Report

SF Int'l announces its 51st program and year-round screen

The San Francisco International Film Festival announced not only its 2008 program today at the Westin St. Francis Hotel, but also the June 13 launch of its year-round programming on one screen at the Sundance Kabuki.

San Francisco Film Society Executive Director Graham Leggat told the assembled that the Film Society has been working very hard since he arrived to turn its programming into a “year-round operation,” and that the SFFS screen will feature international independent and documentary features with limited U.S. distribution.

[Editor’s note: SF360.org is published by SFFS.]

Most of the event was devoted to unveiling the work inside the 51st Festival, which runs from April 24 through May 8. It opens with Catherine Breillat’s The Last Mistress, starring Asia Argento—one of three films in the Festival’s opening weekend featuring the actress, who Leggat spoke of as “alluringly vulpine. And that’s a compliment.” The International’s closing night is an Alex Gibney documentary with roots in San Francisco publishing, Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson. Jonathan Levine’s Sundance hit The Wackness is the Centerpiece presentation.

topics: documentary, environmental films, exhibitions, french cinema, genre films, independent film, international film, italian cinema, midnight movies, san francisco film society, san francisco international film festival, sundance film festival, sundance kabuki, technology

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Platform

L.Q. Jones talks dogs and cult movies

The list of talking dog movies is a long and storied one, from Homeward Bound to Snow Dogs. But one stands head and forelocks above the others: A Boy and His Dog.

First released in 1975, the film takes place after nuclear war has destroyed the planet. The barren post-apocalyptic landscape boasts the usual packs of half-feral men chasing down unlucky women and fighting over the meager supply of food. Vic (a young pre-*Miami Vice* Don Johnson) is more of a loner; his only companion is a dog. Luckily, Blood not only talks, but is by far the smarter and more erudite of the two; he’s crucial to the boy’s survival. He also sniffs out women for Vic to scratch his post-nuclear itch with. They’re the best of friends, until Vic meets Quilla June.

topics: directors, midnight movies

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Film '07 -- Bests and more from the Bay Area's scene-makers

The critics have spoken, and the American West is winning in many year-end polls. But a quick survey of Bay Area programmers, curators, distributors, and filmmakers reveals a much richer picture of 2007’s best movie events, from avant-garde showcases to locally programmed extravaganzas. SF360.org offered some of the Bay Area’s leading voices a chance to weigh in on their film favorites and disappointments for the year, as well as their hopes for the next. We present an edited selection of their comments here.

topics: argentine cinema, bay area, castro theatre, critics year end polls, digital filmmaking, film festivals, filmmakers, gay lesbian cinema, jewish cinema, midnight movies, queer cinema, roxie

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Jesse Hawthorne Ficks on his midnight movie empire

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks is the founder, curator and host of Midnites for Maniacs, a frequent one-night event on the historic Castro Theatre‘s calendar these days. "Emphasizing dismissed, overlooked and forgotten films," MfM might be said to focus on the populist yet esoteric-genre and exploitation flicks that for the most part long since disappeared into the netherworld of discarded VHS rental tapes.

These cultural artifacts have included such rarities as "Joysticks" (a let’s-save-Pop’s-video-game-store opus from 1983) and 1987’s flabbergasting "Troll 2," a quasi-horror fantasy made in the U.S. by Italians, but deliciously senseless in any language. Among the nearly 30 marathon triple bills Ficks has presented at the Castro to date were such tasty theme nights as "Supernatural Swirly Stuff," "Are You Goin’ to Prom?," "So Straight It’s Gay," plus tributes to the cinema of aerobics and roller-disco. There have been evenings devoted to the screen oeuvres of Crispin Glover, Dolly Parton, and "underage Jodie Foster."

Getting his own such retrospective this Friday (though not in person) is none other than the apex of hairy 1970s masculinity. Billed as " Three Moustache Rides with Burt Reynolds," the night features his starring turn (opposite Dolly) in the 1982 film of Broadway musical "Best Little Whorehouse in Texas," and a midnight showing of his 1977 redneck megahit "Smokey and the Bandit."

