Bobby Sheehan's "Docufantasy" Has a Twist

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Parent Category: Film Festivals

Category: Interviews

Published on Wednesday, 21 April 2010 03:44

Written by Brad Balfour

When I first moved to New York City as a freshly minted associate editor at Circus Magazine, I quickly immersed myself in the downtown scene where conceptual art events, outlandish fashion statements and cutting-edge rock performances flourished in its clubs, galleries and loft spaces.

As the scene developed at the end of '70s and flowed into the early '80s, places like the Mudd Club, Club 57, The Pyramid and Danceteria provided the environment for punk rock to merge with electro-New Wave, for sexual identities to alter and for new kinds of art to get invented.

For a moment there, just hanging out was something of a statement -- of rebellion against the encroaching conformity and cultural backsliding suggested by the Reagan era -- and a celebration of an artistic world where money and marketing weren't all that mattered.

To some that seems like a long time ago, yet a continuum flows from the era's bohemianism (which embraced and was inspired by the bohos of before) to now and such overarching events as the 2010 Tribeca Film Festival. The 9th edition kicks off this week, running from April 21 to May 2, 2010, startng with the premiere screening of Shrek Forever After.

Just as TFF's new chief creative officer, Geoff Gilmore (the former Sundance Film Festival head), hails this year's festival as hearkening back to the days when indie film embraced so many new ideas and business models, films like Arias With A Twist: The Docufantasy (which premieres at TFF, Friday, April 23, at 6 p.m. in the Village East Cinema 1), connect such fests to the era they celebrate.

Through the life of pop-punk performance artist Joey Arias -- part sex symbol and artistic chameleon -- and his collaboration with rock puppeteer Basil Twist, the film chronicles a unique persona set in motion (on the West Coast), but propelled into action through the catalytic energy of the Big Apple. I knew Joey, having met him when he worked in the funky-but-chic midtown clothing store Fiorucci's, and have seen him perform many times.

Still, it takes a director like photographer Bobby Sheehan -- who not only lived through those times but gets reborn as a filmmaker with a new agenda to reconnect his subjects to the larger culture -- to get it right. Much like this film festival, he purports to serve as an incubator for indie talent and ideas. To a degree, both succeed, and suggest the many other ways they can keep doing so in the future.

In an exclusive interview, Sheehan recalled the circumstances of his rebirth.

Q: When you got into making this project, what were your expectations?

BS: My first instinct, after seeing the play, was, "We have to document this thing, [Arias with a Twist, the 2008 live show/collaboration between Joey [Arias] and master puppeteer [Basil] Twist staged at Manhattan's Here Arts Center], because there's nothing like it. If this thing goes away and people can't see it even in a projected form or on a television set, it's a shame. There’s far too much in this thing to just to let it go away forever, so let’s document it."

Simultaneously I thought, "We’ve been talking about touching on your [Joey's] history and your influences, so let’s do that." Basil has this great, interesting past too, so we have to do that. He’s kind of like the Mick Jagger of the puppetry world.

[This film] started out as what I thought was going to be a much smaller project, which would largely be about the play, and as it evolved I think we interviewed close to 50 people. We had a much longer cut, but had to take out a lot of interviews because it was very talking head-y, yet everything in there was interesting.

There are all these interesting people saying great stuff, so the film became more of this kind of hybrid where you have all these elements of fantasy and you have this historical stuff and all these interesting people talking about interesting things. It became a much bigger thing, but I hope it’s still intimate. It’s an intimate glimpse into these worlds that you wouldn’t necessarily know about unless you look for it, or this film finds you or if Basil Twist or Joey Arias finds you.

So it became much bigger than what I thought; I didn’t really anticipate traveling to Nashville to interview Katy Kay and Christie Rose, to go to Los Angeles to interview Cassandra Peterson and Gary Austin, and then going to Seattle, and to Berlin.

We shot at the Christopher Street Gay Pride Parade in Berlin in 2009, where Joey performed to over 500,000 people. Last year, we shot at the Puppet Festival in Charleville, France, that happens every three years. Basil studied puppetry there, and it's like the Harvard for puppetry -- very few Americans have ever been accepted.

We went to France twice. Actually, we went to France three times, because I had to go back to interview [the legendary fashion designer/icon] Thierry Mugler, who’s now Manford, by the way. So it became a much bigger production.

Q: Was it hard to find the money for this?

BS: I have a commercial career and do other documentaries. Last year I did an AmEx and a couple of Pfizer campaigns. It was just out-of-pocket,  self-financed. So it's truly a labor of love, because on paper if I went to investors and said, "Let's do this documentary, Arias with a Twist," they probably would have looked at me cross-eyed like, "Are you out of your mind?"

