Making Priscilla (16 page)

When the film is shown to the ratings boards it receives an R in the U.S. (‘for sex-related situations and language’) and an M — recommended for people over fifteen — in Australia (‘medium-level coarse language and sexual references’). We are relieved that neither censor requests a glossary.

Two soundtrack album clearances are still proving difficult. The likelihood is that both R.B. Greaves’ ‘Take a Letter Maria’ and Lena Home’s ‘A Fine Romance’ will be omitted from the record for cost reasons. As the payment of the film’s synch licences is now being covered entirely by the FFC, and neither Polydor nor Mother Records are paying any advance to the movie for the soundtrack rights, the penny-pinching is incomprehensible. What appears to be happening is that this soundtrack, an orphan until a few weeks earlier, and on which we lost further time while everybody worked out who was releasing it, now has the unmistakable whiff of money to the few song licensors who are outside the PolyGram group.

We then realise that we still do not have confirmation of who is doing the remixes, and a sniffy initial reaction to Stephan’s video concept has not been followed by any decisive feedback. All this makes us wonder if it really is worth the effort any more. When ‘Maria’ and ‘Romance’ are finally cleared, giving us the fourteen core-tracks plus remixes, we decide that it is.

The video of Alicia Bridges’ ‘I Love the Nightlife’ is still
not resolved. The consensus among the various record companies is that any attempt at storytelling other than through the film images is likely to confuse the viewer, and that if the video is to engender interest in the movie it should simply condense the film’s narrative. ‘Because the beats are so strong/clear in the song,’ reads one memo, ‘simply editing brilliant film images (of which there are many) in a compelling way to the sound bed may be a logical approach.’ However, because the standards departments of MTV and similar channels insist that no more than forty per cent of a video can be footage from a motion picture — at which point in their terms it becomes a movie advertisement rather than a record promotion — this does not take into account who, if anyone, is going to perform the song to camera.

The Rapino Brothers remix arrives. It is a disappointment. With my negligible knowledge of contemporary club sounds, it sounds all right to me, if a little anachronistic, ironically recalling the early days of Stock/Aitken/Waterman. Stephan dislikes it intensely and feels it epitomises what he and Mother in London had agreed should
not
be done. Neither of us believes it is a hit single. Stephan goes so far as to promise that he will eat his shoe if it reaches the top ten.

One of the difficulties in aiming for an of-the-moment remix of an old disco hit is that people can rarely agree on what it should sound like. The Charlene and R.B. Greaves songs, both eccentric in a timeless way, have an honest nostalgia about them which would engender radio if not club play. In our bid to be contemporary, we may be missing the mark by a mile, and I do not enjoy the prospect of a flop single preceding what is showing signs of being a successful film. A second remix, done in New York by Phillip Damien, is better but still not right.

Someone finally disinters the original Alicia Bridges video, made in 1978, in which she looks like, as one viewer puts it, Billy Idol’s mum. Rendered out of contention by its crude presentation, it will be impossible to use in any case because her movements do not match the tempo of the new mix. However, Stephan has an idea of how to incorporate it in his revised concept for the video which, stripped of its extravagant effects and armies of extras, is still wonderfully imaginative:

A matt full moon hangs over an affluent Sydney suburb, and superimposed on to it is Alicia Bridges singing to camera from a distance, which bypasses the tempo problem. We return to her occasionally but mostly we follow the gradual metamorphosis of airline pilot and family man Hugo Weaving into a drag queen dancing in the street with miniature planes in her epaulettes and propellers on her nipples. In the course of the transformation, drag images from
Priscilla
appear in the mirror, reflected in perfume bottles, even emerging from a lipstick as his alter ego takes over and he runs out of the house to lead an army of drag queens — who have emerged from neighbouring homes — through the moon-kissed streets.

We call it Drag Wolf. Polydor refer to it as Jekyll and Hyde and Hugo. The whole thing is shot in a day on a housing estate on the North Shore resembling a giant
Stepford
Wives
set, with the crowd of drag queens and friends in the finale reinforced with curious locals. Towards the end of the day, Hugo falls down a flight of stairs in six-inch stilettos and tears a ligament in his ankle. For several nights he goes on stage at the Sydney Opera House in Tom Stoppard’s
Arcadia
with a limp, and extra emphasis is placed on a line in the play about his character being prone to driving into ditches.