It opens with a movie that perhaps hasn’t been seen in SF since its disastrous 1975 theatrical release: Peter Bogdanovich’s "At Long Last Love," another musical that had Burt, Cybill Shepherd and others kicking up their heels to Cole Porter tunes in a tribute to 1930s Hollywood glamour. A critical whipping post and commercial dud, "Love" was (somewhat unfairly) branded as so awful that it became a virtual "lost" film, never released in any home format. Its extremely rare screening at the Castro comes courtesy of Ficks. In a roundabout way, we felt the need to ask him: Why?

SF360: You teach Film History at the Academy of Art. How does your curriculum balance the required likes of ‘Potemkin’ against, say, your confessed all-time favorite ‘Ski School’(a 1990 sexploitation comedy complete with lambada jokes)?

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks: I was always frustrated in my film classes when the teacher would teach the same old films, pointing out the same old things. I remember one time when I was in school, I compared Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘Psycho’ to Steve Miner’s ‘Friday the 13th Part 2’ and my professor reacted as if I had personally offended him. That kind of snobbery doesn’t fly in my classes. Film history for me encompasses ALL films, not just those that theory books have been deemed to be ‘important’.

SF360: You’ve been programming midnights since you were 16, starting then in SLC. What kind of stuff were you showing then, and for who?

Ficks: Salt Lake City is a tuff place to grow up in if you are yearning for more. Midnite films in Salt Lake were (and still are) extremely important for this reason. Being exposed to movies that mainstream programming shies away from helps you in ways you don’t even realize. When I was programming films with my manager, we had teenagers to 40-somethings coming out in droves! David Lynch had just become a household name with ‘Twin Peaks,’ so ‘Blue Velvet’ and ‘Wild At Heart’ were huge hits. As were staples like ‘Pink Floyd’s The Wall’ and ‘Monty Python and the Holy Grail.’

SF360: How did Midnite for Maniacs start?

Ficks: I moved to SF in 1998 and scored the greatest job of my life at the Four Star Theatre. The manager Frank Lee and Uncle Lam became mentors, giving me opportunities as a projectionist, programmer, and host. This was toward the end of the heyday of Hong Kong cinema, so I started programming midnite shows of everything from old fantasy films like ‘Encounters of a Spooky Kind’ and ‘Zu: Warriors on Magic Mountain’ to new Johnnie To films like ‘Love on a Diet’ and ‘The Mission.’ Not only did people actually come out, I realized there was a late-night movie community in San Francisco! Then one day I programmed ‘The Garbage Pail Kids Movie,’ and it sold out so hard we ended up having to turn people away who had driven all the way from Oakland! From then on, I was able to mix and match just about anything.

SF360: You’ll only show 35mm prints — and a lot of these movies aren’t exactly in high demand by rep cinemas and such. How do you go about tracking down prints?

Ficks: This is becoming more and more difficult, because many of the films that deserve to be screened are so obscure that finding a 35mm print is almost impossible. Oftentimes, if you can track down which distributor actually owns the rights to a film, the archive will pull out the cans of the film — and it will be unrunnable. The studios don’t seem to care about their old 35mm prints. And when it comes to the type of programming I’m interested in, they often ask why I even want to run the title, as was the case with Andy Kaufman’s ‘Heartbeeps’ and George Lucas’s ‘Howard the Duck.’ A very special story is behind the print of ‘Troll 2’ I screened as a part of a ‘Vertically Challenged Monsters’ triple bill. After confirming its availability with a distributor, I contacted the film’s lead actor Michael Stephenson in hopes of him attending the screening. I will never forget his absolute amazement when I told him that a 35mm print existed. [Note: ‘Troll 2’ was a direct-to-video release.] Not only was that the print’s theatrical world premiere, it has gone on to screen in thirteen cities since.

SF360: A lot of films you’ve shown have been ones that made an impression on you when you were growing up. Were you attracted to exploitation-type cinema early on?

Ficks: I watched a lot of films as a kid. I give my Mom most of the credit. She would take me to the video store every Friday and rent four movies of my choice. And since I was scouring every magazine about movies I could find (‘Fangoria,’ ‘Starlog’, even ‘MAD’ and ‘Cracked’), I acquired quite an obsessive appreciation for movies ranging from ‘The Evil Dead’ to ‘Return To Oz,’ ‘First Blood’ and ‘Transylvania 6-5000.’ And since I was so young, I wasn’t affected by what I ‘should’ or ‘shouldn’t’ like. Which I know happens all the time as we get older. How many times have you said to a friend, ‘I kinda wanna see that movie’ and they respond by contemptuously rolling their eyes at you?

