In
1982 I was a struggling young film student in San Francisco
and Doris Fish was a sort-of-famous drag queen from Sydney with a few thousand dollars in the
bank and dreams of being a movie star.
We were just children, really, when we started on the road to glamour
that became Vegas in Space. I was just out of my teens and Doris, Miss X,
and “Tippi”, consorts in the Sluts-A-Go-Go theatrical drag troupe, were not
much older. “Let’s make a movie,” we
giggled! “It’ll be fun,” we
tittered! Little did we know that the
next ten years of our lives would be given over to the toils and triumphs that
awaited us. Driving under the influence
of glamour, film theory, pharmaceutical stimulants and an addictive love of
vivid colors and bad acting, we devoted all of our time, money and youth to the
completion of our cinematic fantasy. In
the course of chasing this whimsical caprice, all my dreams came true and I
found what, for most of the 1980’s, was to become my artistic family.
I
began making super-8 films when I was fifteen, after reading for the first time
about how movies were made in the 1971 World Book encyclopedia my daddy had
bought me and deciding that when I grew up I wanted to be a movie director. I started with short spoofs of Robert Altman
films like Two Girls and zany
parodies of surrealism like Lina
(Wertmuller) Meets Her Sister, and continued learning the rudiments of film
technique with simple, wacky films like Krafty
Catalina the Genie, in which a genie washes up on shore in a Kraft Catalina
Salad Dressing bottle and wreaks havoc on the friends of the teen boy who
attempts to use her magic for his own nefarious ends. That epic called for plenty of jump cuts and
lap dissolves as the genie’s hapless victims dissolve into thin air and are
transformed into dolls. Then there was Trouble in Paradise, 1981’s autobiographical half-hour Super-8
single-system synch-sound epic. In it a
clueless New Wave Marin County girl and her two roller-skating gay Hollywood friends in jumpsuits sniff too much toot and
are boiled to death in the hot tub by the vengeful little sister. ”Everyone
take your clothes off for the camera!” was my motto then.
I enrolled in the film program at San Francisco State
University, so by the time I met Doris at the age of twenty I was already an experienced
filmmaker. I was introduced to Doris
through her legal wife, Lori Naslund, who had married Doris at City Hall (in
Doris’ male persona, Philip Mills, of course) so Doris could stay in the
country and not get shipped back to Australia.
Lori had a hard drinkin’, dark-haired Italian barmaid girlfriend named
Sarah Cecchini and was interested in filmmaking. Back then film students used to have parties
where we would bring our films, set up a projector in the living room, and show
them to each other. Lori came with Doris
and some other people and we showed Trouble
in Paradise. What I think impressed Doris
was that I had used some bird calls from an LP as sound effects, clumsily
dubbed over the dialogue, to set the bucolic and serene Marin County
scene. Doris thought those gigantic-sounding
chirping birds were hysterical.
I was already at work on my next
project, a 15 minute 16mm sound epic called Rollercoaster
to Hell—“the tragic story of the growing menace of narcotics addiction and
its hideous consequences on teenage America.”
I was studying the techniques of the American film noir at the time and tried to apply them to a comic-book
“reefer madness”- type story, set in the 50s, in which teenaged Eddie Anderson,
played by my roommate Matt Barton, a friend from high school on whom I had a
sad and epic obsessive crush, goes from his first hit on a marijuana
cigarette—“tea, pot, Mary Jane, you square”—to “popping Jive-H” in a matter of
days.
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| Doris Fish (right) in "Rollercoaster to Hell" with Matt Barton (center) |
It
was on the set of Rollercoaster to Hell
in March 1982 that I first worked with Doris. There was a big scene in the clubhouse near
the high school that served as a sanctuary of teen drug vice, and I needed
extras. Amidst the assorted hop-heads
and juvenile delinquents, Doris showed up in full drag, saying, “Look, Phil,
I’m an older artistic woman,” which to her translated as a long black “beatnik”
wig, black sweater and beret and some crumbled up grocery bags stuffed into her
stockings. It was perfect. I later learned Doris
had a particular fondness for portraying elderly, decrepit and unsightly
characters.
As
the scene played out, Eddie was puffing his fateful first “roach,” lit by none
other than the “older artistic woman.”
Eddie is immediately addicted to all forms of narcotics and begins his
descent into hell. But the scene had no
real ending, so I directed everyone to just dance wantonly around because they
are “stoned on pot,” as Eddie sits in the corner slobbering on himself. Doris, taking her cue on what would be the
beginning of a long and illustrious star-and-director relationship, spun around
the basement and collapsed in a in heap on the floor as the camera whirred away
from above. It was the picture-perfect
conclusion to the sequence and even in a tiny role, Doris
was already a scene-stealer, hurling herself to the floor in the name of art
(or at least in an attempt to satisfy her pathological need for
attention).
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| Photo by Daniel Nicoletta |
For a
short student film, Rollercoaster to Hell
was something of a hit. I was still in
school but the film was exhibited theatrically when Marc Huestis booked it as
the short to play at the Roxie with his trashy early-80s cult film Whatever Happened to Susan Jane, which
was set against the wild and madcap drag New Wave performance art scene that
was then burgeoning in San Francisco. Better still, it played on Channel 2’s Creature Features, the legendary local
television program that showed horror movies every Saturday night. I appeared on the program with the film in an
episode entitled The George Lucases of
Tomorrow or something like that, in which they showcased student films with
a fantastical edge. This, indeed, was a
dream come true for me. I had spent my
youth watching Creature Features and
never dreamed I would be on it!!! During
my interview segment with host John Stanley, I shyly announced I was commencing
production on my first feature film, a “Barbarella-style
outer space comedy in collaboration with the famous drag queen Doris
Fish”. Here I was just twenty and
already on TV announcing my first feature film!