A few days later, Stephan goes to America for a week-long
publicity tour before the east coast premiere at the Hamptons. For a moment it appears that a contractual oversight on their part is prompting PolyGram to reconsider their release plan.

The moment passes. The buttons are pressed. We are on our way.

Fetid, cranky, rumbustious, as infatuated with its ‘energy’ as the outsiders who perpetually rhapsodise about it, New York is a city running — to borrow the writer Mick Brown’s indelible phrase about somewhere else — on the emergency tank of its own mythology.

Although only the defiantly hardcore East Coasters of the movie business live there, the place increasingly resembles a giant film set in which ‘action!’ is called seconds before one’s arrival and ‘cut!’ moments after departure. The featured players and extras are seamlessly absorbed in the process and have chosen their roles with the unerring exactness of a casting director. There are occasional lapses in the wardrobe department: a couple of middle-aged businessmen jog down Sixth Avenue early one morning wearing white shorts over brightly coloured spandex tights, as if they have borrowed accessories from their wives’ closets to help them come out of their own. As for the set design, the steam which rises with such evocative predictability from the drains and subway grids has now been so sanctified by the New York films of the British commercials directors Adrian Lyne (
Flashdance,
9½
Weeks,
Fatal
Attraction,
Jacob’s
Ladder
), Alan Parker (
Fame
) and Ridley Scott (
Some
one
To
Watch
Over
Me
) that all too easily one can imagine thousands of stand-by props people with smoke machines running along a network of underground tunnels to keep the vapour topped up to appropriately pictorial levels.

Even the old panhandlers look like they might be the grandfathers of the character Eddie Murphy plays at the beginning of
Trading
Places,
although racial jokes tend to get a frosty reception in this outwardly anarchic, inwardly conformist city. The style-sheet of its principal newspaper the
New
York
Times
is testament to a fear of causing offence, a treasury of linguistic cleansing and politically correct euphemisms. (A couple of years ago it declared that the Massachusetts state budget had, for the first time in several years, gone into the African-American. It sportingly made a correction the following day: what the Massachusetts state budget had really done was go into the black.)

The East Coast premiere of
Priscilla
is being held not on a weekday in Manhattan — where, the theory goes, it would have played primarily to the media crowd, most of whom have already seen the film — but on a Friday night in the Hamptons, where it will be attended by the kind of celebrities who holiday there in the summer, and by those wealthy, taste-making New Yorkers who have left the city sufficiently early to struggle through the afternoon traffic of Long Island and arrive — a quick shower and change of clothes later — in time for the screening.

Gramercy’s premise — reinforced by the publicist Peggy Siegal, who is organising the event — is that, as most of the people they would want to have at the New York show are in the Hamptons, we should bring the show to them. So we do.

It is to take place in Sag Harbor, a quaintly affluent, low-key tourist town favoured by artists and writers on the south fork of coastal Long Island. This was Indian territory when the whites began to settle three centuries ago. Then it became a seaport with a burgeoning whaling industry, abandoned when the whalers heard about the California goldfields. Now the people with their own California goldfields, like Steven Spielberg, go there to relax.

The guest list leans more towards East Coast aristocracy than movie celebrities — various Aga Khans, the designers Calvin Klein, Donna Karan and Marc Jacobs, show business tycoon David Geffen. How this upscale bunch will respond to a downscale joke about an Abba turd is a moment one can barely wait to witness.

When the first Gramercy person arrived in town earlier in the week to test the print in the Sag Harbor Cinema, what he heard was so primitive that a Dolby engineer was airlifted in from New York to upgrade the sound system. And as Sag Harbor does not appear to have any of its own drag queens, we fly them in as well.

Greeting arrivals outside the theatre on the quiet main street in the diminishing evening light, they make a sensational trio, stopping the traffic intermittently, the jaws of pedestrians dropping as they approach. A few disappointed customers, anticipating the billed session of Kieslowski’s
Three
Colours
White,
linger to watch the feathered and sequined creatures who have invaded the sidewalks of their town.