SF360: Why Burt Reynolds? His peak stardom would have been a little before your time.

Ficks: Burt Reynolds is just as amazing and important to film history as Cary Grant or Jean-Paul Belmondo. Yes, my students have to study The Moustache Man. He not only is one of the smoothest and most charming actors to cross the movie screen, he represents a time period when men could be sexy, funny and furry—and that includes on his back!

SF360: ‘At Long Last Love’ is a very rare film-partly because it was so despised at the time. You recently spoke to Peter Bogdanovich — what did he have to say about it?

Ficks: This film is a true rarity. It has never been released since its theatrical run in 1975. Not on VHS, DVD, Beta, nothing. And this is the original print from that release! It represents the type of film that Midnites for Maniacs showcases: Dismissed, underrated, and overlooked. People hated this film when it came out. It’s a musical shot in the tradition of Ernst Lubitsch, where all the musical numbers were filmed live. And in this film’s case, all the actors were singing in their own untrained voices. And if you’ve noticed, this concept has inspired many films from Woody Allen’s ‘Everyone Say I Love You’ to Lars Von Trier’s ‘Dancer in the Dark.’ Now ironically, the writer-director Peter Bogdanovich also has some difficulty embracing the film. After talking with him recently over the phone, he still seems to feel that the film missed its mark. I tried to explain to him that the film may not have achieved exactly what he wanted, but that it did achieve something quite refreshing and unique, something that people have obviously been inspired by. His response: ‘Let’s talk about my good movies!’ This happens all the time, when the creator doesn’t realize how wonderful their creation actually is.

SF360: What are some favorite guests you’ve had at Midnite for Maniacs shows to date?

Ficks: Just last month I hosted the 25th anniversary screening of Greydon Clark’s ‘Joysticks’ in Los Angeles at the New Beverly Theatre. The sweetest programmer down there, Phil Blankenship, helped me put together the reunion of actors Jonathan Gries (King Vidiot), Jim Greenleaf (McDorfus) and director Clark. They were all so happy to be there. It was the best.

Then there was the utter surprise of experimental filmmaker Nathaniel Dorsky and director Richard Lerner attending the screening of their 1976 T&A spectacular ‘Revenge of the Cheerleaders.’ They didn’t tell me they were there until after the movie ended! The director Richard Lerner was surprised at how well the film played to contemporary audiences. He also told me that at least three minutes of full-frontal-bush had been cut out of the print I screened. Brilliant. Plus to top that, Dorsky (who wrote the screenplay) authored a book about Robert Bresson and Roberto Rossellini entitled ‘Devotional Cinema’ that I use in my Film History classes.

SF360: What guests and films are on your wish list?

Ficks: I would love Peter Bogdanovich to come out and host a retrospective of his contemporary classics. And I am trying to get Allan Moyle to release a director’s cut of ‘Times Square’ (a 1980 proto-riot-grrl-power teen flick).

Someone recently told me that at a recent Pat Benatar show she introduced her ‘Invincible’ from ‘The Legend of Billie Jean’ (a 1985 teen epic) by saying, ‘This is the theme to one of the worst films ever made.’ How heartbreaking is that? I’d like to get her here for a screening and teach her a thing or two!

The next Midnites for Maniacs programs at the Castro are Dec. 7’s ‘Three Moustache Rides with Burt Reynolds’ and a Feb. 8 ‘Bringin’ on the Heartbreak’ triple bill featuring ‘Lucas,’ ‘Say Anything’ and ‘My Bloody Valentine.’

topics: castro theatre, film festivals, midnight movies, q&a

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Peaches Christ Superstar

Can cult movies save the world? Maybe; they saved a young Joshua Grannel, a.k.a. Peaches Christ, founder and host of camp/cult-fest extravaganza Midnight Mass. This summer marked the tenth anniversary of the series, which has been starring not only Peaches and her sidekick Martiny, but also a slew of celebrity guests (Mink Stole, Elvira, and John Waters, to name a few), as well as featuring plenty of audience participation. Upcoming screenings include ’50s sci-fi “Creature from the Black Lagoon” (this weekend in 3-D, with Cassandra Peterson/Elvira live and in person!), “Dead Alive” (Sat/25), and as a finale, The San Francisco Underground Short Film Festival (Sat/1). As the series enters its stretch drive, we needed to chat with our very favorite Hostess with the Mostest, the exceedingly lovely Peaches Christ.

