BEARDED WOMEN ON LSD: An interview with The Cockettes directors David Weissman and Bill Weber. By Warren Curry 7/27/02 Part 2 of 2

Bill, had you ever worked with so much archival footage when editing a film?

Bill: No, I'd never worked with archival footage period, almost. Just a little bit for tv commercials.

Were there any particular challenges?

Bill: I think the biggest archival challenge was the pictures. There were literally 12,000-15,000 pictures to go through and how to handle that. There were a lot of great pictures that just didn't fit into the story so well. We tell a narrow part of The Cockettes story in a sense. There are many other stories and much more material within the stories that we do tell. For time considerations you really have to edit. It just evolved over time. It started out as something long and we kept whittling it down into something that was more concise. Also to take people on some sort of arc through the story where you get a sense of a wild beginning, the influence of popularity and then the end.

David: We had a lot of footage that covered certain kinds of things and a real lack of footage for other things. One of the things that Bill did incredibly masterfully was to make it look like there were movies and footage of everything. So many people have said, "God, how did you get so much performance footage?" Well, there's almost none.

Bill: And the performance footage is only from two shows, pretty much.

David: I think part of the mastery of his editing is the way it was put together.

Bill: We were really lucky -- we found a photographer who had taken really nice photos of the second Cockettes show. That's a miracle in a way. The second Cockettes show nobody really knew who they were yet.

Do you think The Cockettes were coming to an end regardless of the disastrous New York performance?

David: Yup.

Bill: To me, it's the whole A Star Is Born story that gets told over and over. There are the roots that are pure and genuine and fun and experimental, and then comes in popularity and recognition and you start to take yourself more seriously. I even feel that as a filmmaker. I made this film totally naive and now all of sudden, "I'm a filmmaker!" It just happens in a way and that's a tricky and sticky and dangerous position. I think that's definitely what would spell a short life span (for The Cockettes).

David: The heyday of the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, not just the San Francisco counterculture but the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, was already a mess by the time The Cockettes started. It was already being taken over by a lot of crime, much harder drugs and it got ugly. The Cockettes came into that and provided this last burst of exuberant fun into the Haight scene, while the rest of it was starting to get funky. It was right around the time that Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix and Morrison died. They all died in the first eight months that The Cockettes existed.

Bill: Even Pigpen.

David: Pigpen from The Dead. You could feel that the counterculture was being squeezed by the realities of commercialization, economic problems and hard drugs. The Cockettes were just this bubble that burst into the scene with the same kind of joy that existed earlier in the Haight. But they couldn't transcend what was going on in the culture either. Things got dark within their own group with drug problems. In a way it's a miracle they lasted as long as they did, because they were such a disparate group of people, some of whom were highly functional, creative people and some of whom were just mysterious creatures that found a home where they could act out who they were and be really honored and welcome for their craziness in a way that didn't happen so often.

Is there any one particular aspect of making this film that you could point to as being the most difficult?

David: I would say there were two types of situations that were extraordinarily stressful, one of which was there was footage we knew about, that we knew we needed, that we had a very hard time getting rights to and would've killed the movie if we didn't get it. The process of working those (rights) out was absolutely excruciating. The other was fundraising. It's a horrible thing to have to do.

Bill: For me, it was just the stress of telling the story properly. Telling it in a way that's engaging and respectful and accurate and entertaining.

David: In terms of those worries and stresses, I never worried if Bill was going to do a great job of editing it, and he never worried that I wasn't going to be able to get the footage or raise the money. We both worried about those things ourselves, but it was nice because I don't think either of us ever felt anxiety that the other one wasn't living up to their (job).

Bill: In retrospect, I'm amazed you managed to raise money for this, though.

Did you find people in various stages of the project who would give you money?

David: I'd never fundraised before and it's certainly easier to ask for larger numbers the further you are to the end. I had this hope, because we didn't have enough money at the end of the movie to pay off music rights and things like that, so I figured if the movie could get into Sundance, which I had feeling it would, we could then find an individual who wanted an associate producer or co-producer credit to give us that last chunk of money. Then September 11 happened and it really hampered that surge dramatically.

I imagine also that it must be taxing emotionally to have developed relationships with people that make up The Cockettes story, who have passed away since the film was completed.

Bill: Sure, but it's also a huge blessing. They all realized that there story was being told in a loving way. Marshall (Cockettes' member Marshall Olds) was in a coma in the hospital, and a fellow Cockette went into him and just talked to him. She said that she could tell that Marshall was hearing what she was saying because he kept on doing some sort of motion to have her keep talking and she was telling him, "Marshall, you're dying a star. People love you and people are seeing you." It's a huge blessing to give that to these people who are passing away. I wish a lot of the other Cockettes that have passed away, especially in the past 10 years or all of them for that matter, could have appreciated that too, from Hibiscus on down.

Click here to read Dan Tester's review of The Cockettes

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