Interview: Charles Busch and Carl Andress ("The Sixth Reel")
There have been times in my career where I’ve gotten pissed off about having an equipment failure in the middle of an interview, but there are two big reasons why I’m not as annoyed as I’d ordinarily be about losing a few minutes of conversation from my chat with Charles Busch and Carl Andress.
The missing portion of the conversation did not involve the topic that brought us together in the first place, which is to say that I can still successfully help them promote their latest movie, The Sixth Reel.
Given that the motion picture in question revolves around missing media, I can’t help but appreciate the irony.
I will admit, however, that the biggest reason that I didn’t run this interview sooner is because I was hoping that maybe I hadn’t lost that section of the conversation. But at this point, I think it’s better just to post it and go with the hope that someday what is seemingly lost will someday be found…and if that doesn’t happen, then maybe I can hop back on the phone with these guys again and they’ll indulge me by telling me their Psycho Beach Party, Die, Mommie, Die!, and Addams Family Values stories again.
But, hey, at least we talked about the new film, the fun of working with Polly Bergen, their feelings on Feud, and and their mutual love of Lypsinka.
That’s something, anyway.
Carl Andress: Where are you calling in from?
Chesapeake, Virginia. Right next door to Virginia Beach.
Carl: Oh, how nice! I'm actually in Atlanta, Georgia right now.
Well, I'm a native of my area, but I'm guessing that Atlanta is not exactly your usual stomping grounds, based on your credits.
Carl: [Laughs.] No, it's not. I'm actually here working with three comedians who are launching a tour, so we have a show tonight in Atlanta. It's their first show in a theatrical venue.
Who are the comedians?
Carl: They are three sort of internet sensations, three mom comics - Tiffany Jenkins, Meredith Masony, and Dena Blizzard - and they're going around and they're going to do this tour called "My Name is Not Mom." They're three moms with children of different ages, so Tiffany has the pre-schoolers, Meredith has the middle years, and Dena has the one in high school and two in college, launching them into the world. So it's basically a conversation in stand-up about parenting. They're really funny, and I've known Dena Blizzard for a long time, so it's great fun.
[At this point, Charles joins the call, and we get down to brass tacks.]
I was able to check out the trailer of The Sixth Reel, and it's extremely funny.
Carl: Thank you!
Charles Busch: It really turned out well! You just never know. But we're serving madcap. [Laughs.] So I thought it came out well!
Carl: We were thrilled with how the agency we worked with brought it together. We had discussed ideas with them, but they're people who do that for a living, and they really, really captured it. We were thrilled.
I'm a film buff and a pop culture geek anyway, so the premise alone... I was immediately onboard.
Carl: Well, good!
Charles: Not too often is the Macguffin a Lon Chaney movie! [Laughs.]
I'm sure that Gilbert Gottfried will love this film. He's an obsessive Lon Chaney fan.
Both simultaneously: Oh, really?
Carl: I didn't know that!
Charles: That's cool!
In fact, I don't know if you guys are familiar with his podcast or not, but I feel like the two of you would be a perfect pairing.
Charles: I'd love that! And I hear you're also an Oz aficionado.
I am, absolutely. I don't know if you're familiar with the AV Club, but I do interviews for a feature called Random Roles, and I feel like I've talked to at least a dozen different people who've been either cast members or guest stars on Oz.
[After the fact, I checked, and I was spot-on: I've done 10 Random Roles interviews and three Bullz-Eye interviews with people who've appeared on the show in some capacity.]
Charles: I was thrilled to get on that show. I was a fan, you know, after watching it the first season, and I don't really pursue an acting career outside of my own work, but I was chatting with my late manager, Jeff Melnick, and I wasn't really serious, but I said, "Oh, do you ever watch Oz?" And he said it was too violent, but I said, and I just was kind of daydreaming, but I said, "It'd be so cool to be on a show like that." And he called [casting director] Georgianne Walken, and the next thing I knew, they called me in to chat with Tom Fontana, who I knew a little bit, and he said, "We'd love to have you on the show. Who would you like to play?" And I said, "Oh! Well, I'm the least street person there ever could be, but maybe I could be someone who seems sort of innocent and fragile but is really lethal." And I thought that was going to be the end of it, but a few months later, they called and wanted to know if I was available on this date to shoot, and the character was exactly as I had described him. It was cool.