Not only that, I had what all the other film students lacked—stars! I liked the direction in which my film career
was moving.
Sarah Cecchini, Doris’
wife’s girlfriend, was the barmaid at the Hotel Utah and every day after
classes I would race to the bar to partake of the free cocktails she so
generously dispensed. Over gin gimlets
Sarah would share with me conspiratorially that “Doris
wants to make a movie with you.” At
first, it was a remake of Valley of the
Dolls, which I am ashamed to admit at the time, meant nothing to me. (Oh, I
learned, I learned later.) Then it
became an outer-space adventure musical comedy called Vegas in Space. Apparently,
Doris had just returned from a trip to New York where she had bought a thousand
dollars worth of fun fur in magenta, lime green, yellow and hot pink and her
mind was already racing with ideas for the Barbarella-style
outer space sets. In my typically
practical fashion I asked, “Well, we’ll need a script and a budget,” and Sarah
said, “I’ll set up a meeting.”
In
the fall of 1982 I met Doris and Miss X, her chief associate in their
performing “women’s art collective” Sluts-A-Go-Go, for our first production
meeting. We had buckwheat pancakes at
the authentic ‘50s diner It’s Tops on Market
Street. They didn’t have a script, really, but
they had tons of concepts thought out.
They spun the plot for me—a crew of spacemen from earth are sent on a
secret mission to the Planet Clitoris, an all-female pleasure planet where a
crime wave has struck. As no men were
allowed to touch down on Clitoris, they would be ordered by the Empress of
Earth to take gender reversal pills, swap their sex and go undercover as
traditional mid- 20th century showgirls from earth on a secret
mission to retrieve the stolen girlinium gems.
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| Photo by Daniel Nicoletta |
And they already had the entire movie cast! Doris would play Captain Dan Tracy / Tracy Daniels, the beautiful, plucky commander who comes to love being a woman; Miss X would play a dual role as Vel Croford, Empress of Earth and the Empress’ sister Veneer, the seemingly wicked Queen of Police with, of course, a heart of gold. Doris’s roommate Ginger Quest would play the dithering ruler of Vegas in Space, the green Empress Nueva Gabor, and Miss X’s roommate “Tippi” would play the dainty yet suspiciously scheming Princess Angel, official hostess of the glittering resort planet. And everyone who lived on Vegas in Space was some sort of outer space royalty. The supporting roles of the crew of the USS Intercourse were to be filled by both men and women: Lori Naslund, Doris’ wife, as “the blonde,” chanteuse Ramona Fisher, X’s next door neighbor, as the brassy brunette, and Sluts-A-Go-Go pianist Timmy Spence taking the role of Lt. Dick Hunter.
I was thrilled at their offer to
direct my first all-star motion picture, yet slightly wary of what we were
getting ourselves into. By then I had
made many films and knew the pitfalls. But after some practical talk about things
like schedules and budgets, I, of course, jumped at the opportunity and said
yes. We decided to begin shooting in the
spring. It would be a short film, thirty
minutes, maybe. Doris
would design all the sets, makeup, costumes, and wigs, and there would be
“special effects” consisting of toy rockets on a string flying over a city made
of perfume bottles and lipsticks. Doris and X went off to write the script while I
commenced with the production planning.
I needed a crew and found them all among the ranks of my fellow San Francisco State film students. After my preliminary movie successes (why, I was still a junior in college and had already been on Creature Features!) it seemed some very talented guys were interested in working with me. I recruited Robin Clark, a creative genius with gels and lights and electricity; as Director of Photography, Al Gonzalez, who had his own 16mm camera, to shoot the film and bearish, jovial Todd Ritchie to record the sound. Boy, that was a great team. This little project ended up taking a year and a half just to film (I’m getting ahead of myself here) and my dedicated crew hung with me and with the project and me until the very end, through considerable sacrifice and to the detriment of their health, sanity and pocketbooks.
As Doris’ and Miss X’s handwritten
pages came in, I typed them up. I
remember we had twenty-five pages but no real ending when we scheduled the
first scenes to be shot in March 1983, in various rooms in Doris
and Ginger’s flat at 422 Oak
Street. And
although the screenwriting books tell you it’s a page a minute, that script was
so dense there was at least a one-hour movie there (and I did have the nagging
thought “What can you do with a one-hour movie?"). Be that as it may, Doris and I opened a checking
account with Doris’ nest egg and founded our
little production company, Fish/Ford Films.
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| Photo by Daniel Nicoletta |
At that time Doris was making a good living as a call boy; on more than one occasion we’d be having a production meeting in the kitchen at her flat, the doorbell would ring, Doris would disappear for twenty minutes and return with a check for me to put into the production account. It was only later Doris was to quip, “No one ever told me you couldn’t make a feature film on a prostitute’s salary.”
I had grown up reading Mad Magazine and watching horror movies.
