Attend the Tale of Sweeney Todd!

I saw Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street at a word-of-mouth screening packed with people who I got the feeling were unfamiliar with the Stephen Sondheim musical it’s adapted from. I base my suspicions on the gasps of shocked laughter that greeted the many murders Johnny Depp commits over the course of the film. The shock, I think, arose from how unexpectedly grisly those murders were, with thick geysers of Bava-red blood gushing from the throat of one hapless Londoner after another. Was this grim, blood-drenched revenge saga really the kind of movie they wanted to see less than a week before Christmas? And the laughter, I think, came from them realizing that yes! Yes! This was exactly the kind of movie they were in the mood for: big, bloody, deliciously cynical, with a plot whose machinery grinds away with the frightening inevitability of one of those dark Victorian workhouses Sweeney Todd can glimpse from the window of his barbershop.

That’s where he’s plotting his revenge against Judge Turpin (Alan Rickman), who 15 years earlier falsely sentenced him to life and transported him to Australia. Now Todd’s wife is dead and his beautiful daughter Johanna lives as a virtual prisoner and prospective bride in Turpin’s home. But until Todd can figure out a way to lure Turpin to his place of business, he slakes his bloodlust by killing random customers—he strikes a bargain with Mrs. Lovett (Helena Bonham Carter), his downstairs neighbour, who uses the corpses as a cheap but delicious ingredient in the meat pies she sells.

The plot teeters on the edge of camp, and the original Broadway production (or at least the version filmed for PBS and currently available on DVD) made a point of playing up the comic elements—Angela Lansbury’s performance as Mrs. Lovett especially indulged in a lot of mugging to the audience.

By contrast, director Tim Burton makes the surprising decision to play the story mostly straight: it took me a little while to warm up to Carter’s underplaying, but I grew to admire her take on Mrs. Lovett not as a comic gargoyle but as a grim, practical-minded, quietly cunning businesswoman. The dazzlingly clever cannibalism puns in “A Little Priest” are still here, but in a shortened, much drier form. Indeed, the biggest comic setpiece is now “By the Sea,” a bit of a throwaway number in the original which here becomes a blackly funny ditty in which Burton visualizes Mrs. Lovett’s lovesick fantasy of running a seaside hotel with Sweeney—whose gloomy, scowling presence spoils each tableau, like a cockroach stuck in the icing of a birthday cake.

That sequence aside, Depp is the film’s biggest shortcoming. Sweeney is a very vocally demanding role, and there’s just no disguising the fact that Depp’s voice (and his phony British accent) aren’t up to the challenge of some of the show’s most powerful songs—he talk-sings his way through “Epiphany” when he should be careening wildly from one emotional extreme to another. In many of the musical numbers, you can feel Burton covering for and cutting around Depp’s vocal weaknesses (and, to a lesser extent, Carter’s), and a Sweeney who can’t thrill you musically is almost a contradiction in terms.

And yet, I can’t imagine any fan of the show not being thrilled with this version of it. Screenwriter John Logan makes several cuts and alterations to the songs and story, but they are all unfailingly intelligent, tightening up the suspense, speeding up the plot, and emphasizing the cruelty and cheapness of life in the Victorian age in ways much more subtly effective than the intrusive Brechtian staging Harold Prince created for the original. Plus, the arrangements are good and loud, just the way I like ’em.

Burton has been trying to get this project off the ground for two decades, but unlike so many Hollywood directors’ pet projects, this one doesn’t feel locked up in its creator’s head. It’s got a mad, slashing excitement that hopefully will get people past their squeamishness at the sight of blood. As Sweeney himself cries out, “I’m alive at last, and I’m full of joy!”

"I Am The Super Mother Bug!": The Best of 2007

This is my list of the best films of 2007, as it appears in the Edmonton, Alberta alt-weekly SEE Magazine. Keep in mind that a lot of titles that are popping up on a lot of these lists didn't reach Edmonton in 2007, including I'm Not There, There Will Be Blood, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Lake of Fire, Syndromes and a Century, and The Savages. There are also a few titles, like Sweeney Todd, Charlie Wilson's War, and Juno, which I won't be able to see until later this week.