Q: So it's self-financed?

BS: It's still self-financed, which we feel good about because we only answer to ourselves. I show cuts to Basil and Joey, and we have creative chats. There isn't a money person saying, "Is this too gay or is that too weird?" None of that. We just look at the content of the film, and we have meetings about it and we edit for what’s going to make it the most creative film.

Q: And where did you go between this movie and back in the day; where have you been?

BS: I've been making little films, doing lots of commercials. The '80s started out exactly like what you remember.

I was very young, would go out to clubs every night, take pictures, do videos, and through knowing people like Joey, Klaus [Nomi] and John Sex, that was my life.  Then AIDS happened, and I blame MTV for part of the destruction of the '80s.

So by the time the '80s ended, I had to sort of pull myself together or else I was going to be another bad statistic. I had to thaw out from the ;80s and just get myself together.

I've been trying to make a living doing commercials, and you get preoccupied and addicted to making money, so I kind of drifted a bit. Now I'm trying to get back to what I originally wanted to do, which is to [make] film. And Joey's like a brother to me. I’ve done a number of projects with him, and through the years we've always spoken about doing some sort of a documentary thing because he's obviously a fascinating person.

Then, [like I said,] when I saw the play he did with Basil I was like "That's it, we’ve got to do this thing now because this play is going to come and go." Did you get a chance to see the play when it was in New York?

Q: I lost touch with a lot of people I knew from that era, and when I didn't see a show like this, I was really sick to death to have missed it.

BS: It might be happening again. It happened in a really small theater and ran for like six months. They were only supposed to run it for like eight weeks or something like that, and then I think they extended it to six months. It was hugely popular, and I think this film might regenerate the [interest] in having the play remounted again back in New York. So it's possible.

There’s talk of bringing it to Berlin in June; it travels. I’ve traveled with it to France, and then it was in Stockholm, and then it was in the REDCAT Theater in Los Angeles at the Disney/CalArts Center. I wouldn’t be surprised if it ended up back in New York sometime in the future, because a lot of Basil’s shows -- he does one show, then packs it up and puts it away -- and then he’ll unpack a prior show. So I wouldn't be surprised if you get to see it.

Q: One great thing about the '80s was that there weren't dichotomies like between rich and poor, art and commerce, pop/low art and high/intellectual art. I'm glad you used that Bowie clip from The Tonight Show because that was a big deal when it was shown.

BS: It was a huge deal. One of our own hit the big time: Joey Arias and Klaus Nomi on TV with David Bowie [as backing singers performing "Boys Keep Swinging" on Saturday Night Live in April 1979, (during which NBC censors muted the "other boys check you out" line)].

Q: That's what the big deal was. It wasn't about straight or gay. At different times that became contentious. "Are you part of the community? You’re not part of the community," and people were worried about being associated or not associated with it. Joey went beyond that, he transcended gender-bending, switching back and forth all the time.

BS: You're saying something very interesting, and I've never heard anyone else say it. I was a straight kid in a very aggressively gay environment. Do you remember that store, Parachute?

Q: I still have some stuff I bought from Parachute sitting somewhere. I went there all the time, especially when there were events or parties there.

BS: Do you remember the video installations that played there in the bleachers? Those were mine. That's what I did. So in that environment, everyone thought I was gay. When I was doing interviews [for this film] this topic came up because Joey would never not include me or whoever else was straight and make that demarcation of, "He’s not part of the club."

So everyone thought I was gay, and Joey in some ways would protect me. I vaguely remember some of those times where it was like, "Joey, this guy's really on me. You’ve got to get him off of me." Joey was like my big brother in a lot of ways. He would make sure that I felt comfortable and never felt out of place if Joey was there. Remember there was a bar called Blue Boy or Blue Bar [NOTE: It was Blue Bar] or something on St. Mark’s Place?

Q: I knew the bar.

BS: In the course of running around in an evening, if you were Joey you might end up at, like, Boy Bar [unrelated to Blue Bar] or something like that, and I would have absolutely no problem going in there if I was with Joey and whoever else was around, but I probably would not have gone in there without Joey.

I don't even know why I say that, but I know that that's true. I would have felt less comfortable if I wasn't with someone like Joey who I could hang out with just about anywhere. You could walk into a Republican Convention party and be with Joey, and at first they’d be put-off by him but eventually they'd be fascinated by him and he'd win them over.

[continued, next page]

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