fulfilling are ones that are conflicted; ones where the character or the circumstances are ambivalent. Deadgirl is a perfect example of that. The whole film is about ambivalence, and the conflict of youth, masculinity, friendship and power. There's a lot of that in Brick as well. It's easy for me to do those roles because I'm personally conflicted. I'd like to think most actors are. I'd like to think that most actors who immerse themselves in their work do so because they're trying to answer questions about themselves. There's some catharsis in that as well. I'm a pretty nice guy. [Laughs.] I'm not really a jerk; but, I think playing jerks helps me be a nice guy. It's definitely therapy, man.

I look at my character JT in Deadgirl and I see a guy who really does want to be liked and who wants to be strong, powerful and helpful to his friend. He wants to achieve a level of success in a way. His relationship with the dead girl, with Jenny Spain's character, is one where he's trying as hard as he can to get somewhere in life. He thinks he's found the girl of his dreams. He thinks he's going to have a future. He thinks he's hustling on his way somewhere. It's tragic. It's more apt to say I have a tendency to play tragic characters than evil ones.

Guillén: Can you speak to your attraction to genre films?

Segan: I'm a fan of Peter Jackson and these guys that push the envelope into different genres within the horror genre. That's the beauty of working within a genre. When you have these established rules and your audiences are aware of them, then they're also aware when you break the rules. It's obvious when you break the rules and make that joke or go too far or don't go far enough. That's a great challenge. There's a great delight in that. That's why I like genre fans and why I'm a genre fan and why I like working in those environments. If you really want to read a manifesto, you should read this piece I did for Bloody Disgusting after Deadgirl played Toronto. They just fucking let me go off and I gave them this manifesto on genre films and westerns. They printed every fucking word, which is the beauty of writing online. It's the ultimate soapbox. If you want to look that up, it's my best piece on where it's all coming from for me.

Guillén: Were there challenges preparing for the role of JT?

Segan: Right before I was to start Deadgirl, I was off in a far faraway land shooting another movie. I was concerned about how to negotiate the role of JT and how to remain in the zone. Simply enough, remain in character or to be able to get back in touch with the character on a regular basis, right? I was also about to move. I had secured a new apartment on the other side of town. I lived on the beach and was moving towards the city. I was bitching and moaning, to be honest with you, at these other actors on this other set, concerned about how I was going to stay in character and have a handle on the character. It's fairly easy for me to figure out the arc of a character, especially in something as well-written as Deadgirl. You read the script and take your character out. You see where he goes and you try to figure out where he's been, maybe where he's going afterwards, what he's doing when you don't see him; it's a little crossword puzzle. But how do you keep that up? How do you maintain that?

I was talking about it to some other actors who I respected and one of them said, "Well, when I was working on a film that put me in a similar situation, I moved out of my house. I stayed in a hotel somewhere even though I was shooting in a location near where I lived. I lived in this hotel. I didn't own anything. I didn't have any belongings. I was quiet and alone." Knowing what I was going through at the time with moving, I decided that was my opportunity to do something similar. When I boxed everything up at the old apartment, I paid an extra month's rent, left everything there, went to the new place, put up blackout curtains and lived there alone without anything on the walls, no pictures of my mom or my sister, no clothing of my own. I had a blanket but it wasn't my blanket. It didn't smell like me, you know what I mean? That was the important transition: to make sure that I could be alone. The important part wasn't remaining in character, it was insuring that nothing came into the character that wasn't supposed to be there. When I was not working—which on a set like Deadgirl or All About Evil—you're only not working a few hours of the day; but, it was important to me that during those few hours I was shut down. It was almost like those hours didn't exist.

Guillén: And because of the controversial relationship with women in Deadgirl, it was important for you not to have contact with the women in your life?