Is that the last of my caveats? I think so. Let's roll up our sleeves and get cracking!

***

Assembling my list of the best movies of 2007 forced me to make some difficult choices. Which deserves the greater respect: craftsmanlike precision and magisterial control over every aspect of the filmmaking process (à la No Country for Old Men, Zodiac, and Children of Men), or go-for-broke, tonally inconsistent trainwreck craziness (à la Brand Upon the Brain!, Bug, and Romance and Cigarettes)?

I decided to make a little extra room for the trainwrecks this year. Those filmic masterpieces can be so intimidating; it’s nice to have a few flawed movies around to bring your affectionate side out.

Here’s my list. Watch out: it’s dark in here.

(1) BUG
I’m as surprised as you are to see this one sitting in the top slot, but William Friedkin’s claustro-phobic thriller about two lonely people succumbing to paranoia and madness inside a dusty motel room is the movie I find myself thinking back to more than any other film from 2007. Ashley Judd gives the performance of the year as Agnes White: after years of forgettable romcoms and woman-in-jeopardy thrillers, her fearlessness here is downright inspirational. She is the super mother bug!

(2) ZODIAC
I hated Se7en—I thought it was pretentious, mannered, over-designed, and loathesome in the way it savoured the twisted ingenuity of its killings. I half-wonder if director David Fincher hates it too, because Zodiac repudiates all of Se7en’s most distinctive stylistic and thematic elements. It’s a long, understated, painstaking, often frustrating film that suggests that a fascination with murder leads nowhere except down a very long, dark hole.

(3) NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN
Another period serial-killer flick—this one set in the sunbaked Texas of the 1980s, although Javier Bardem’s remorseless Anton Chigurh seems less like a human being than a demon who’s been wandering the plains ever since the 19th century. Like Zodiac, it breathes new life into the serial-killer genre to refusing to grant the audience the final, conclusive confrontation between good and evil that we’ve been trained by hundreds of lesser films (and presidential speeches) to expect.

(4) THE ASSASSIN-ATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD
Andrew Dominik’s art Western is at once a stunning evocation of a bygone time and place (the breathtaking train-robbery sequence is like watching fact turn into legend before your eyes) and also a contemporary-minded commentary on the nature of celebrity. Alberta hasn’t looked this good on film since Terrence Malick came here in the late ’70s to shoot Days of Heaven.

(5) CHILDREN OF MEN
A latecomer to Edmonton from 2006, Alfonso Cuarón’s dystopian sci-fi picture is like a grittier version of Blade Runner—no technological wonders to gape at, no sexy women to fantasize about, just an ordinary man too busy protecting the last glimmer of human life to worry about any artificial lifeforms running around.

(6) BRAND UPON THE BRAIN!
Gender-bending teenage detectives, brain-control experiments conducted in lighthouses, mechanical devices that allow lovers to communicate with each other across any distance: that Guy Maddin had quite a childhood. His latest “autobiographical” exercise in silent-movie style may be his funniest and most emotionally satisfying film yet. Perverse, obsessive, and probably half-demented: the man’s a national treasure!

(7) THE TV SET
Jake Kasdan’s satire about a writer who compromises pretty much every shred of his art and his personal dignity while ushering a show he’s created through pilot season seemed amusing but slight when I first saw it. But in the weeks it followed, it seemed to stand for something larger and more important: the way anything smart or complicated or “downbeat”—movies, politicans, ideas—gets sanded down and smoothed over before the public is allowed to hear it.

(8) NO END IN SIGHT
Charles Ferguson’s summary of the United States’ epic misad-venture in Iraq will get you angry like no other movie made this year—angry at the Bush administration for completely botching what Ferguson argues was actually a winnable war, and angry that this engrossing, intelligent, admirably fair-minded documentary was seen by so few people.


(9) INTO THE WILD
Sean Penn’s adaptation of Jon Krakauer’s nonfiction account of the life and untimely death of youthful adventurer Chris McCandless is every bit as wide-eyed, charming, and uninterested in playing by society’s rules as its subject. Emile Hirsch gives a breakthrough performance in the lead, but it’s the excellent supporting players—especially Vince Vaughn, Hal Holbrook, and Brian Dierker—who give the movie its texture.