Stephan and Terence — criss-crossing on different legs of a US publicity tour — have flown from Atlanta and Chicago respectively into the small airport nearby one hour before the screening is scheduled to start, as have Russell Schwartz from Los Angeles and, from New York, Michael Kuhn and Alain Levy. The latter is the head of all PolyGram’s entertainment interests, and is seeing the film for the first time.

Having witnessed in San Francisco and Seattle the kind of unbridled commotion that a fully engaged American audience can muster, I find the response to the movie disappointingly tentative. Walking down the street to the after-show party at a nightclub called the Amazon Deck, we stop in a bar for a drink, not so much to restore ourselves as to make a collective guess at wondering what we are all doing here.

When we arrive at the party Stephan is asked the same question by a reporter. ‘I have absolutely no fucking idea whatsoever,’ he replies. It is a brilliantly condensed summary of the bewilderment shared by several of us. My own bewilderment is exacerbated by the dislocating effects of twenty-one hours of air travel the day before, followed by a four-hour drive that morning at the hands of Stephan’s agent Bobbi Thompson, as engaging a companion as she is a terrifyingly distracted driver. Since we know none of the four hundred guests at the party we concentrate on keeping each other amused.

Stephan tells me that during a dinner in San Francisco he asked the former girlfriend of a now openly gay colleague what signs she noticed first. She came back without a beat: ‘He kept turning me over’. While in Atlanta he discovered that Alicia Bridges, of whom little has been heard since ‘I Love the Nightlife’, lived there, so he decided to track her down. The trail led to an over-forties leather bar, full of men in peaked leather caps and bare-bottomed pants, where Alicia Bridges works as a disc-jockey one night a week, playing old disco records to old fistfuckers.

Despite the unsettling, thankfully temporary, loss of a prized purple sock while in Chicago, and a weariness about the demands of his schedule (‘I am a prince, not a slave,’ he tells Gramercy), Terence is in good spirits, and very much in his element here. He has been living in nearby Amagansett for
some weeks in a windmill next to an organic farm, which must seem like being in heaven to him, and the party — hosted by
Hamptons
Magazine
and Hugo Boss — is emphatically ‘in honour of Terence Stamp’.

The pink invitation card has a feather and sequins in it, but at the party all one can see is the glitter which was sprinkled on everyone as they arrived at the theatre. Kuhn, covered in glitter, talking to the
New
York
Times
; Schwartz, covered in glitter, scanning the deck lasciviously; me, covered in glitter, delirious with jetlag, longing for bed, and wondering about the $26 000 worth of television advertising we could have bought instead. We are all getting drunk, and dealing with it in our different ways.

It seems that nobody in the place can stop talking, except for Alain Levy, who wanders around watching other people talk. In the encroaching penumbra, I begin to recognise a few faces. Griffin Dunne still has that slightly haunted look which suggests he no more wants to be stranded at the Amazon Deck than he did at the Club Berlin in the indelible punk nightclub sequence from
After
Hours.
Marisa Tomei, a 1993 Oscar winner for
My
Cousin
Vinny,
is having her picture taken with Terence, who does not appear to know who she is. Stephan, in conversation with Bret Easton Ellis, tries his pitch of turning
American
Psycho
into a musical on the author himself, who simulates polite but detached interest in a manner which the very famous, confident they will be interrupted within moments, have made their own. Tim Chappel, having completed the dressing of the
Priscilla
windows at the department store Barney’s, has finally arrived on a late train from New York.

A menswear manufacturer from Philadelphia, whose yacht is moored in Sag Harbor, has called Gramercy and offered to pay several thousand dollars to ‘buy into’ the premiere party.
When his offer is declined, he hires a PR woman who
has
been invited to scan the guests and find suitable companions for his yacht, which is moored adjacent to the venue.

It is virtually inconceivable for an Australian to pass up an invitation to a yacht party and, sure enough, they all go.

In a week when the U.S. senate votes to cut off federal money to schools which teach acceptance of homosexuality as a way of life, the newspapers and magazines are full of drag queens, and not just ours.
To
Wong
Foo,
which has recently started shooting, is already riding on the coattails of our publicity, with pictures of Patrick Swayze in a beehive and a burgundy ball gown: much more the kind of ‘lady’ Terence had in mind before Lizzy and Tim showed him their costumes.