Segan: Yes! It was very important for me not to have contact with the women in my life. There weren't many women on set other than Jenny Spain, who played the dead girl, who also understood what I was going through. She was sensitive and one of the most professional people on that set. At the very beginning of the process I also took Gadi and Marcel aside and I said, "Look. I'm not the kind of actor in general who feels like he needs to be patted on the head every time he does something well, as much as I appreciate it when someone pats me on the head or the back." I said, "In this particular case especially, whatever attention you would normally think to give to me, give it to Jenny instead and leave me alone. Just let me be in my weird, dark place and I promise you it will be worth it.

Guillén: Which it was.

Segan: You can keep yourself occupied on a set, especially if you had as much stuff to say as I did in that movie. I had a lot of homework; but—while we were shooting—it was important that when I was off that set, I was not in my own head. I wasn't Noah. I was no one. It wasn't that I needed to be JT 24 hours a day; it was just that I needed to get this gross, vitriolic, chauvinist, violent person to go away, and Noah needed to go away, so I could be in an empty place.

Guillén: I understand that Someone's Knocking At the Door will be playing Another Hole in the Head?

Segan: Yeah. I want to try to coordinate something with All About Evil and Hole in the Head to, perhaps, have Darren and/or Joshua come by on the day of, do a little introduction to my film and then, afterwards, maybe show a minute-long teaser of All About Evil. Or have Kris Boxell, our graphic designer, come by with some artwork. More than anything, it occurred to me that many of the people who helped out on All About Evil are not Hollywood movie people. It'd be nice to give audiences a taste of All About Evil because it may be six months to a year before the film is finished and able to be seen by a wide audience in theatres. It'd be nice to keep the San Francisco vibe going.

Guillén: How did you become involved in being the producer for Someone's Knocking At the Door?

Segan: I'd been introduced to Chad Ferrin through Trent Haaga who wrote Deadgirl and who is a very close friend of mine. Trent and Chad have worked together a bunch. Chad and I had similar taste in film. We hit it off and became buddies. He sent me the script for Someone's Knocking At the Door. It had been presented to him. It was the first time anyone had ever asked him to direct something he hadn't written. He called me up and said, "Someone just sent me this script. I'm going to do some work on it. You've got really good taste in movies, do you have time to take a look at the script and let me know what you think? Maybe give me some notes on it? I don't know where to start." The next thing we knew it was a couple of months later and we had taken the script apart and put it back together again. It was very much a different kind of film. Our executive producer and investors liked the direction in which we were going. There was a role in it that, ostensibly, I could play that we had created that would be fun to come in and do. We started putting the movie together and the next thing I knew I stepped in as a producer, not only helping with the development of the script but the locations, hiring the crew, auditioning actors.

Guillén: Would you like to do more of that in the future?

Segan: I had a fun time doing it—I really did—and I'm still involved in the post-production process, the artwork. The festival premieres have been exciting.

Guillén: Can you provide a short synopsis of the film?

Segan: Someone's Knocking At the Door is a contemporary take on the classic '60s-'70s grindhouse grossout sex drugs rock and roll movie. It's a psychedelic story of murder, mayhem, rape and deviancy.

Guillén: Oooooooh! It sounds perfect for Hole in the Head.

Segan: It is. And the soundtrack is hip. It's by this band The Mae Shi who I met playing The Screamers in the movie I did about The Germs. They're out of L.A. They're a really interesting band, lots of unique sounds, kind of punk rock meets synthesizer, very Devo kind of sound. I became buddies with them on the set of What We Do Is Secret and I thought they would be a cool addition and take Someone's Knocking At the Door into a different direction. Not only did the band provide some cool mixes of their songs for the movie that became part of the movie, but Brad Breeck—one of the leaders of the band—did our score. So it's a ground-up collaboration for the music and sound. We use a lot of his score as sound effects. Those were the cherries on the icing on the top of my producing cake.

A reminder that Someone's Knocking At the Door will be screening twice at San Francisco's Another Hole in the Head Film Festival; on June 8 at 7:15PM and June 13 at 11:45PM. Chad Ferrin is expected to attend.

Cross-published on Twitch.