(10) ROMANCE & CIGARETTES
John Turturro’s bizarre musical begins with a New Jersey ironworker played by James Gandolfini striding out his front door, standing in the street, and belting out Englebert Humperdinck’s “A Man Without Love.” From that moment on, this crazy movie had me on its side, and I stuck with it through every ridiculous plot twist, every celebrity cameo (Steve Buscemi! Amy Sedaris! Christopher Walken!), even the scene where Gandolfini tries to spice up his affair with Kate Winslet by getting himself circumcised. Hey, Hairspray: this is how you make a musical!

HONOURABLE MENTION: Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, Black Book, The Bourne Ultimatum, Iraq in Fragments, Rescue Dawn, Stephanie Daley

MOST OVERRATED: Atonement, Hot Fuzz, The Lives of Others, Ratatouille, Julie Christie in Away From Her, Cate Blanchett in I’m Not There

MOST UNDERRATED: Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters, The Darjeeling Limited, Hostel: Part II, Redacted, Gordon Pinsent in Away From Her, Richard Gere in I’m Not There

The Cat in the Hat

Last week I had to go to the hospital to have a cyst removed from my chin. The procedure began with the doctor producing a needle that appeared to be the length of his forearm and injecting me about half a dozen times. Once I was sufficiently numb, he laid me down on a table, painted my chin with mercurochrome, draped a sheet over my eyes (presumably so that I wouldn’t get freaked out by the sight of the increasingly bloody scalpel in his hand), sliced my chin open and began painstakingly extracting all the goop that was causing my chin to bulge out like the son’s on American Dad. Apparently a lot of the tissue was attached to the bone, which meant that for about 15 minutes, the only sound I hard was his knife scratching against my chin—it was the sound of someone slowly removing ice from a windshield, or scraping two or three coats of paint from an antique chair.

I mention all this because just last night I went to see Margot at the Wedding, and I think that, given the choice between undergoing that procedure again and spending a weekend cooped up in a house with these characters, I think I’d let Dr. Mehling have another go at my chin.

However, in the hands of writer/director Noah Baumbach, sitting at a safe remove from the action in the movie theatre and watching these miserable people making each other even more miserable is a surprisingly enjoyable experience. That’s assuming, of course, that you have a taste for the new breed of comedy where, instead of snappy one-liners, you get excruciatingly protracted scenes of social awkwardness. Margot at the Wedding makes Baumbach’s previous film, the painfully autobiographical divorce dramedy The Squid and the Whale, seem like a Neil Simon play by comparison. The things these people say to each other would make Todd Solondz flinch.

Nicole Kidman plays Margot, a successful literary author with a bad habit of taking family secrets and using them as fodder for her fiction. She’s arrived at her family’s New England summer home to attend the marriage of her estranged sister Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh) to Malcolm (Jack Black), an unemployed musician who’s trying to pass off writing letters to the local alt-weekly as one of his “jobs.” “I can’t say I hold out a lot of hope for the whole thing,” Margot tells her son Claude (Zane Pais) during the trip down, and when he asks why they’re going, she guilelessly replies, “We’re supporting her!”

With support like Margot’s, who needs enemies? Faultlines were already developing in Pauline and Malcolm’s relationship before she even got there, but Margot’s quietly disapproving presence, her habit of poking at old wounds and asking inappropriate questions, has a way of turning them into gaping fissures. Baumbach’s decision to cast Kidman as this horrible woman is a masterstroke—there’s always been something icy and ruthless behind Kidman’s eyes, and she smartly plays Margot as if she truly believes she’s the victim. (“Stop picking on me!” is one of her favourite exclamations.)

Baumbach devotes perhaps a little too much screentime to the predictable unraveling of Pauline and Malcolm’s relationship (although Black’s blubbering phone call to Pauline begging her to take him back is one of the film’s comic highlights) and not enough to the more interesting, weirdly Oedipal relationship between Margot and Claude. You can see why he’s so enthralled with Margot—when you’re a kid, it’s a thrill to hear an adult talking candidly about other adults’ flaws—but you can also see what a smothered, psychological mess she’s turning him into.

