Peaches' slice-'em-up and mental health reimagined and redefined

By Michael Fox

There are midnight movies series, and then there is Midnight Mass, Peaches Christ’s long-running vaudeville-burlesque-drag extravaganza at the Bridge. Peaches, aka Joshua Grannell, doesn’t simply screen campy cult faves but produces a themed show. Yet even that’s not enough to slake this gal’s creative thirst: Peaches has also written, directed and starred in a trio of infamous funny-scary short films that made their debut at Midnight Mass. A fourth, Grindhouse, doesn’t include Ms. Christ, and has always struck its director as the most fertile premise to expand into a feature. "The short film was just an attempt at an idea; it’s not a fully realized film," Grannell explains. "What would happen if a woman inherits a failing single-screen theater and she begins making her own art-horror films? What the public doesn’t know is she’s murdering the people in the movies." Grannell chuckles. "She sees these people as being her actors. She’s just not being honest about she’s using them."

Grannell spent two and a half years writing and rewriting the screenplay for the deliciously titled All About Evil. After all, he was stretching beyond . "I really want to challenge myself and make a feature that doesn’t bank on the popularity of Peaches or even the popularity of drag," he explains. "And I wanted to make a more realistic horror film that was still funny but didn’t rely on me, Peaches, to carry it."

About a year ago, he was contacted by L.A. filmmaker Darren Stein (Jawbreaker), in town to show his first-person doc Put the Camera on Me at Frameline. "There was a chance we’d be kindred spirits and hit it off," Grannell recalls. "We share a real sensibility and love for the same stuff. He and I started planning and plotting. ‘How are we going to find the help we need to make this movie?’ Independent films are not in vogue anymore, so we thought, ‘What are our resources?’ My audience and the ability to throw it out there over and over."

With Stein onboard as producer, and the duo’s long list of contacts, they’ve managed to line up the lion’s share of the budget and nearly all the principal cast. Thomas Dekker (Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles) has agreed to play the high school student who’s obsessed with horror movies, frequents the theater, stumbles on the grisly crimes and, well, that’ll hold you for now. Cassandra Peterson (Elvira to you) will play his concerned mother; her announcement at Comic Con that she was going to be in All About Evil generated a host of publicity for the project. Longtime John Waters regular Mink Stole also has a role, but Grannell wouldn’t say who’s in line to play the murderous villainess. Hmmm, what’s Kathleen Turner up to these days?

Grannell has a long and close relationship with Landmark Theatres—he started working for the chain shortly after he moved to the Bay Area in 1996, and has managed the Bridge since 1997—and he’s in talks with upper management to shoot All About Evil at the Geary St. theater in March 2009. It would mean closing the Bridge for four weeks, albeit during the post-Oscar arthouse lull. But it’s at the top of Grannell’s wish list. Some screenwriters have a specific actor in mind when they write; he had a theater. "The outline in my head has always been the Bridge," he confides. "I did give the Bridge some things it doesn’t have, like a fantastically creepy attic. The theater [in the movie] is infested with rats, and I will say for the record the Bridge does not have a rat problem. I used creative license." Aside from the benefit to the production, Grannell thinks shooting at the Bridge would focus local attention on the plight of single-screen theaters. And he’s already got a batch of ideas for the show he’d stage to accompany the film’s S.F. opening at, naturally, the Bridge. By sheer coicidence, Peaches Christ presents Grindhouse and the Tran-ilogy of Terror Sat., Oct. 18 at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts as part of a current series of guest curators.

On the straight and not-so-narrow
One of the attractions of the Bay Area is that the definition of what’s normal and what’s aberrant differs from elsewhere in the country. Longtime local experimental filmmaker Ken Paul Rosenthal is doing his part to overturn conventional wisdom with Crooked Beauty, a forthcoming poetic documentary on mental illness. "I’m highly suspect of prior documentaries on mental health struggles that romanticize or objectify the ‘mad other’ as genius or savant, or visualize an inter-subjective view of ‘insanity’ through stylistic excess," he declares.

The film had its genesis in Navigating the Space Between Brilliance and Madness, a magazine that an artist and writer named Ashley co-edited three years ago with Sascha DuBrul. Co-founders of the Icarus Project, the duo argued that so-called psychiatric condition such as bipolar were not diseases to be cured but "mad gifts to be cultivated."

"Ashley’s opening essay articulated my experience of the world in a manner I could not have considered or conceptualized on my own," Rosenthal recalls. "In a flash of inspiration, I envisioned my project and immediately contacted Ashley to discuss her participation. It took an entire year to gain her trust, and prove I was not a member of the mainstream media but an independent artist, a fellow traveler and an ally."

Their collaboration blends Ashley’s voice-over, describing her arduous path from psych ward to activist, with Rosenthal’s subjective and non-literal imagery. Crooked Beaty is not your standard PBS doc, obviously, with its emphasis of the experiential and artistic.

"My film positions Ashley’s testimony over urban and natural environments to suggest that madness is not only a reflection of an individual’s mental condition, but also a broad and complex field of forces and phenomena that shape our collective human experience," Rosenthal says. "Though my images are poetically lensed, often to the point of abstraction, Ashley’s gracefully articulated narrative infuses them with meaning. Hence, the outer world functions as a ‘psychological road map’ for both speaking subject and viewer alike."

Rosenthal’s non-traditional approach may not sound like the obvious choice for reaching filmgoers used to a certain breed of social-issue documentaries distinguished by spoon-fed facts, carefully crafted arguments and emotional melodrama. Well, guess again. "Thus far," he reports, "both mental health professionals and common viewers appear to have no trouble accessing the core message. And I think that’s largely because I’m making each and every image as strikingly beautiful as possible in order to reach the head through the heart."

Rosenthal, who teaches at the Academy of Art and City College, lists filmmaking itself as a crazy-making activity.

"For me, a film set is akin to a psych ward. As I was conceptualizing this film, and as I went into production, I came to realize there’s an intrinsic madness to ritualized forms of making films. The rigor of it, the intrinsic power relationships and the ideology of any film reflects the cultural and political zeitgeist at the time in which it was made."

We’ll find out when the film is finished next year. "It is my hope," Rosenthal declares, "that at the end of my film the viewer will have given birth to their own mad child and nurture it in a way that will lead to healing, wholeness and integration.

topics: bay area, digital filmmaking, directors, documentary, political film

10.01.2008