Making Priscilla by Al Clark Read Free Book Online Page A

mediocrity. With the exception of Elia Kazan’s The Last Tycoon and Nicolas Roeg’s Insignificance — directors who knew how to exploit Curtis’s ingratiating edginess — he has somehow managed to avoid appearing in an entirely watchable film since his spellbinding but short-lived change of gear as The Boston Strangler in 1968. (Reaching rock bottom in the early ’80s, Curtis played Iago in a contemporary adaptation of Othello, ‘based on the drama by William Shakespeare’,called Othello the Black Commando, written and directed by, and starring Max H Boulois. While acknowledging the competition presented by several of the works of Ed Wood, this has the distinction of being perhaps the worst film ever made.)
    Yet Curtis remains a star, an indelible memory, an exhilarating echo to anyone dreaming up a drag movie who has seen — as they must surely have — Some Like It Hot, still one of the quintessential film comedies. Our picture would enable him to go a stage further by playing a woman, rather than a reluctant transvestite with a weakness for Marilyn Monroe’s body and Cary Grant’s affectations.
    The first exchange with a newly remarried Curtis has left Stephan completely infatuated. Weary of actors who not only require persuasion to wear dresses but reassurance that they will be permitted to project an air of competence in the film’s musical numbers, he is relieved that Curtis cracked the code immediately. ‘The thing I love about these guys,’ said Curtis of the drag queens after reading the script, ‘is that they have absolutely no talent.’
    Unintimidated by the prospect of making a movie in the Australian desert as he approaches his sixty-eighth birthday, all he asks is not to be expected to sleep in a tent. He also has a winning way of concluding a conversation. As if possessed by the combined spirits of all the screenwriters of his much ridiculed early costume pictures, he lapses effortlessly into archaism. ‘Excuse me Stephan,’ he exclaims before hanging up, ‘I must leave you now and return to my beautiful bride.’
    There is an enthusiasm and complicity about his manner which continues in a series of calls and faxes — signed ‘Hugs and Kisses, T.C.’ — as he visits various American cities on his honeymoon. Then, mysteriously, we are unable to reach him. One senses a failure of nerve, as one often does with actors. Hebecomes a diminishing prospect, if not yet a completely lost one. He has gone to Europe, and his assistant makes familiarly evasive noises about whether our picture can now be made to fit his schedule. He really wants to do it, she says. Of course.
    Stephan has finished a new draft of the script minutes before our departure from Sydney. I read it on the flight to Los Angeles. It is not particularly different from the old draft, but there are a number of additional jokes and characters inspired by our location survey.
    I make some notes while he sleeps, mostly identifying what I consider to be banal or redundant lines. The script as a whole reads well. Unusually witty and unremittingly foul-mouthed, it has retained the originality of what made it worth making in the first place. There is something fundamentally mechanical about many screenplays because most of them are written to satisfy some threadbare, hand-me-down notion of what the marketplace wants. Priscilla just jumped out of Stephan’s head, which is why neither the concept nor the characters have had a chance to be emasculated before they reached the page.
    In the departure lounge at Los Angeles airport, waiting to board the connecting flight to London, we discuss — far too loudly for some of our fellow passengers — whether or not one of the drag queens should threaten to rip off another’s head and shit in her neck. The line stays, for the time being.
    With the casting of Bernadette left in suspended animation, we concentrate on finding actors to play the other two leading roles. On arrival in London we decide