The Squid and the Whale ends with its teenaged hero breaking away from the toxic embrace of his literary father and running through Central Park. Margot at the Wedding reverses that ending: just when it looks like Claude is about to escape Margot’s clutches, if only temporarily, she races furiously after him, as if to signal to him he’ll never, ever get away. The poor kid.

The Knightley News

Atonement is this year’s The Hours. I don’t mean that as a compliment.

Like The Hours, it’s an adaptation of a literary bestseller split into three sections set in three different time periods. The director is a hot young Brit coming off a surprise popular hit: The Hours was Stephen Daldry’s follow-up to Billy Elliot, while Atonement is Joe Wright’s second film, following the Keira Knightley version of Pride and Prejudice. It’s built around a tricky postmodern literary conceit—The Hours had its references to Mrs. Dalloway, while Atonement has a rug-pulling final confession by Vanessa Redgrave that makes you re-evaluate much of what you’ve just finished watching. Both movies have incredibly annoying, literal-minded scores—the constant clacking of typewriter keys on the soundtrack of Atonement makes you yearn for the endless arpeggios Philip Glass used to underline every other scene in The Hours. Both movies will undoubtedly be forgotten within 10 months, but they both have that perfect sheen of middlebrow “quality” filmmaking that the Academy and the Golden Globes love to reward with bushels of nominations.

The first section of the film takes place in 1935 during a tremendously eventful day at a vast country house outside London. Sexual tension is mounting between beautiful young aristocratic Cecilia Tallis (Keira Knightley) and servant’s son Robbie Turner (James McAvoy, from The Last King of Scotland), a creepy friend of Cecilia’s brother is prowling around the nursery, explicit love letters are being exchanged, trysts are being arranged in the library—and Cecilia’s precocious 13-year-old sister Briony (Saoirsie Ronan) is glimpsing just enough of it all, and has enough of an overactive imagination, to reach a disastrously incorrect impression of what’s actually going on. That night, she accuses Robbie of a terrible crime, essentially destroying his budding medical career, and ruining any chance he and Cecilia might have of finding happiness together.

Although I never quite believed the plot contrivance that accidentally places a shocking piece of paper into Briony’s hands, this part of the film does an expert job of establishing several characters and laying out a complicated series of plot points in a minimum of screen time. But it never feels rushed—indeed, the sequence takes place on a hot, heavy summer day, and Wright ably captures the languorous mood of a weekend in the countryside, when you can barely hear yourself think over the chirping of the grasshoppers. (I’ve heard of actors walking through a performance, but in Atonement, Keira Knightley might be the first person ever to loll through one.)

But once we leave the countryside and rejoin the story five years later during World War II, the film quickly loses its focus, and we realize that the film hasn’t actually persuaded us to care about any of these people: not Cecilia, who remains a beautiful cipher; not Briony (now played by Romola Garai), who has become a nurse tending to severely wounded British soldiers; and not Robbie, who spends this entire middle section of the film wandering, dazed and unshaven, through various meadows and battlefields.

Meanwhile, the tightly plotted intrigue at the country house gives way to a grab bag of wartime vignettes, none of which really build on each other. There’s an insanely ambitious scene, for instance, in which Robbie stumbles around the beach at Dunkirk during the 1940 evacuation—Wright shoots it in a single take that incorporates thousands of costumed extras, massive props (including a grounded ship and a Ferris wheel), and seemingly impossible-to-choreograph action, like the guy who puts two wounded horses down with his pistol as Robbie passes by. The sequence should be amazing, exhilarating, terrifying, but instead it’s a yawn: it feels like a funhouse ride, with various bits of staged business prepared for us around every corner.

What’s more, there’s absolutely no reason for it to be in the movie, which is ostensibly about Briony and her fruitless efforts to make up for her false accusation against Robbie. But Wright and Hampton never figure out how to take you inside Briony’s head, or feel the painful, ineffective urgency of her guilt. (Or, perhaps, her inability to appreciate the full consequences of her actions.)