SF360: What’s the spirit behind Midnight Mass and how did it come about?

Peaches Christ: Well, really the whole thing was inspired by John Waters, to be honest, which is why it’s so fitting that he was the special guest for the opening weekend. He came to my university and I was able to host his visit with Martiny, who’s my sidekick at Midnight Mass, at Penn State — and he told us about the Cockettes when we mentioned that we were thinking about moving to San Francisco. He was very encouraging and kind of told us how great San Francisco was and how Divine and Mink [Stole] had performed with the Cockettes and kind of put the seeds in our head for this idea that people and queens and artists and singers and weirdoes would get up at a movie theater in North Beach and do these shows, because it was before the documentary came out. So when we moved to San Francisco and actually started looking for Landmark Theatres, it was a perfect opportunity to pitch them this idea. So Martiny and I came up with the title ‘Midnight Mass’ because I had named myself Peaches Christ and pitched the idea of just a real simple kind of performance, a sort of a fun celebration of the movies before the actual movie screens. They were very…not so much concerned about the maybe sacrilegious nature of the title … they were more worried about the fact that midnight movies hadn’t really worked in San Francisco for a long time and ‘Rocky Horror’ had just left the Kabuki due to dwindling ticket sales and it was kind of like, you know, there’s so much that’s going on in this city that’s transgressive and ‘underground’ quote-unquote that midnight movies are sort of a suburban phenomenon at this point. Our [response] was ‘Well, let’s see, let’s see if we can draw a crowd where the focus is really the show or the experience around the movie,’ and it worked. People came and they dressed up and they participated and we would put on a show and kind of set the scene and then hand the movie over to the audience and say, ‘Do with it what you will.’ Which is still how it is to this day. When we walk off the stage, the movie starts and the audience kind of takes over. Very interactive.

SF360: Well it’s pretty fitting that John Waters came for the tenth anniversary.

Christ: It’s amazing. It’s like there could be no more perfect guest and it’s like a dream come true.

SF360: I know you saw him again after college, have you kept in touch with him between then and now?

Christ: No, and really kind of avoided him because I was so afraid of tainting that awesome memory I had of him from college. So even though we obviously have mutual friends and I’ve done all these shows with Mink Stole and have loved his movies and promoted his movies and celebrated his movies I really didn’t pursue him. Then the ten year anniversary was coming up and we had brought Cassandra Peterson last year when it was like I had become friends with Elvira doing Midnight Mass and she had had me over for dinner and she was going to come back to Midnight Mass this summer but it was like, ‘Oh my god, we have to get John Waters. If I don’t do it now… when would I ever do it if not for a ten-year anniversary?’ I really don’t plan on making it to 20 years of Midnight Mass. I don’t know, maybe we will, but I’m not planning on it, so it was kind of like ‘OK, we have to do it now!’ Amoeba Music is a sponsor of mine and they’re great friends of mine, of Peaches, and I’ll go over there out of drag as Joshua and introduce people for them sometime when they have a signing or something, and they set something up kind of last minute with John and called me at the 11th hour for when his CD released this past February, and I knew that I was going to do some outreach to him but I didn’t know it was going to be tomorrow, so I just scrambled to put something together. Really what I did is I just wrote him a really personal letter and kind of laid it all out for him. At the signing I actually introduced myself and I said, ‘I’m the guy that brought you to Penn State a long time ago,’ and he actually seemed to remember. I don’t see why he’d remember… and I said I’d moved here and started a midnight movie series and he sort of raised one eyebrow and I said ‘…and I host the series as my alter-ego Peaches Christ’ and then he just sort of screamed and laughed and said, ‘Of course I know who are, you became Peaches and Mink adores you!’ I kind of handed him this package and said, ‘There’s a letter in here,’ and he turned to his assistant and made sure that that was put with his scarf so he knew he’d take it. People give him so much stuff that it has to be shipped back to Baltimore because he didn’t want to take it on the plane with him, but he actually took my letter with him. I got a call from his assistant Susan a few days later and we set the wheels in motion. And it’s really amazing because he gets asked to do a million things like this all over the world

SF360: Are you going to be best friends with him now?