While walking along the street in New York I notice that our old friend Vanessa Williams — who nearly prevented us from using her song ‘Save the Best For Last’ over the end titles after we had shot them to picture with a lip-synching Tim Chappel in drag — is appearing in a Broadway production of
Kiss
of
the
Spiderwoman
playing, as one might expect, the movie goddess in the fantasies of a gay window dresser in a Latin American prison. A review in
Time
magazine says she makes a very wholesome siren: ‘Any sensible fly would want to scuttle to the centre of her web and cuddle up’.

Scuttling to the centre of Lisa Marie Presley’s web has been Michael Jackson. Their wedding, rumoured to have taken place some weeks back, has just been confirmed by Donald Trump to the reporters and tourists on the pavement outside his eponymous Tower, on the top floor of which the lovebirds — proclaiming their need for privacy—are allegedly holed up. While police in Los Angeles continue to investigate allegations by a
thirteen-year-old boy that Jackson sexually molested him — an investigation later dropped — the local press are fascinated by the marriage ‘conceived’, as one put it, ‘in supermarket tabloid heaven’. They ask all the important questions. Are they both too strange to marry anybody else? Is she recruiting him for the celebrity-loving Church of Scientology? Most importantly, was Elvis at the wedding? A psychic claims gravely that ‘Elvis doesn’t want Jackson’s gloved hand inside Graceland’.

Stephan, Grant and Tim arrive back in town full of funny stories about the party on the yacht, and about another one held on the runway of the local airport. We take a taxi downtown to look at the
Priscilla
clothes which, with a Chanel suit at the centre of each window, occupy the entire Seventh-Avenue side of Barney’s. Stephan and Tim go on to a club where a complete stranger begins a conversation by asking them if they would like to see his cock ring; then, without waiting for an answer, he unzips himself and shows it to them. Later, a drummer plays a solo in the middle of a crowded dance floor as a cat — some disco kitty, probably on drugs — roams around the legs of the dancers.

They have entered a realm of madness for which most people have lost the talent or appetite. ‘Eroticism’, Roman Polanski once wrote, ‘is when you use a feather and pornography is when you use the whole chicken.’ In New York, it seems, they always use the whole chicken.

I forgo a big promotional screening and a party afterwards featuring the by now inevitable drag show — which sounds like another lively night out — in favour of going to Los Angeles ahead of schedule. That is where mission control for the American launch is located, so, I reason, that is where I should be.

Cable advertising has already begun on most of the major channels and the ‘Be a Frock Star’ lip-synch and dress-up promotion (‘you don’t need a great voice, just a great outfit’) is being set up by Gramercy’s local agencies in the top twenty-five markets around the country, with banners, flyers, table tents, napkins and coasters especially designed for the event. One of the prizes, called ‘Queen For a Day’, involves a trip to a beauty shop, manicurist or hairdresser.

Gramercy has studied the case histories of two pictures with similar ‘genre’ appeal —
Strictly
Ballroom
and
The
Crying
Game
— and has prepared a full report, revealing for example that over 65 per cent of
Strictly
Ballroom’
s U.S. income came from four markets (New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Washington), and concluding that the film ‘played extremely urban’.
The
Crying
Game,
meanwhile, expanded from an initial two-city platform release to sixty-six screens in its fifth week, which started on the Christmas weekend. Not long after came its Oscar nominations, and a month prior to the awards themselves, the film finally went wide.

While we work at establishing a level of awareness of the film in the U.S., the newspaper articles I am faxed from Australia suggest there can be hardly anyone there who, if they read or watch television, is not conscious of the movie. It already feels that it may be one of those rare pictures which enters the national bloodstream and then becomes part of the country’s collective psyche.

This is soon reinforced by three things. The first is that
Priscilla
has been nominated for nine Australian Film Institute awards. The second is that we have a serious video piracy problem in Sydney and Melbourne. Cassettes are being screened at gatherings of various sizes, some of them charging admission. As well as being copyright theft, it is particularly aggravating
to me, after going to such lengths during post-production to keep the film away from anyone other than essential crew members, that it can now be viewed on a television screen by anyone with connections on the party circuit. We employ a private detective to locate the source of the tapes. The third is that Bus Priscilla, which was parked in a Sydney street, has been stolen.