Making Priscilla (12 page)

I read the questionnaire, a very general one as we are using this preview for no other reasons than to determine whether or not the film is liked and why. On some circulated sample forms I have seen for other films, even with the titles and actors’ names erased, the more specific questions tend to betray the identity of the film. The response card for
The
Bodyguard,
for example, listed among the descriptions of the blanked-out Kevin Costner character: ‘reluctant to work with celebrities’.

We stand at the back of the theatre as the red velour curtains part, holding our breath so hard that it leaves a surfeit of oxygen for everybody else. Under a minute into the main titles, there is a glorious moment which prompts a relieved exhalation. When we cut wide to Hugo Weaving as Mitzi for the title card — revealing the full extent of his silvery curves in a dress which looks like a hand-me-down from the early Supremes — there are ripples of applause and amusement. Not long after, Bernadette’s line ‘a cock in a frock on a rock’ — delivered with winningly weary disdain by Terence Stamp — brings the house down.

From then on, just about everything seems to work: the lipstick gag, the Broken Hill hotel room and pub scenes, the bus-top opera (applause), the Aboriginal campfire (roars of laughter and applause) and, to my delight, the Abba turd joke. The scene is timed perfectly by Terence and Guy Pearce, and the
audibly dawning horror among the audience that the pay-off is going to be every bit as tasteless as they are dreading is one of the great repeat pleasures of subsequent viewings.

I wonder how an American audience will respond to the sight of a Filipino woman firing ping-pong balls out of her vagina to a riotously appreciative male bar crowd. I look at Stephan at the start of the scene and we exchange cartoon mannerisms of fear and dread, but it goes down well, except with a Filipino couple, who walk out. There are more big laughs: the shot of the Queen’s portrait, the binoculars at the bus window, the cake out in the rain, Terence’s little flourishes in the dressing room, and Hugo’s fully extended frill-neck during ‘Finally’, which is punctuated by applause throughout.

After the end titles and final gag — for which, despite having alerted the projectionist, the house lights are already on — everything goes intimidatingly quiet. While the audience fill in their forms, I amuse myself by remembering the story recounted in Budd Schulberg’s
What
Makes
Sammy
Run?
about the three studio yes-men who are asked for their opinion after a preview. The first says it is without doubt the greatest picture ever made. The second says it is truly magnificent. The third is fired for saying he only thinks it is great.

A man in a leisure suit from National Research Group, who is monitoring the collection of the scorecards, finally gives us the nod: ‘It doesn’t get any better,’ he purrs conspiratorially. Dan Ireland, who has already selected the film for the Seattle Film Festival, considers Terence Stamp’s performance outstanding, and notes his resemblance to Meryl Streep. Others will say he looks like Glenn Close. I call Terence later and inform him of his escalating glamour quotient.

By the time my attention is back in the theatre, a ‘focus group’ of twenty people and a moderator — one of those men
who has done too many self-awareness courses — are discussing ‘the characters’ true sexuality’. One person thinks that the drag queens’ climb at the end is a little anti-climactic; the rest disagree. Nineteen say that the movie is neither too fast nor too slow: it moves just right. One says that it moves a little slowly, but several people in the group begin to argue with him and he changes his mind. Most importantly, it appears to have given everyone pleasure. As one focus group member puts it, the film has ‘a lot of feelings’.

Stephan, ready to gag at this point, is delighted when someone compares it with Hal Ashby’s
Harold
and
Maude,
a movie which strokes the raw nerve of a childhood in which he frequently feigned his own death to attract his parents’ attention.

Afterwards, I am handed the hand-written summary sheets: 45 per cent of the audience found the picture ‘excellent’ (against an NRG norm of 25), 34 per cent ‘very good’ (norm 30), giving us 79 per cent in the top two boxes (norm 55). If you add ‘good’ (14 per cent), we found acceptance with 93 per cent of the audience. Only three people disliked it, and three others walked out.

The next day, the film starts to travel by limo. Or so I like to think.

