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

Q: Joey moved through a lot of different crowds. What made him decide to move from New York? I never figured that out.

BS: He was in Las Vegas for six years. He came back about two years ago. He was in Vegas because he was in a Cirque du Soleil show, [Zumanity, at the New York-New York Hotel & Casino on the Strip]. I think that was a very positive thing for him because it really forced him to become very disciplined.

There were nights when he would show up and would just suck because he was drunk or whatever, and you can’t be the front person of a Cirque du Soleil [production] and not show up every night 100% there. So he really evolved.

Now when he performs he's just so much more focused and disciplined, and it’s nice to see. When he first came out I was blown away; it was Joey Arias times 100. He was just so "on," and Basil’s world is perfectly suited for someone like Joey because there are no boundaries. Basil’s imagination can take you anywhere he wants to take you, and it’s just a fun place to go. So [Joey's] singing has really gotten pretty solid.

Q: One thing that Joey was about was surviving. For a lot of us in the downtown scene, Klaus was the first person everybody knew that was identified as having died of AIDS. And of course, Joey knew everybody.

BS: I know where you’re going, and I agree.

Q: There was a self-destructive quality to so many creative people in the crowd at that time, so they didn't go on to succeed. Yet some finally pulled their shit together and have succeeded -- Joey being one of them. He's succeeding on his own terms; he may not be doing Leno, but he's doing what he does on his own terms and is recognized and appreciated for it -- to the point where you make this film of him and Basil.

BS: To be honest with you, Joey loves it; he just loves being Joey Arias. Any human being who can find that kind of contentment in being themselves, it's one of the reasons we are so attracted to him, because he loves what he does. He’s very compassionate, and I think that that is one of his survival instincts.

The other thing is: It’s a miracle that he's alive. He was so right smack in the middle of all that stuff; that was like the danger zone. When so many people all started to get AIDS, and when they all started dying, everyone who knew Joey was just completely panic-stricken that [it would happen to him]. It wasn't just Klaus, though Klaus was definitely the first person.

Q: He was the first person to have had AIDS that everybody knew.

BS: It was so tragic because he had just gone to France; he had a record contract with RCA. I went up there once to photograph him, and it just seemed like this record will hit big. They were trying to model him to be someone like a space-age, disco kind of guy. He'd have a hit single and he was all jacked up about that. And it just seemed like someone just popped the bubble.

I was up at RCA first in August [of that year], and I think by that October he went from knowing that he had anything to being dead. It was so quick. Then Joey’s boyfriend [at the time], who he lived with for years and years -- Chuck -- died a couple of years later from AIDS. [In the film, photographer] Michael Halsband touches on how Joey had his partner in crime, Klaus, and then his boyfriend both dying of AIDS.

Q: Joey and everybody else from the Danceteria scene knew the doorman, Haoui Montag, who also died of AIDS. He was another person that we all became aware of, and it really was affecting this community; we didn't at all expect it to have such an impact.

BS: It was sad and dark, and just seemed like what was this very free, open society.... People all of a sudden became very scared. You weren't worried about getting gonorrhea or herpes or something like that, you were now worried about dying after having sex with people.

It just changed the whole complexion of the Lower East Side. New York started changing because the whole MTV thing happened, and you had all these people who maybe weren’t that talented becoming hugely famous. The television just seemed to change the town, of what New York was, at least for me, and then it pumped into my own personal noise.

The '80s started out really gloriously and then for me ended really dark. It was a whirlwind decade for me. I wonder, when we see each other, if we say, “Oh. That’s who you are.”

Q: At that time, in no uncertain terms, we were doing some of the most important, creative, cultural work on the planet.

BS: Ann [Magnuson, the lead in Susan Siedelman's Making Mr. Right] even says in the film, New York was poor, so it was easy for people to migrate here who had no money [and make art]. I don’t think [the late artist] Keith Haring had any money; I know [painter] Kenny Scharf didn’t have any money [at the time].

I used to run around with various other young, crazy people, and we all had friends in bands and stuff like that, so you would hang out with some guy named SAMO who would graffiti stuff everywhere he went, including your friends’ houses. Literally, at a party once he took spray paint in a friend's apartment while their parents were away, and he's spray painting on their living room "SAMO is God," and he just left.