In preparation for Vegas in Space we
watched endless Grade-Z ‘50s sci-fi movies like Destination Moon and Queen of
Outer Space. These films and a deep
commitment to the ‘60s Batman TV
series were my primary influences as a director along with a large dose of Barbarlla thrown in, of course. Doris’ Tracy
Daniels and her chestnut hair are the very essence of Jane Fonda. Looking back now I can see so many lines here
and concepts there that were innocently appropriated, in some cases anyway,
without us even being aware of it — echoes of Trog, The Bad Seed, John
Waters, Ed Wood, Mad Magazine, German
Expressionism, The Jetsons. Miss X played Queen Veneer and her Sister Vel
Croford straight out of Mildred Pierce.
Ginger Quest confided in me one night that her characterization of the Empress
Nueva Gabor was based on Elizabeth Taylor (“I ask it of Caesar, I demand it of
you”) in Cleopatra.
The first scene we shot never made it
into the movie. It was set in the
“Communications Room.” Doris
had pasted some construction paper to the wall in the 10 foot by 10 foot entry
hall and set up some gigantic mirrored stalactites. In this scene, Empress Nueva and Princess
Angel were monitoring the arrival of the USS
Intercourse as it closed in for its touchdown on the planet. As the scene climaxes, the first of many
tremors strikes. It took Robin about six
hours to set up the lights and it took Doris
seven hours to put the two queens in drag.
I had devised an elaborate dolly shot using a platform on wheels that Robin
and I had “borrowed” from the university.
The shot started in tight close-up on ““Tippi”’s” oh-so-beautiful face
and slowly dollied out to reveal the Communications Room in full. Well, in that cramped little hall there
wasn’t much room to maneuver our makeshift dolly, but after a day or so we
finally got the scene “in the can” and sent it off to the lab.
Imagine
my outrage when I received a call from the lab the next day alerting me that
they’d had a power failure while processing my film—already we were facing the
most unbelievable odds—and that the negative had been “over-processed” and
pretty much destroyed. “Print it
anyway,” I snarled. When we screened the
rushes it looked positively madcap, changing color and density and contrast
from green to blue to red to white.
Well, Doris loved it and I said, “Oh,
let’s just keep it in that way. It looks artistic,
‘unlike anything anyone has ever seen before,’” an attribute to which I found
myself aspiring throughout the making of this film. I did switch to a different film lab but that
scene stayed in the film until the close-to-final cut when I decided, I guess,
it just looked too “amateurish.”
Besides, we couldn’t re-shoot because we had already moved on to the
first real scene in the film, the spaceship interiors and the sex-change
sequences!
For
the opening scene of the film, The Spaceship Sequence, Doris
had found the set pretty much intact and purchased it from a commercial display
store. The USS Intercourse interior consisted of several panels with all
of the required accoutrement—dials,
gizmos, keyboards—already in place and drawn on to great cartoon effect, along
with numerous Christmas lights poking through holes for that blinking spaceship
look. The shooting process was slow
going at first but soon we got into a rhythm that became the pattern for the
rest of the shoot.
First
Doris would build the set, and then I would
block the scene, visualize the compositions, and create a shot list while Robin
began lighting the set. We’d rehearse with
the actors a little and then they would have to go off and get into drag while
we continued lighting with stand-ins.
Hours or days later, when the queens were finally dressed, made up and
bewigged, we’d turn the lights on and prepare to shoot. Finally, after numerous rehearsals for the
actors, camera and soundman, the glorious sound of film clattering through the
camera would be heard and we were on our way.
One
problem we faced, though, was maintaining enough electricity to keep the fuses
from blowing. The aged Victorians in
which we were filming accommodated only two or three 1000 watt lamps before the
circuits blew and we were plunged into darkness. That wasn’t nearly enough to light the faces
and makeup of the film’s beautiful, starring drag queens, so cinematographer
Robin Clark cleverly learned how to “tie-in” to the electrical lines outside
the flat. It was very dangerous. I remember he had to stand on a rubber mat,
tie a rope around his waist and have someone standing by to pull him to safety
in the event that he was electrocuted. I
thought that was so brave of Robin!
Anything, including the risk of death by electric shock, for the sake of
art!
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| Photo by Daniel Nicoletta |
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| Filmmaking entails a lot of waiting... |
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| Waiting... |
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| Waiting... |
During
these interminable days the actresses not being used huddled around the kitchen
table, in and out of various states of multi-colored outer space drag, smoking
cigarettes or munching on pizza. When we
were finally ready to shoot, I would laugh at myself as, instead of “Quiet on
the set,” I would holler down the hallway, “Quiet in the kitchen!” Oh, it was great being a big movie director!
Early on Timmy Spence deduced that
this film was going to take a long, long time to complete. He wasn’t doing a lot of drag then and
decided that instead of his character’s sex change being a success, Lt. Dick
Hunter would overdose on gender reversal pills and dissolve into thin air, thus
reducing his appearance to a cameo. Was that
a wise move on Timmy’s part? Only history
can judge; but he did do a stunning job
writing, scoring, and singing the epic title song, Love Theme from Vegas in Space.
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| Photo by Daniel Nicoletta |
Next, we shot the scene on the
“balcony” overlooking Vegas in Space in which Miss X as Veneer, Queen of
Police, demonstrates the color dial to Doris
as Captain Tracy Daniels. You see, the
atmosphere on the Planet Clitoris is too thin to hold color by itself, so in
some districts the color fades out and they have to use the “color booster”
dial to turn it back up. Like all of the
special effects, for reasons both aesthetic and economic (it was the pre-digital age), this one
presented a technological challenge – how to get the scene to go from black and
white to color again as Queen Veneer turned the color dial. I had always had a great love for early
cinema which shaped my vision for this film. I realized I really didn’t want to
utilize any film effect designed after 1902 when Georges Méliès presented his A Trip to the Moon.