There is hardly any news in the movie business which travels as rapidly as that of a successful preview, and no individual quicker to respond to it than a hungry agent.

There is a question agents always ask as a prelude to stealing a client from other agencies: ‘Are you happy?’ I am called by someone to congratulate me on the results of the screening, and to inform me that she is part of a ‘boutique’ agency representing a ‘small, select’ group of writers and directors. She
hopes that I will be interested in reading material written by her clients, and asks me to congratulate Stephan as well. ‘Is he represented?’ she asks. I tell her that he is, by Bobbi Thompson at William Morris. Then it comes: ‘Is he happy?’

Bobbi has agreed to replace the beer with a bottle of good champagne and a massage. The masseur has shown up in Stephan’s room with an armoury of unguents and accessories. First he covers him in hot oils, then wraps him in plastic and blow-up leg-warmers so that he resembles a cross between the Michelin Man and a boiled ham. Then the phone rings. In the middle of his William Morris massage, it is ICM wondering if he is interested in talking.

At Gramercy, the test scores are confirmed to be very good indeed. Handing me the report, Russell Schwartz tells me that if one were to substitute the gay component of our audience with women, it is virtually the same result as for
Four
Wed
dings
and
a
Funeral.

Accordingly, our Cannes planning meeting with them has a very different complexion from the spiky, tentative discussion of a couple of days earlier. The first item on the agenda is drag queens. We have already persuaded PolyGram in London to help bear the expense of getting three drag queens — Cindy Pastel, Strykermeyer and Portia — to Cannes for a documentary which is being made about them, and Gramercy now agree to pay them a fee of $100 for each of two performances they will give: one at the American Pavilion on the night of the screening, the other at the PolyGram villa after the distributors’ dinner the following night. ‘And they’ll never have to pay for drinks,’ adds the publicist Claudia Gray. Stephan widens his eyes in simulated horror. ‘
Don’t
tell them that,’ he says like the appalled parent of delinquent children. ‘If you do, they’ll drink so much they’ll get completely trashed and start licking Stewart
Till’s face in front of the distributors.’ This is a prospect we all relish, so drinks will be on the house.

As we arrive at the film’s first LA press screening, arranged for that evening, each reel of Robert Redford’s
Quiz
Show
is carried out by security guards as it finishes: a rigorous policing of potential bootleggers that is clearly not being applied to our picture.
Quiz
Show
overruns, and there is a perceptible weariness in the waiting journalists by the time
Priscilla
starts fifteen minutes late. The response feels correspondingly muted by comparison with the two local screenings so far, and our view of the screen is obstructed by an immobile man with a hairdo like Jack Nance’s in
Eraserhead
.
The back of his head gives nothing away.

Depressed, I have dinner with the screenwriter Robert Mundy, who has better reason to be depressed than I do.
Twenty
One,
his ten-year-old screenplay based on the same events as
Quiz
Show,
is an outstanding script that will now probably never be made. I tell him that earlier in the evening I saw the cans of Redford’s film, but that its minders prevented me from getting any closer. Mundy is part of a rare Hollywood species, an educated man who is not bitter, and he retains his flair for the epigram. When I ask him about Helena’s, a private club in Silverlake popular with the fast crowd in the late ’80s, he puffs ruminatively on his cigar and says, ‘It was a place where people went to watch their agents dance’.

While neither of us have yet seen his agent dance, Stephan and I are seeing studio functionaries do so around their offices. Many of them, in accordance with Candice Bergen’s memorable typecasting (‘those tiny, intense executives’), are quite short.

Although the rituals of business courtship are fascinating, I
can see no point in having conversations with people who are unable to make decisions. Crossing the parking lot towards the opulently redecorated Thalberg building on the Sony lot, we see a giant hoarding of Peter O’Toole as Lawrence, prompting thoughts about what he might have looked like in drag in the outback. Then we really could have called it
Florence
of
Arabia.

