 Starring: Hugo Weaving, Guy Pearce, Terrence Stamp
Director: Stephan Elliot
Year Of Release: 1994
Plot: Drag queen Tick gets a job in Alice Springs and decides to take fellow cabaret performer Adam and transsexual Bernadette on the road with him, to help put on the show. Buying a clapped out old bus, they head off from Sydney into heart of Australia, facing homophobia, personal revelations and all sorts of problems on their way. However Tick hasn’t explained who it is who gave him the job, or who will be waiting for him at the end of the trip. It’s also a good excuse for them to wear an awful lot of over the top frocks in the middle of the desert. |
Believe it or not, if you’re making a film and hoping to get it into film festivals and to get DVD distribution deals, you’re actually better off making a movie about gay characters than straight ones. That may be surprising, but the fact is that while there are thousands upon thousands of micro-budget movies made about straight characters every year, there are far fewer made about gay people, yet there are major gay and lesbian film festivals all over the world and plenty of distributors who solely handle queer movies, and who are constantly on the lookout for new films (for example in the UK there’s TLA Releasing and Pecadillo Pictures, who just handle gay themed films, while quite a few generalist indie distributors also have a strong track record for trying to attract the pink pound).
With a comparatively small amount of gay movies made each year, a cheap and cheerful queer cinema effort has a decent chance of getting picked up for cinema or home entertainment release, particularly in the US. With most other types of movies, there are so many of them competing in the marketplace that you’ll have a far tougher time get anyone to take any notice at all. (Of course, if you make a really good film, you’ll probably get noticed whatever it’s about, but we’re purely talking percentages here).
There is a bit of a problem though, except for a tiny few, these gay movies that do get released are pretty rubbish. Having reviewed films for a decade, I can’t count the number of bloody awful gay movies I’ve seen, that were amateurish, badly written and directed, and shouldn’t ever have gotten a release, but they got put out on DVD because there’s a market for gay entertainment but no decent product to fill it, and so the also-rans get a chance.
The normal excuse for why these films aren’t very good is a lack of budget. However I don’t buy that, and one of the reasons is Priscilla, Queen Of The Desert, which was made for virtually no cash at all. However the cast and crew found novel ways to do things that allowed them to stretch their limited funds to the limit and to use their imaginations to create a really entertaining movie while not spending much cash.
Just take the drag costumes as an example. They’re so impressive that they won an Oscar, beating far more expensive period efforts like Little Women, Bullets Over Broadway and Maverick, but if you actually look at them, they’re made from odds and ends, such as straws and sellotape and whatever was hanging around. Indeed if you watch the documentaries on the DVD, they talk about how at one point they didn’t even have any elastic, so they had to tie the costumes to the actors using bits of string. There were also other times when director Stephan Elliott knew he only had one take, because as soon the shot was finished, the costume was going to fall apart. The film really used its resources to the fullest, which many films don’t do.
However the real difference between Priscilla and most gay movies is in the script. It’s funny, smart, has great characters, there’s superb interaction between the different people in the movie, and most of all it has a story that’s really worth telling. It’s amazing how many gay films I’ve seen where you really can’t tell why they bothered, as it’s just another limp coming out tale, or a bed-hopping comedy that isn’t funny and doesn’t go anywhere. I can’t help wondering when I watch those, why the makers didn’t take notes from films like Priscilla, Hedwig And The Angry Inch, Latter Days and Were The World Mine, to really see what scope and ambition low budget gay movies can have, and how to use your lack of cash to your advantage and still tell a really worthwhile and entertaining story (to be honest, that’s true of all film, not just gay ones, but as mentioned, most straight films that are as bad as many of the gay ones that come out, don’t get a DVD release).
There is another reason why a lot of these films are rubbish, which is that if you make one really good gay cinema effort, you’ll be offered more money to make your next film, but your new backers probably won’t want it to be about gay people, as gay film is a relatively limited market. Take Priscilla director Stephan Elliot, who went on to make the awful but far more expensive Welcome To Woop Woop and the surreal Eye Of The Beholder, returning recently with Easy Virtue. None of them are as good as his breakout hit, but they’ve all been decidedly straight. The same happened to Gus Van Sant, who made a name for himself with the queer themed Mala Noche and My Own Private Idaho, before straightening up for Good Will Hunting and Psycho (although he did make the decidedly gay Milk last year).
The result is that independent queer cinema now tends to be the preserve of first time filmmakers, or those who make movies that aren’t good enough to get them a deal to make bigger, more expensive (and probably straighter) films. There are of course exceptions, such as Todd Haynes, who’s managed to go slightly Hollywood with the likes of Far From Heaven but not abandon the queer themes of his earlier work, or C. Jay Cox, who wrote the Reece Witherspoon rom com Sweet Home Alabama, but rather than immediately finding more well paid mainstream Hollywood work, went off to write and direct the low budget gay movie Latter Days.
Hollywood may now make a few high profile gay movies like Milk and Brokeback Mountain, but overall it has to be said that most queer films are pretty rubbish, yet there’s a decent chance they’ll get a DVD release, just because there’s nothing decent out there to fill the niche. It’s a real shame, because The Adventures Of Priscilla shows just what gay filmmakers can do with a bit of imagination and a story that’s worth telling – especially as if you do that, you may get an audience that goes beyond the gay population. After all, who would have expected a film about Aussie drag queens to become an Oscar winning, Cannes contender, and a worldwide hit with both gay and straight audiences?
But rather than learning the lessons of Priscilla, most queer cinemas directors at the moment just seem satisfied to make an endless succession of limp movies with nothing to say, which only get a release at all because there’s nothing else out there to soak up the pink pound.
TIM ISAAC
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