Admittedly, their hands are somewhat tied by the way Ian McEwan’s original novel is structured so that it builds up to the big surprise ending. But then they alter the meaning of that ending so fundamentally, it’s outrageous—a reversal that once served as a breathtaking indictment of Briony now redeems Briony and gives Cecilia and Robbie’s romance a happy Hollywood ending... provided, of course, you’re willing to accept the film’s solipsistic logic.

Atonement is a good-looking, well-crafted movie—the costumes are really pretty. But it’s a good-looking shell, a deeply internal story that’s been turned into nothing but externals, and if the prognosticators are right and this movie wins Best Picture in a year that produced No Country for Old Men, There Will Be Blood, Zodiac, and The Assassination of Jesse James... well, the Academy will have plenty to atone for.

Pig Business

Here's a brief excerpt from the film Our Daily Bread, my review of which appears below. It should give you a good idea of the style and content of this film. Just be warned that if you have a weak stomach, you might not want to watch this clip.

Factory Showroom

I think I may have gotten the wrong message from Our Daily Bread. But I guess you risk the audience misinterpreting you when you make a documentary that contains no interviews, no voiceover narration, no music, and no indication as to where any of the footage was shot—nothing, in fact, but images showing the full spectrum of the modern industrial food industry (or at least how that industry looked in Europe between 2003 and 2005, when the film was shot).

I can easily see the film being a big hit with vegetarian/vegan organizations and groups promoting organic farming: director Nikolaus Geyrhalter succeeds in making food factories look like the eeriest, most unnatural places on earth—no place that employs people to run a gigantic stainless-steel pig-bisecting machine, and then employs another person whose sole job it is to take a knife and separate that last little bit of snout that the machine always misses, is a place I want to think about when I eat a pulled pork sandwich. The film ends with a sequence showing a guy in a slaughterhouse at the end of the day hosing down every surface with some kind of concentrated soap—but the memory of this one cow desperately writhing in this restraining metal cylinder before a worker knocks it out with a zap to its skull is not washed away so easily.

And yet... I also came away from this film dazzled by the ingenuity and the ruthless efficiency of some of the technology on display. Some of it is delightful—like the machine that drives around an orchard, grabbing each trunk and then furiously shaking the tree until all the fruit comes loose. Some of it is surreal in the way it mechanizes organic processes—like the moving cages with the metal gratings for floors where newborn pigs suckle their mothers’ teats. And some of the sights are almost comically horrifying, like the vacuum tube that Hoovers chickens right off the dirt floor, or the women who unemotionally take handfuls of baby chicks and stuff them down a vent and onto a conveyor belt leading God knows where.

You could say the human beings in this film have become machines as well, but the deftness with which they perform their ridiculously specialized functions within these factories is kind of phenomenal. Like the guy who’s gotten hilariously good at sliding gutted fish onto metal holders, or the women who sort out pig guts all day long, or—most impressive of all—the guys who collect bull semen. (They wait for the bull to climb on top of a cow, but just as he’s about to penetrate her, they grab his penis and shove it into a long tube instead with a plastic bag at the end of it. Talk about dexterity!)

I had this same misguided reaction to Koyaanisqatsi, another wordless documentary which was supposed to show the ugliness of the human world but which I thought made industrialization look like kind of a miracle. Geyrhalter’s film recalls Koyaanisqatsi in other ways as well, especially the meticulousness of its relentlessly symmetrical images, almost all of them shot from the same flat, neutral, dead-level angle. The film verges on appearing anti-human, but Geyrhalter shrewdly includes occasional images of breaktime. And what do workers do when they’re not snipping off pigs’ feet or chicken heads? It seems they eat sandwiches, drink coffee, and smoke cigarettes just like the rest of us.

I can’t imagine what kind of couple, out for a night at the movies, would choose to see Our Daily Bread, but it’s a remarkable, oddly mesmerizing movie all the same. It might not have persuaded me to change my eating habits, but it made me damn glad I don’t work on a lettuce farm—I could probably get used to slicing pig snouts, but picking lettuce looks like the most tedious, uncomfortable job in the world.

