Tonight's Film Feature:

Wigstock: The Movie

(Barry Shils, 1995, 85 min.)

Wigstock: The Movie is a 1995 documentary feature focusing on Wigstock, the annual drag music festival that had been held New York City's East Village through the 1980s and '90s. The film presents a number of performances from the 1994 festival, including by Lypsinka, Antony, John Kelly (as Joni Mitchell), The Lady Bunny, Coco Peru, Girlina, Crystal Waters, Deee-Lite, Jackie Beat, Debbie Harry, Leigh Bowery, Joey Arias, the Dueling Bankheads, Wayne County, Mistress Formika, Wendy Wild, Miss Understood, Tabboo!, Lady Miss Kier, and Flotilla De Barge. The film also captures a performance by RuPaul at the height of his mainstream fame during the 1990s.

Wigstock: The Movie also goes behind the scenes, examining the rehearsal process of a number of the performers including Lypsinka and the "Wigstock Dancers." Members of the stage crew and audience members are interviewed about their experiences at the festival, and some of the performers give interviews about the importance of drag and transgressive gender expression in their lives. One memorable moment features Wigstock Mistress of Ceremonies The Lady Bunny on the telephone with a city representative inquiring about the possibility of placing a wig on the Statue of Liberty.

In 1987, filmmaker Tom Rubnitz had shot a 20-minute documentary short, also called Wigstock: The Movie, which played the gay and lesbian film festival circuit in 1988. The title sequence of the 1995 Goldwyn film is cut from footage from the 1987 Tom Rubnitz film. (Rubnitz's films were shown at Hallwalls, most notably The Fairies (1989), part of a February 1990 program Feeling the Faults: Confronting Dis-Ease Through the Mediated Body (Tapes from Gay Men's Health Crisis).

These two black & white photos, depicting The Lady Bunny and Lypsinka, both of whom appear in the 1995 film Wigstock: the Movie, were taken by Buffalo's own Paul Morgan at the time of the first Wigstock festivals held in Tompkins Square Park in the East Village (1985–1986), when Morgan was living in NYC.

Paul Morgan is making a limited number of these and other prints available at the August 8 screening for $50 each, as a fundraiser for the REEL Party film series. They are 8" x 10" archival inkjet prints, signed by the artist.