The posters which executives have on their walls, chosen from the studio’s library of one-sheets, are usually a revealing barometer of both their self-image and their function within the studio. The person we see at Columbia has three —
Boyz n
the
Hood,
Poetic
Justice
and
El
Mariachi
— and together they say ‘minority filmmakers’ delegate’. Stephan, a white boy from Sydney’s North Shore with an appetite for big, expensive trash, could not be further away from this realm.

He has some fun at Amblin where, instead of being cross-examined about
Priscilla
and
To
Wong
Foo,
he meets an executive who recently travelled to the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras in Sydney, and has just attended a fancy dress party to which he and his partner showed up as Holly Hunter and Anna Paquin in
The
Piano.

The most memorable encounter of all is not with a studio executive but with a studio security guard. Charcoal black in a smart navy-blue uniform with a badge which identifies her as Alfreda Myers, she hovers behind both sides of a pillar at the entrance to the reception area of MGM/UA, the whites of her spying eyes appearing around it. She is the hidden camera, the silent watcher who misses nothing, and she turns up in parts of the building which Stephan feels sure can only be explained by her own secret corridors, enabling her to confuse people she is following by arriving before them at their destination.

We are both frightened and fascinated by her, and feel that on a subsequent visit we may fall in love completely.

We pick up Grant at the airport and drive up the coast road to San Francisco in a convertible. There are some strange sights along the way: a model trying to sell clothes to lunch tables of ‘ladies’ in Santa Barbara; a surfer on a contaminated beach near Guadalupe; Hearst Castle lighting up through low rain clouds at twilight; jets of spray coming through a rock in the rain at Big Sur; a coffee shop full of
very
peculiar people in Santa Cruz.

Arriving in San Francisco singing selections from
Can
’t Stop
the
Music
in the muted evening light, we hear that when the Gramercy people were pink leafletting Castro Street near the theatre where the film will be shown, they offered one to a tall man with a crew cut emerging from one of the many gay bars in the area. ‘Of course I want to see it,’ he barked, ‘I’m one of the investors.’

There is a reception for everyone connected with the festival at Emporio Armani, and the sense of irregularity which will take over for the rest of the night is already in motion: we are standing around talking, eating and drinking among hundreds of thousands of dollars of Armani clothes, as models glide around us randomly.

Reeling from the excessive oxygenation of a day in the back seat of the convertible, compounded by the cold wine consumed among the clothes horses, we arrive at a dark, fast-lane restaurant called Bix. A young actress who lives close to her senses first tries to get up Stephan’s nose as much as possible, then switches her attention more literally to his ear, into which she plunges her tongue while still chewing her food. The evening deteriorates with increasing hilarity from then on, turning ugly only when the actress attempts to rape Stephan on a pool table in a late-night bar.

The Castro Theatre audience are more prepared for the film
than we could ever have imagined, yet not so prepared that they fail to be surprised. It is a dream screening. The crowd is so exuberantly responsive to the movie that it begins to resemble an interactive show rather than a motion picture, and at the end Stephan is practically carried from the theatre on the shoulders of his adoring public. It is a night for punching the air.

David Stratton’s review in weekly
Variety,
which on a Sunday is available only in Los Angeles, has been faxed up at our request. For a moment, it seems slightly muted, less than the all-cylinders rave I was hoping for, but I send a copy up to Stephan’s room and he is delighted with it. It
is
pretty good. Stratton calls it ‘a cheerfully vulgar and bitchy, but essentially warmhearted road movie with a difference … a lot of fun’, and he acknowledges several individual contributions.

The next morning I am awoken by a call from Russell Schwartz.
Daily
Variety
has reprinted the previous day’s piece from the weekly edition and the
Hollywood
Reporter
review — written, we are astonished to find, by the man behind whose post-modernist beehive we sat at the press screening — is also a rave. He calls the film ‘drenchingly delirious, wickedly pithy, a splendid amusement’, noting also its poignant elements. Schwartz reads me the draft of a media release announcing that the picture will be distributed in the US by Gramercy and asks me for a quote. I have no interest in the corporate logorrhoea that appears between quotation marks in trade press announcements. ‘Just write what you like,’ I say.