Iraq in Fragments (of Footage)

Redacted is the second film Brian De Palma has made in his career based on a true story of U.S. troops raping and murdering a teenaged girl. The first was 1989’s Casualties of War, which is one of the most searing, unforgettable movies ever made about the way war can erode men’s conscience—but it flopped at the box office, and to this day it’s regarded dismissively by people who haven’t seen it, largely because it co-stars the “lightweight” TV actor Michael J. Fox. Casualties showed De Palma at the height of his powers behind the camera, taking all of the visual techniques that were a signature of his thrillers—split-focus shots, complexly staged action setpieces, agonizing slow-motion—and using them to dramatize both the horror of the soldiers’ crime and the agony of the one member of the platoon who is unable to prevent it from happening.

But in Redacted, which is set at a U.S. military checkpoint in Samarra, De Palma—at the age of 67—has decided to completely reinvent himself as a filmmaker. Gone is the masterfully controlled camerawork of Femme Fatale and Blow Out, replaced by a patchwork quilt of faked “found footage”: soldiers’ home movies, surveillance videos, blog entries. (De Palma’s surprising late-career embrace of a brand-new low-budget visual grammar echoes David Lynch’s embrace of digital video in Inland Empire.)

So while the outlines of De Palma’s story—which was inspired by the 2006 rape and murder of the 14-year-old Iraqi girl Abeer Qasim Hamza al-Janabi—are an eerie echo of the real-life story that inspired Casualties of War, De Palma’s message is more explicitly, urgently political this time around. De Palma’s movies have always arguably been more about images than characters, but that’s especially true of Redacted, in which he demands to know why so few images of the human cost of the war in Iraq have been seen in North America—why images of dead U.S. soldiers and dead Iraqi civilians have been systematically suppressed by the mainstream media and relegated to the semi-underground Internet sources that he replicates throughout the film.

De Palma knows the power of images better than just about anybody in Hollywood, and nothing gets him more angry than being forbidden from seeing something (or showing it). The film closes with a montage of photographs of dead Iraqi civilians—a sight that preview audiences found so incendiary that Redacted’s American producer, very much against De Palma’s wishes, ordered that the corpses’ faces be blacked out in the release print. The irony is almost too cruel even for a De Palma movie: Redacted has itself been redacted.

Redacted is not a perfect movie. It feels like something scribbled down and filmed as quickly as possible, a film made in the heat of passion. It’s reckless. Frequently, De Palma visibly struggles to find ways to make plot points without violating his “found footage” structure—his decision to have a few of the soldiers’ arguments play out in front of a surveillance camera (which, inexplicably, has been equipped with sound) particularly strains credulity.

Also, De Palma’s attempts at duplicating the feel of soldiers’ homemade videos or left-wing online screeds results in an intentionally strident acting style. I can certainly understand why many critics have dismissed the performances in Redacted—by a cast of unknowns—as amateurish and stagy. (Maybe it helped that I didn’t see the film in a theatre but instead watched it at home on my laptop—indeed, the computer screen might be Redacted’s ideal medium.)

But Redacted also feels alive and risky and engaged in a way that the big Hollywood movies about Iraq, like Rendition and Lions for Lambs, simply do not. De Palma isn’t merely “concerned” about Iraq, the way Lions for Lambs director/star Robert Redford is—he’s practically quivering with anger and outrage. He doesn’t want to show you two actors pretending to die in a fake-looking Afghanistan set; he wants to shove actual photos of dead Iraqis in your face. And he doesn’t care about making his message “palatable,” like Redford; he wants you to recoil. He’s willing to piss off not just Bill O’Reilly, but everyone in the audience. (Even those who don’t already think De Palma’s nothing but a has-been hack.)

Flawed, messy, contradictory, often contrived and unconvincing: Redacted is all of these things. It also happens to be essential viewing.

