Rating:
Directors: Bill Weber and David Weissman
Producer: David Weissman
Director of Photography: Marsha Kahm
Cast: The Cockettes, John Waters
Visit the IMDB page for full cast and crew
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COCKETTES Rating: Directors: Bill Weber and David Weissman Producer: David Weissman Director of Photography: Marsha Kahm Cast: The Cockettes, John Waters Visit the IMDB page for full cast and crew |
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Review by: Dan
Tester
7/24/02
We have all found ourselves, from time to time, in this uncomfortable situation: We're at a friendly gathering at someone's house, eat some food and enjoy some cocktails, and then the hosts whip out a home video of their recent family vacation, and everyone must sit and watch. It is an unpleasant experience, mainly because the footage unraveling in front of our eyes is boring and unrelatable to everyone but the hosts, who laugh throughout, fondly remembering the wonderful time they had. This is the same kind of reaction I had to a lot of The Cockettes, the new documentary about the famous San Francisco gay performance artists from the late 1960's. The first half of The Cockettes features remembrances from the surviving members of the famous underground troupe, but to be honest, none of the footage or stories moved or interested me much. It just kind of looked to me to be a bunch of annoying, obnoxious freaks putting on a low-budget show with questionable talent or focus. Kind of like The Little Rascals meets Ziggy Stardust. But the interview subjects sure have a wonderful time remembering their heyday. I'm sure it was a magical time for them, and it was certainly a phenomenon born of a specific time and place, but I had never heard of The Cockettes going in, and it took a while for me to begin to comprehend what all the fuss was all about.
In the late 1960's, a San Francisco revival theater began featuring midnight screenings for all the counterculture residents of the Haight-Ashbury scene. The theater mostly screened strange underground films and classic sexploitation movies from the 20's and 30's and was an immediate success. But it really didn't matter what was on the playbill. The attendees were there for a party, and the theater was filled nightly with hundreds of ultra-hippies and androgynous weirdoes at their most unabashed. It became such a local phenomenon that many curious outsiders would actually travel from long distances to check out the display; one of these folks was the legendary director John Waters, who was so inspired by the whole scene that he later began debuting his early films starring Divine at the venue. As the popularity of the all-night movie-fests built to a fever pitch, a local hippie named Hibiscus (ah, the sixties!) began assembling a cast of bizarre characters to perform mostly impromptu live performances before the screenings. Hibiscus called his group The Cockettes, and it was comprised of mostly flamboyantly gay male hippies, with a few free lovin' females along for the ride, dressing up in outrageous costumes and make-up and performing hippie chaos in front of the stoned crowd.
The first half of the film certainly features an impressive amount of footage of the stage performances, as well as modern day remembrances and stories. As mentioned before, the stage antics were not particularly funny or significant to me, just bizarre acid trips in the footlights. And the interviews generally consist of a former member reminiscing about some "crazy" occurrence on stage and laughing to the point of tears, as I sat staring at the screen thinking, "Must have had to have been there."
Luckily the second half of the film is much more interesting, as we begin to see how behind-the-scenes politics begin to cause stress among the group as The Cockettes gradually expanded from improvised midnight antics, to carefully produced musical reviews, to bizarre short films. The Cockettes even achieved national attention when they produced a short film entitled Tricia's Wedding, in which the performers reenacted the marriage of President Nixon's daughter, premiering it on the actual day of the nuptials at the White House. I don't know if the real Nixon wedding day featured this many hairy legs in dresses, but I guarantee that the Mamie Eisenhower in The Cockettes version had a deeper voice. The documentary reports that the ripples of infamy their short film created rolled all the way to a grumbling Nixon, who was reportedly humiliated and probably considered napalming Frisco. To be honest, Tricia's Wedding (the film includes a number of great clips) is absolutely hysterical and the real highlight of The Cockettes. I would love to see the whole thing some time. The guy who played the disoriented Rose Kennedy, continually asking, "Is this a funeral?" was one of the funniest things I have seen in a movie this year.
As The Cockettes popularity grew, a misguided big time New York theater producer offered The Cockettes the chance of a lifetime: bring the show to BROADWAY! I was reminded at this point of the brilliant Waiting For Guffman, which depicts a bunch of local amateurs with dreams of the New York stage. It could never happen for the Guffman crew for obvious reasons, but astoundingly, it did happen to the equally regionally famous Cockettes, and their dismal failure outside of the confines of their safe haven eventually tore them apart for good.
As I mentioned earlier, I had never heard of the Cockettes before watching this film, and while their onstage antics left me lacking, their overall story was pretty interesting. But, if you were a fan of the group, this will undoubtedly be a wonderfully enjoyable experience. Drop acid now.
But as always, it is only one man's opinion.
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