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| Photo by Daniel Nicoletta |
A few weeks later our first “crowd scene” was scheduled (in this film ten was a crowd). The film climaxed with Debbie, Sheila and Captain Tracy, the dazzling secret agents undercover as traditional Mid-20th Century Showgirls from earth, performing their act onstage at the Mt. Venus Vanity Lounge. For this scene, Doris constructed the lounge interior at a little South of Market performance space known as 544 Natoma. I remember that ‘80s drag legend Ethyl Eichelberger had played there just before we’d booked it for our one-week shoot. We hauled over the lime green, pink and yellow fun fur in my brown Ford Fairmont and stapled it to the walls. Doris spray painted some paper plates and tacked them to the walls to serve as Fleur-de-Lys accents, and for the stage set she constructed a gigantic “mobile” which, she explained to me, was a homage to “I’ll Plant My Own Tree”, the number performed by Susan Hayward as Helen Lawson in Valley of the Dolls. The one thing that disturbed Doris was the floor of the stage. It was blonde wood and decidedly low-tech looking and so, ever on the lookout for a means of explaining away the obscure, she insisted on adding a line for the Empress Nueva Gabor: “Wait’ll you see the Vanity Lounge! It’s super! I put in a new antique floor. What’s it called? Wood!” Oh, we thought that was funny!
For
the lounge scene we invited every drag queen we knew to appear. Amazingly, we
didn’t know many; that would change later, of course. The only catch for these queens was that they
would have to also be available later to appear in the preceding, yet-to-be-lensed,
Cocktail Party scene. Not long before Vegas in Space, Doris
had appeared at Theater Rhinoceros in a Genet-inspired straight play about drag
queens, directed by Chuck Solomon, called Torn
Tulle. Doris
invited her co-stars from that show to appear in the Vanity Lounge scene. They were Alexis Rahill, who I remember being
spectacularly untalented, and Beverly
Plaza, a denizen of the
black and white planet who was unfortunate enough to end up with a grey
face. Beverly
later appeared for many, many years as the emcee at San Francisco legendary female impersonator
club Finnocchio’s. Also featured were Ramona’s friend and collaborator,
Jeanette Szudy, as well as Ida Lee, an elderly actress acquaintance of mine
who’d appeared very briefly as the mother in Rollercoaster to Hell and was enthralled with the idea of wearing
tooth paint. Appearing as party guests
were Sluts a Go-Go stalwarts Frieda Lay as Empress LaLa Galaxy and “assistant
director” John Canalli (who later would produce our weekly TV show, The Gay Cable Network) as the
piss-yellow Princess Jaundice. As
everyone was a queen or empress from another planet, Doris tried to make their
looks as outré as possible, using
primary colors for the makeup foundation, green and blue wigs, weird costumes
and glow-in-the-dark eye shadow she bought in bulk directly from the Day-Glo
Corporation. Onstage Ramona and Lori wore a pair of gigantic matching bejeweled
mermaid gowns Doris claimed to have found in
the trash, as if a gift from the Goddess, right outside the back door at 544
Natoma.
As
usual, everything went very slowly. As
we built and lit the set, Doris started
putting everyone into drag. Doris had decided she was personally going to put on
everyone’s makeup, which guaranteed that everyone would look stunning but
presented some logistical challenges.
She ended up creating something of a production line, having each person
apply their own green or blue foundation as she applied the highlights,
eyeliner and lips. Each person would
move down the line and when every one was entirely ready Doris
would have to get herself into drag. On
more than one occasion, by the time Doris was
herself was ready to appear before a camera, the beards of the extras had
started to grow through their heavy foundation and we’d have to call it a day,
wash everything off and start all over again the next night. Needless to say this entailed, I swear, days
and days of waiting on everyone’s part.
A few people had jobs they had to go to (if they hadn’t yet lost them)
so mostly we’d shoot all night with the group and do close-ups during the day
with whomever was free.
It
was around this time that I became involved with stimulants. I had dabbled in trucker Benzedrine in high
school and toyed with prescription diet pills in college (this was the
pre-Betty Ford era) but it was during Vegas
in Space that one of the extras who shall remain nameless (okay, Frieda
Lay) first got me excited about using crystal.
I don’t want to paper the entire cast with meth use, but the crew did
come to rely upon it (how could they not?).
Eventually they let me know I had to include in my budget a provision
for “speed and beer.” Doris and Miss X
did appeal for “food and sleep,” but their ministrations, I am afraid, fell on
deaf ears.
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| Photo by Daniel Nicoletta |
After wrapping up at 544 Natoma we went back to the Oak Street flat where Doris constructed the Throne Room set in the living room. In the script this was known as the Pink Plush Room (somewhere there was a reference by Princess Angel to the “Pink Flush Room” but I’m afraid that gem got cut out of the film). Doris bathed the tiny room – floor, wall and ceiling – in pink fun fur, placed a throne at one end flanked by two glowing lava lamps and, voila, the sumptuous lair of her Royal Highness the Empress Nueva Gabor. I remember we only had enough pink fun fur to cover one side of the room, so we shot every scene from one side and then tore the fur down, stapled it up on the other side and shot each of these same scenes from that side of the room.