Christ: Well I don’t think that that’s possible. People have asked that, but it’s like when you admire someone so much… to me he’s this godfather, mentor, diva that I could never not have on a pedestal. I don’t think that could ever happen because I’m such a dorky fan. I grew up in Maryland and I discovered him at an age where it was kind of life-saving in some way because when you go to Catholic school and you’re growing up in Annapolis and you’re queer and you’re teased and you’re taunted

topics: actors, bay area, film festivals, midnight movies, q&a

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A JT LeRoy reader

The hardest working hoax in show business, JT LeRoy, as an author, was tireless: not just in the creation of three books, the collection of dozens of celebrity friends, the performance of five-hour phone calls in character, the penning of countless articles and the fanning of scores of rumors — including the how-could-anyone-believe-it fathering of a child to Asia Argento — JT LeRoy, a.k.a. Laura Albert, also raised a son of her own to seven or so years of age in the time this busy career was unfolding. We forget all this, because, as fashionable as it once was to have a book by JT LeRoy in your backpack, or near your masthead, it’s even more fashionable to claim you always knew who JT LeRoy wasn’t. As the Asia Argento-directed/JT LeRoy-initiated The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things opens this Friday at the Castro Theatre, we take a moment to reflect on the art of deceit in the marketing of fiction.

1. National Public Radio: Terry Gross’s “Fresh Air,” claims of JT LeRoy in 2001, on the NPR site, “The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things (Bloomsbury) is the collection of autobiographical stories that he wrote at the age of 16. And Sarah a novel about a cross-dressing 12-year-old hustler. LeRoy’s writing comes from his experience traveling with his mother across the country.”

2. New York Times: Warren St. John writes, in Nov., 2004, that “JT LeRoy remembers well the first time he read about himself in print. It was an article in the British magazine The Face, declaring Mr. LeRoy, just 19 at the time, a literary wunderkind. Mr. LeRoy — who says his mother was a drug addict and prostitute and that he spent his youth as a cross-dressing hooker, turning tricks in truck stop parking lots — was elated.
‘I cut the article out and put it on my stomach like it would heal me,’ Mr. LeRoy said in a twang left over from his West Virginia childhood. ‘But it didn’t heal me. The thing about attention is it’s like drinking. One drink is too many, and a million isn’t enough.’”

3. New York Magazine: Stephen Beachy delicately unravels the persona in Oct. 17, 2005, with the explosive story, “Who is the Real JT Leroy ?” “A good hoax is like a good con,” he writes in the piece, which will track down who, exactly, the likely perpetrator is. “Though a con liberates the mark from some of his material things, it also teaches him how easily he was tricked, how ready he was to believe certain stories. To ‘wizen the mark’ is to send him back into the world a little less wide-eyed, a little more jaded, his vision now penetrating beyond the surfaces of things. But to enlighten us, a good hoax or a good con must eventually be revealed.” . . . “In one interview,” Beachy writes, sympathetically, “JT said, ‘When I wrote Sarah, I was male-identified, and now I’m not. I don’t know what I am. So it’s easier if people decide it’s not me, then I won’t be held down. So many people have claimed me as their own, so I guess the best thing is to confuse them all.’”

4. New York Times: On Jan. 9, 2006, Warren St. John, who’d previously interviewed a person he believed was “JT LeRoy,” breaks the identity of the wigged-and-sunglassed publicly shy JT LeRoy as Savannah Knoop, the sister of Laura Albert’s partner. “A photograph of Ms. Knoop at a 2003 opening for a clothing store in San Francisco was discovered online. Five intimates of Mr. Leroy’s, including his literary agent, his business manager and the producer of a forthcoming movie based on one of his books, were shown the photograph and identified Ms. Knoop as the person they have known as JT LeRoy.”

5. Salon: Jack Boulware, a writer who’s path also crossed with Albert’s in ’90s post-punk, sex-positive San Francisco, moves the story forward by looking at how “LeRoy’s fiction is in many ways Albert’s life. Both were fond of aliases. JT LeRoy was known as Terminator and Jeremy; Albert has used many names, including Speedie, Laura Victoria and Emily Frasier. Both engaged in long, late-night phone conversations. Both emerged from desperate lives spent on the streets — Albert in New York, LeRoy in San Francisco.”

topics: authors, bay area, directors, midnight movies

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