Will Work for Feud

I don't know if this will be of interest to anyone outside my home base of Edmonton, Alberta, but it is movie-related: a preview I did for SEE Magazine of a play written by and co-starring a legendary local drag queen named Darrin Hagen and called Bitchslap!—in which Hagen and another respected local actor and director, Trevor Schmidt, re-enact the bitter, legendary feud between Joan Crawford and Bette Davis, which culminated on the set of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (Well, actually, it really culminated during the making of Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte, when Crawford was so broken by Davis' mind games that she withdrew from the film and was replaced by Olivia de Havilland.

You may not be able to see the play, but Hagen's insights into the two women are pretty interesting and insightful. Read on!

***

“We don’t caricature Joan Crawford and Bette Davis,” says Darrin Hagen, playwright and co-star of Bitchslap! “We play them big.”

It’s a key distinction. Bitchslap! may look like a drag show about two Hollywood camp icons, but underneath the thickly painted eyebrows, the giant shoulder pads, and the deliciously catty insults, it’s a real play about two strong-willed adversaries who ultimately wound up prisoners of their own larger-than-life personas. (It also efficiently condenses nearly four decades of Hollywood history into less than 90 minutes.)

“It’s a juicy feud,” says Hagen, who plays Joan opposite Trevor Schmidt’s Bette. “That was the starting-off point. And the lines are brilliant—these women were so fucking funny when they talked about each other. I couldn’t write lines that funny! But I’m also fascinated by how their images were also constructions of the women who played them, which is sort of what I go through when I’m doing drag.

“And I was also really interested in how we give Joan and Bette so much power in the play, but in fact gossip columnists like Hedda Hopper [played here by Davina Stewart] had so much power behind the scenes—at the end, you realize they weren’t really in charge. And there’s the iconic gay status Joan and Bette both have—there’s one theory that calls them the first queer politicians, in the sense that in the 1930s and ’40s, when gay men had absolutely no visibility, these actresses acted out their dreams and fantasies of success onscreen.”

But there was little sisterly solidarity between the two women, who became rivals almost from the moment Davis arrived in Hollywood—Hagen pinpoints the start of their feud to the moment when Crawford upstaged Davis at the moment she was about to accept an award as one of Hollywood’s rising young stars by swanning into the hall with six male escorts in tow. Davis envied Crawford’s glamour and star power, Hagen says, while Crawford knew she was never taken seriously as an actress the way Davis was. They exchanged barbs throughout the ’30s and ’40s (Davis supposedly once said Crawford had “slept with every male star at MGM except Lassie”), and their clashes on the set of the first film they made together, the 1962 gothic potboiler Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, are the stuff of legend.

“They were fighting for the same things—the Oscars, the money, the roles, often the lovers,” Hagen says, “so they were always in competition. And you have to remember that when Bette came on the scene, Joan was already a huge star. And Bette never respected Joan as an actress—Joan started out as a dancer, a chorus girl—and I think Bette made it her mission to become more famous than Joan Crawford. Joan could sing and dance, which Bette couldn’t do at all. So I think despite her Oscars, she had reason to be jealous of her.”

And as Hagen points out, there are some interesting parallels between Crawford and Davis and the men playing them—minus the bitchy attempts at one-upmanship. (Although Hagen points out that he made sure to pose on the left in all the Bitchslap! publicity photos so that his name would always come first on the poster.) Like Crawford, Hagen was a star before he became a serious actor thanks to his drag career. “I got famous before I ever learned how to create art,” he says. “I’m very much a movie star, while Trevor is very much the ‘actress’ who had to fight to get a higher profile in this town.”

If the response that his Bette Davis act got at the Orlando Fringe earlier this year is any indication, Schmidt has no problem convincing anyone of his starpower. When the moment came for Schmidt to deliver Davis’ classic Baby Jane line, “But y’are, Blanche! Y’are in that chair!” Hagen says, “I swear, 75 gay men in the audience said it along with him. They were waiting for that scene!”

So, Hagen hopes, are audiences everywhere—he’s trying to put together a touring production of Bitchslap! as a vehicle for Canadian female impersonator Christopher Peterson. “This show has serious legs,” Hagen promises. “And not just my own!”