After
filming the pre-show cocktail party in the Pink Plush Room, we finally let all
the extra outer space queens go home. All this had taken weeks and weeks of
their time, and I was still in college—I don’t know how I did everything!
Nevertheless, we moved on to the scene where our protagonists first meet the
Empress. That was the first big scene
that featured Ginger Quest as the Empress and Miss X as Veneer, Queen of
Clitorean Police. In this scene the
girls are introduced by Princess Angel to the Empress, who explains that her
girlinium gems have been stolen and the planet has been plunged into
chaos. At that, Queen Veneer bursts in
and after some queeny bitchery they all agree to work together on this caper.
I
didn’t really know these queens and they didn’t really know me, but I so
admired their fierce vision and commitment to their art, and I know they
respected my commitment to their film. I very quickly realized I was becoming
part of something really very special.
Everyone soon felt like family to me, and I began to see without doubt I
would be collaborating with Doris Fish and Miss X and ““Tippi”” and Ginger for
a very long time (in the end it lasted close to ten years). And I also saw how serious everyone was about
their acting!
We
had some fabulous “rushes parties” and it was at those affairs we came to
believe that we were onto something spectacular with this film. The rushes just looked fantastic and
marvelous, bursting with bizarre and wonderful color. I would get the work print back from the
lab, rush back to San Francisco
State late at night, and
transfer the dialogue audio tracks and synch up the film on a university
editing table. I owned an antique
interlock projector which allowed us to project the film we’d shot in synch
with the sound, and so everyone involved would come over to Doris’
house as we projected the rushes on the wall.
Doris would video tape the projected
images for later analysis with her Betamax camcorder (somewhat of a new thing
in the early 80s) and oh, how we would shriek and howl with laughter at those
rushes parties. And we all looked
great! It was film, not video, and Robin
had taken such care and applied such artistry in the lighting. For a drag queen to see herself projected in
such a stunning fashion onscreen was better than heroin! It was then that Doris and Miss X and I and
everyone agreed that we sort of, maybe had a real movie here and that we
absolutely had to keep writing and shooting until it was something resembling a
feature length film.
But by then we were all pretty exhausted, and Doris was broke, so we had to take a little break. In May 1983 I graduated from San Francisco State University
and was named Film Department honoree, which meant that of all the graduates of
the Undergraduate Film Program, I had the highest GPA. I assure you I was more surprised than
anyone! I guess that just shows what a
smart and ambitious speed freak can do. In
any case, I was very, very happy to finally be a college graduate and able to
focus full time on my movie director career, while more or less paying the rent
doing phone surveys for a market research company where Ramona Fischer had
gotten me an evening job.
By
August we were ready to begin again, this time in black and white! Doris and X’s concept of the script included
a large section in the middle of the film set in Queen Veneer’s Gothic
Detention Center on the Dark Side of the Planet. Miss X in particular was rather fond of the films noir of the 1940s and wanted an
opportunity to act in black and white, since the rest of the film featured a
dazzling array of sparking colors, she explained, this black and white sequence
mid-film would allow the audience to give their eyes a rest. But before moving on to the Detention Center
sequence, we shot our first exterior.
As
Captain Tracey and Queen Veneer travel to Veneer’s personal complex on the dark
side of the planet, they trek across the planet and up and over Mt. Venus. This scene was shot outside on a summer
afternoon in Corona Heights Park,
a rocky, mountainous park halfway up Twin Peaks, overlooking San Francisco’s Castro district. We got into drag, piled into my car, and
drove up the hill, pulled our cameras and microphones and reflectors out and
off we went. You can imagine the stares
from the local gays as we turned their neighborhood park into an exterior film
location. The wind was fierce that day,
but I do love how this scene looks in the final film. It think it’s hysterical when you first see
the top of the ridge of Mt. Venus, then a wisp of Queen Veneer’s pony tail
peeks over the mountain as the two space queens emerge over the edge of the
crag and make their way down the rocky hillside, made ever more treacherous by
the high heeled boots they were wearing, all the while acting, acting, acting!
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| "Tippi" in drag as "Drag" Photo by Daniel Nicoletta |
Actually,
the Detention Center scene is one that we ended up
shooting, in its entirety, twice (I think it came out much better the second
time). The first time we shot it in the
summer of 1983, Doris built the set in Miss X’s flat on Market Street near Sanchez because, I
think, Doris was a little tired of living on a
movie set and needed a break from that.
So the Detention Center was built in X’s tiny living room and we went
through the entire grueling ordeal of shooting the sequence only to have the
all film come back from the lab entirely blank!
Black! Empty! Evacuated!
There was nothing there! On the
film! As you can imagine, by this time I
was beginning to think the goddesses of the motion picture laboratory were
conspiring against us and our bewigged brainchild. None of the lab technicians or my crew could
offer a plausible explanation, but these obstacles only caused us to increase
our determination and to soldier on in spite of the blow this terrible, unexplained
mishap made to both our budget and our morale.
The great lesson in this adversity, though, is that a year later we shot
the Detention Center scene again—the version that actually appears in the film—
entirely re-written and it turned out much, much better both technically and
artistically.
And
so we trudged forward with the production in this manner, gathering every few
months for a week or so to shoot a scene or two until Doris was broke, then
oooohing and aaaahing over the rushes and reveling in what a great film we were
going to have someday as we tried to figure out how we were going to get the
money to shoot the next scene. (Never mind how we would get the money to
complete it.) We were forever trying to find new money. In addition to Doris’
prostitution earnings, my father contributed his winnings from a small Irish
Sweepstakes prize and a big chunk of funding came from Doris’
friend Cheryl, a big, burly, bearded Australian queen who seemed to run some
kind of real estate/cocaine empire.