Then you blink your eyes and all of a sudden he’s [Jean-Michel] Basquiat, and he's this world-renowned artist. There were no rules; you could do something really interesting and something extraordinary could happen for a reason that wasn't motivated necessarily by ambition.

It just seemed like Basquiat was meant to happen in the '80s because [Andy] Warhol was still around, and Klaus Nomi was meant to happen in the ‘80s because he needed to be one of the figures in the downtown scene, and Joey Arias absolutely needed to exist in the'80s as part of Klaus' thing.

He had Strange Party, one of Joey's bands in the early 80s, and did Mermaids on Heroin, a surreal theater ensemble -- including Fred Schneider from the B-52's -- he was Key Largo, mad scientist extraordinaire. Joey played the devil, he played [Salvador] Dali, he played Warhol. Joey needed to be the chameleon to connect a whole bunch of people, and I think that’s one of the things that makes Joey very interesting.

Everyone loves Joey, he has no enemies, and mutual friends always want them to get to know Joey almost as a favor. Like I would want to introduce Joey to anyone I met because in a way he qualified me.

The only thing I was capable of contributing to that era was that I took photos and made videos and film. In essence it really wasn't a contribution to what was going on because I wasn’t a performance artist or in a band. So my way of making me feel more secure in a new creative environment was to be like, "Oh, you’ve got to come meet my friend Joey."

It was just automatic. It also felt like I was doing them a favor, because if they didn’t know Joey yet I knew that they were going to want to know him. It was a very free community where people weren’t competitive with one another, except for me and my stupid rivalry thing with Michael Halsband. It wasn't like a mad thing; I just wanted to be able to take pictures all the time. I love the '80s.

I was like this ghetto rat crawling out of a tenement building and crawling into a nightclub, and once I found that nightclub, there were all these fabulous people and interesting people and it was like okay to just be anybody.

It was just a really pleasant experience. It was people who haven’t seen each other for a while for no good reason back in touch with one another. Obviously Joey’s really close with Ann, and there are certain people that I’m really close with.

Q: Joey's preferences are gay, but not in terms of his image and presence in the world, and that’s an underlying quality of the film that is very interesting.

BS: Yeah, he calls himself "The Z Chromosome," because he's not male, he's not female: He's Joey. The idea is something that I hope is there [in the film], because what was really eye-opening for me and made me feel great was that Joey's still Joey, yet he's evolving.

The film deals with the past tense but it’s also a present-tense film because Joey’s still creating art. And then there's this other new artist -- Basil Twist  -- who’s like a generation and half later in a way.

There's a gap in there between the '80s and now, and Basil hopefully [reflects] what happens next. Basil's definitely part of a younger generation, but if he were around then he would have fit in perfectly.

Q: Puppetry was one creative form not done enough in those Downtown/New Wave days. He would have added to those times.

BS: I think Klaus Nomi would have gone crazy. He would have been like, "There has to be a Klaus Nomi puppet, and this is what we’re going to do with it." And Basil would have been like, "Yeah. We have to have an entire Nomi scene where we have Klaus, Adrian and Joey, and their puppet selves are going to do this."

Of course [the late performer/actor] John Sex would have been a great puppet. Basil doesn’t necessarily need personas or real people to make into puppets. I think he would have done what he does with Joey; he’s going to add his own world into the mix.

It would have been awesome to have Basil Twist in the '80s. Just look at the potential combination of imaginations like having Ann Magnuson in the mix with Basil. Ann was highly imaginative with everything she did.

Q: Ann's story is another one that could be told; she has been hiding in the wings as well lately.

BS: I love Ann. Ann and I were dancing around the idea of doing something. The other thing I'd like to do with this, because there are so many stories in this, a lot of these personas I'd like to do sub-chapters with. They’re all certainly decent sized short documentaries.

Q: Maybe movies like this one that not only document the times but show it as a living thing will revive such interest; what do you think?

BS: I hope so. That’s one of the things that I hope people take away from the movie. That sort of community intimacy led to a cross-pollination that can’t happen on the internet.

People need to get together, and I think seeing films like this together or seeing theater pieces like this together, there’s really nothing like it, you can’t replace it by watching a video screen, you just can't. I hope so.

For more by Brad Balfour: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/brad-balfour

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