One
day Doris said I should go over to Cheryl’s
house and pick up a check for $5000 (one of several installments we received
from him), and so I dutifully did as I was told. Cheryl answered the door to his flat
bottomless, wearing only a T-shirt.
Clearly, he had been partying.
“I’m here for the check, Cheryl,” I said cheerfully. I was steered by my teetering host to a chair
and we watched some Lucy on TV and made small talk. All the while Cheryl made no mention of his
lack of pants and after Lucy was over I rubbed my hand together and said, “Well,
I must be going, Cheryl.” He gladly
handed over the check and I was on my way.
I wasn’t sure if any sexual favors were expected for the $5000 check
(Cheryl was definitely not my type so that was, in the end, beside the point)
but I figured he was just relaxing at home with no pants after a long night of
fun. I mean, this was show biz, wasn’t it?
I’m sure other directors had to jump through bigger hoops than the sight
of Cheryl with no pants in order to get their film projects funded, didn’t
they?
In
October it was back to Doris and Ginger’s flat
on Oak Street
to get a few more scenes in the can. In
the very same two rooms where we’d filmed everything else, we spent a few weeks
completing two more scenes – the sequence where Tracy gives her crew their
“beauty boosters” (more jump-cut costume changes!) and the scene in Princess
Angel’s private boudoir which became
known to us as the Doom Room.
Doris
and Ginger informed me one day that we were going to have a dream sequence in
the film (which I was all for as we were trying to stretch it out to feature
length). In the scene in the Girl’s
Quarters, Sheila is seen tossing and turning on her chaise lounge, and then we
dissolve to the dream sequence, which was jam packed with spinning
psycho-whirls, flying dolls and gloved arms popping out in every direction at
the poor girl’s face. The whole thing was put in the film solely as a means of
feeding Captain Tracey a great punch line.
“Oh,
Captain,” says Sheila (her delivery straight out of Dorothy Gale), “It was
awful. I’ve never had a nightmare so
vivid, so real.” “Calm down,” reassures Doris
as the Captain. “It was just a Bad Dream
Sequence.”
Doris
and Ginger also came up with the idea of shooting this scene with Doris’ home video camera.
MTV was new then and “Rock Videos” were all the rage so I decided to put
every terrible, low-rent MTV cliché I could think of into it. I also studied dream sequences in other
films, such as the Salvador Dali dream sequence in Hitchcock’s Spellbound, and read Freud and Jung in
search of every trite and hoary dream sequence concept I could dredge up. The end result was a mélange of luridly painted eyes and gloved hands popping out at
poor Sheila, ghostly Princess Angel apparitions luring her over a rocky cliff
and even a Sheila doll used to simulate the ultimate, “I’m falling, I’m
falling,” dream sequence cliché.
 |
| The Executive Producer |
While
we were doing the movie we all got involved in another production, Marc
Heustis’ live soap opera with a beatnik setting, Naked Brunch. We all acted onstage
at the 181 Club in this wildly popular nightclub event, and through that we met
many people whom Doris wanted to put in the
film. Luckily, during a break from Naked Brunch we were getting ready to
film our biggest scene yet—the Plasworld Mall sequence. This is a long scene at the beginning of the
film where the girls wait with Princess Angel for their audience with the
Empress. In this scene we were able to
cast many of our new friends from Naked Brunch: Silvana Nova as Plasworld shop
girl Wynetta Whitehead, Arturo Galster (then very famous for his “A Tribute to
Patsy Cline”) as the arriving Empress Noodles Nebula, and as escaped convict
Babs Velour (and Miss X’s real life new girlfriend!), Sandelle Kincaid. At the time she was using her given name
professionally, Sandahl Hebert. Pandering to the pervasive, but rather
unsophisticated, idea that a drag queen dating a real girl was a virulent
source of scandal, Doris quickly dubbed her
“Scandal Sherbert.”
I
visualized the Plasworld Mall as a vast space that was a whirl of activity with
intergalactic queens arriving and departing.
This time we stapled up the industrial sized rolls of white plastic in
the cavernous performance space Theater Artaud, a theater in a converted
cannery in the then forlorn East Mission
district. One problem with Artaud I did
not take into consideration, though, is that one wall was entirely glass—What
was I thinking?—and so, once again, we could really only shoot at night,
otherwise the careful lighting designed to create the subtle effect of an
airport terminal would be completely ruined.
In
the end my sanity was just about ruined, also.
The shoot seemed endless, and when it was over I counted and realized I
had been awake for ten days. It seemed
everyone else was able to go home and get out of drag and sleep for a few
hours, but I just kept shooting and shooting and shooting film. At one point I decided we needed a chase
sequence, which was not in the shooting script I assure you, between Angel and
Veneer leading up to the climax in the Vanity Lounge and so I said, “Everyone,
we need a chase scene that isn’t in the script.” Well, my devoted crew just couldn’t make it
that night so they gave me the camera and the audio recorder and told me to
shoot it myself. Troupers that they
were, Miss X and “Tippi” of course suited up and showed up. In the final film, the chase in the Plasworld
Mall is speeded up in the optical printer in order to give it a pixilated,
comical “fast motion” effect. But that
night when we shot that scene, it was just the three of us. “Tippi” and X got
into drag, I switched on the massive banks of light, started the tape recorder,
slung the camera over my shoulder and said, “Okay girls—fight!”
I
myself appeared in a few scenes in this Plasworld Mall sequence as one of the
many vulgar and provincial tourists.
Until now, I been rather coy about identifying myself in this role, but
if you look carefully in the spaceport mall sequence early in the film you will
see I am the blue-faced tourist with the big blue hair, flouncing around with a
parasol. I directed this very complex
dolly shot with Susan Kay, a high school friend of mine, as the tour
guide. It was a long, long speech that I
wanted to get in a single shot, and Susan just could not remember her
lines. We kept dragging her across the
floor on her dolly and she kept flubbing up.
We have lots of behind the scenes video of the making of Vegas in Space and years later I watched
myself directing this scene and it seemed to go on for days, my face painted
blue, wearing a ridiculous gown with no wig, awake for ten days, barking orders
at my bedraggled and exhausted crew and cast.
I guess I was pretty demented. On
the video executive producer Doris, out of drag, paces in front of the camera
and mutters as I stalk around in the background barking orders and mock-frets
“What am I doing here? Phil says it’s
all going to be okay, but I don’t know.”
I had
moved into a flat on Oak Street
one block up the hill from Doris and Ginger
and we shot the starcruiser cutaways with Janice Sukaitis and Arturo in the
basement there. Basically, we put them
in a trash can on the stolen dolly, put a terrarium on top of them, built a
cardboard spaceship around them, lit a cherry bomb out the back and pushed them
around in front of a pink cyclorama.
When we shot Janice Sukaitis as the Martian Lady Driver, her starcruiser
caught on fire. I still have the behind
the scenes video of her screaming, “Get me out of here! It’s on fire!” But no one was hurt.
I
spent the summer of ‘84 editing at a little studio in the Sunset District. Smoking was not allowed but I chained smoked
then and the owner was pretty mad that I had disobeyed. Anyway, I soon had to pack up all the crates
of work print in order to shoot our final big scene, Queen Veneer’s Gothic Detention
Center redux. That was shot at The Farm, a combination commune/performance
space under Highway 101 at the intersection of Potrero Avenue and Cesar Chavez Boulevard. Once again Doris
rolled out the gigantic sheets of plastic to create the illusion of an ice
palace of sorts which served as the private lair of the Queen of Police. This was shot in black and white and is my
favorite sequence in the finished film.
After
the madness of the Plasworld Mall shoot at Theater Artaud, it seemed, as a film
crew, we finally knew what we were doing.
I recall this shoot being five days of genuine pleasure. Tommy Pace, one of Doris’
favorite performers, appeared as Mrs. Velour, the mother of fugitive Babs
Velour. Everyone was getting a little
tired, though. One night Miss X said she
had to go home because her hood was on too tight. And poor “Tippi,” who was recruited to wear a
rubber mask for hours in order to play Veneer’s familiar, the monstrous
draglodyte, reportedly had to spend a few days in an institution upon the
completion of that particular shoot. So when,
after a year and a half, the production finally wrapped up and the film was, as
they say, officially “in the can”, we were all pretty happy.
Thus
began the staggering seven years post-production process (the standard
post-production schedule for a Hollywood film
with a budget is about six months). I
hired a flatbed editing table, set it up in my bedroom, and did a first cut of
the film. In 1986 we did a work-in-progress
screening presented by the Film Arts Foundation at the Adolph Gasser screening
room that was a sensation. We screened
the edited work print in a very, very rough cut, the spliced film rattling
through the projector with no music or sound effects and the very loud clanking
of footsteps banging on the sets, I remember, generated peals of laughter. Later, the wizards at earwax productions, who
did our audio post production, would magically remove all such errant
sounds. I was delighted that people were
lined up around the block and, for the first time and for the next five years, San Francisco was abuzz
about this outer space drag queen film that was going to be completed any
day. For the second half of the ‘80s Vegas in Space was the most famous unfinished
film ever.
After
the work-in-progress screening it was decided we needed a video trailer in
order to showcase the project and to raise the necessary completion funds. The trailer cost thousands of dollars and
took a year to make. Doris and I shot a
pretty funny introduction. We had a
photo session and, as I had decided in the editing room that I needed a few
things to pick up the pace, we shot some inserts and cutaways in ’86 in the
front room of the flat I shared with Miss X at 3567-18th Street. And so, at the very end of the film, as
everyone crowds around the battered body of the dead Princess Angel on the
floor of the Vanity Lounge, you’ll see close-ups of the stars inserted into the
long shot which were actually photographed three years apart. I guess I am the only one who can see how
much everyone had aged between the two shots.
But then, I’m the only one who can see a lot of things in that film, I
suppose.
Time
marched on. Doris and Miss X and “Tippi”
and I did a lot of theater together. I directed The Bad Seed to fine reviews and sold-out houses at Theater
Rhinoceros; Doris and X did a lot of West Graphics greeting cards; film critic
Craig Seligman wrote an article about Doris in the San Francisco Examiner. She got sort of famous for a few months and
appeared on the NBC TV show Partners in
Crime with Linda Carter and Loni Anderson. And Doris
appeared to rave reviews as Madame Irma in a take-me-seriously production of
Jean Genet’s The Balcony. But all the while I was softly depressed that
our film continued to sit on the shelf and I worried if it would ever, ever see
the light of a movie screen.
Finally,
I decided I needed to hire an editor to get it to the final stage. We also had yet to shoot the opening
miniature spaceship sequences. Of
course, we were broke, and the completion of this would-be drag cult movie
seemed so very far off, and so, just to keep things moving, I decided we should
have a benefit show to raise money to finish the film. That took a year. In January 1989, we presented the Sluts A-Go-Go Still Alive!, the Last-Chance All-Star Greatest Hits
Benefit commemorating the 10th Anniversary of the Sluts
A-Go-Go’s first appearance at the San Francisco Gay Community Center in
1979. That show was really special—it
was a four-hour chronology of all the Sluts’ routines and numbers and scenes
made famous onstage over the years and a drag feast for our small but devoted
clique of fans. And, it netted $6000, a
fortune to us at the time and enough to hire editor Ed Jones to do a nearly
final cut of the film, to tighten it up, and to shoot the tabletop spaceship
miniatures effects Doris had built in my
living room.
 |
| Timmy Spence on the Red Carpet |
Unfortunately,
in the course of that shoot I got fired from my job at the motion picture
lab. They’d wanted to get rid of me for
a long time, anyway. Finally I got
caught in the vault too many times with a straw up my nose, I suppose, and I
soon found a better job. But that did
slow things down because I had been getting an employee discount on film
processing and printing services.
Soon
it became clear, after a few years of denial on my part and silence on her
part, that Doris was suffering from AIDS and
that she was not doing well. As we began
to prepare a benefit tribute to her, Who
Does That Bitch Think She Is?—a sensation of a show which is another
chapter altogether—it became for me a race against time to finish the
movie. I needed a big-time investor and,
after going down a few dead ends with potential benefactors, finally found one
in comedian and patron of the arts Laura Milligan. In January 1991, Laura, an angel if there
ever was one, happily agreed to “invest” whatever we needed in order to
complete our little dream movie. I will forever be grateful to Laura Milligan.
After eight years of glamorous toiling, we were able to finish the film—final
cut, titles and special effects, sound mix, score and publicity campaign—in a
mere nine months.
 |
| Ginger Quest and Lulu at the premiere |
 |
| Miss X and Ms. Bob |
Vegas in Space was
a bittersweet victory but, you know, I have always been surprised how far the
little film we shot in our living room has gone down the lane of cult film
legends. All my movie director dreams
came true and then some, thanks to Vegas
in Space. In 1992 we all went to Park City
to see the film play to sold out houses at the Sundance Film Festival, and it
ended up playing at more than 30 film festivals around the world. It took me to Europe twice ― to London, Torino and Frankfurt—and Miss X and his lovely
missus Alison to film festivals in Cannes and Vienna. The film was picked up by schlock
exploitation-miesters Troma, who distributed it all over the world, thanks to
the efforts of the darling and lovable Marty Sokol, Troma’s man in Hollywood who spent two
years non-stop tirelessly peddling our beloved little film. It played at theaters on the Ginza in Tokyo, appeared on USA
Network and Showtime and Entertainment
Tonight. The Los
Angeles premiere was at The Hollywood Palace at Hollywood and Vine and was covered by E!
Network. The after-party, at Dragstrip
66 in LA, was raided by the fire marshals and police with helicopters.
I
have never ceased to be amazed when I learn every few years how Vegas in Space comes to touch someone in
a special way. When it showed on USA
Network, a very tall, handsome and darling young man from Austin, Texas,
saw me on TV and fell for me from afar. He tracked me down several years later
and we carried on a delightful long distance affair for many years. That bit of
serendipity taught me never to underestimate the power and the value of
appearing, however briefly, on nationwide TV.
And I was flattered when, many years later, in 2002, a New York stage producer inquired about
developing Vegas in Space into an
off-Broadway musical/opera. Although
after a year of talks nothing came of it, it sure was nice to be asked.
 |
| At the Sundance Film Festival (photo by Brook Dillon) |
After
Vegas in Space I became associated
briefly with another screenplay, the gay gangster epic BoysTown—it was 1993 and Queer Cinema was very, very in—and was
driven by Marty Sokol onto the backlot of Universal Studios to go to pitch
meetings at Ivan (Ghostbusters)
Reitman Productions. Then Laura Milligan
invited me to develop a film with her based on her standup comedy. I guess she figured if I could turn Doris
Fish into a star, I could do it for her, too.
So I gave up home and job in San Francisco
and moved to Hollywood
to pursue my dream of being a movie director—which lasted for about a week. I
was confronted about my drug problem (boy, was that a surprise; I had never
hidden my meth use) and was sent home with a small settlement and my tail
between my legs.
 |
| Fifteen years later, Peaches Christ hosts the cast reunion (November 2006) |
 |
| PRF, Ramona Fischer and Ginger Quest |
And
so, even though in the end I never did become a famous and successful movie
director, I have no complaints. Vegas in Space was indeed my big
break. We set out to make a fabulous and
stupid movie and we succeeded. Because
of that film and Doris Fish’s fantasy of being a movie star, all my dreams came
true and then some, and I got to do a lot of things most people only
imagine. Hopefully, the name Doris Fish
will never be forgotten in the tatty, yet glamorous, irrational annals of cult
film history.
All photographs by Robin Clark unless noted otherwise
Video by Doris Fish, Miss X, Ginger Quest
and Esther K. Paik
and Esther K. Paik
contact: vegasinspace@earthlink.net