Apparently, Tom Fontana is good like that, because I recently talked to BD Wong for Random Roles, and he said that Tom reached out to him for Oz and said, "I have this part, I've written this specifically for you."
Carl: Isn't that nice?
Charles: Yeah, he's a wonderful man.
So on to current matters: what was the origin of The Sixth Reel? How did you come up with the premise?
Charles: Carl, you want to take it away?
Carl: Well, a number of years ago Charles and I wanted to write a movie, and we both loved caper films, and we both loved those early Ealing comedies, especially a movie called Make Mine Mink, a Terry-Thomas film, and we just always thought it would be so much fun to imagine Charles and Julie Halston in a caper and mad scheme.
Charles: If I could just interrupt for a second, I live in the West Village and have been here for so many, many years, and I just have always had a fantasy of being in a caper movie, running around in crazy disguises in my neighborhood. Anyway, Carl, I'm sorry I interrupted you. Continue!
Carl: Anyway, years ago we'd thought we'd do that sort of movie, but the screenplay and the story we were working on would require a big budget and a lot of locations, and Charles was going to be playing a female character, and it was just going to be quite ambitious, and from where we were at the time, it just didn't seem very feasible. So we made a very different movie, a coming-of-age movie called A Very Serious Person.
But then the opportunity presented itself again to create a new movie, and we sort of decided, "Well, maybe we should investigate that caper-film idea and see if we could do something that's just in the Village, that's a little bit smaller and not quite as ambitious as it was." And so we started developing a new idea from there.
Charles: Yeah, the original idea from 12 years ago was a bit of a travelogue, with scenes in Beirut and Hong Hong and... [Starts to laughing.] And on the banks of the Nairobi somehow! It didn't seem like we could do it for under a million. So, yeah, this was a much better idea. Although occasionally we'd get carried away again. "Oh, and then the truck pulls up, and they jump in the back of the truck.." And Carl would say, "We can't have a truck!"
Carl: Yeah, the idea was to make this on a lower budget, so we could actually make it and not be sort of scrounging around for money forever. So we were, like, "We've got to keep this simple! We have to shoot in people's apartments. We have to keep the locations really easy. Places we know we can go." But then COVID happened, so we weren't going to be able to shoot in anybody's apartment!
But our producing team decided that it was important to keep moving along, and once there were SAG guidelines to allow filming to proceed, we opted to build sets at the Umbra Sound Stages up in Newburgh, New York. So we built five sets. Two of them were four-wall sets. It was very ambitious.
But Charles and I loved it because it felt like we were making our movie on a Warner Bros. lot! [Laughs.] This, as we totally marveled at the fact that most of the people working on the movie had never really been able to shoot a full feature on soundstages. Usually you get one or two days on a soundstage.
Charles: Yeah, for indie films, usually it's all shot on locations, and then for tax-incentive purposes, you get two days on a soundstage. So that's where all of our experience lay.
Carl: Yeah, so everybody was, like, marveling and going, "Oh, gosh, we're doing, like, old-time moviemaking!" So it was great fun to be making a movie that evokes old-time movies and old Hollywood. It was a real meta experience!
It's funny that you mentioned Terry-Thomas a minute ago, because my first reference to him was It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, which kind of plays right into this concept.
Charles: Oh, yes, this movie is a little bit of that. But I love the idea of just a group of misfits who come together to pull off a heist or a caper.
Carl: And we wanted it to be in a milieu that we were both more or less familiar with, so we could both draw on experience and characters we know and really be able to have fun with it, to keep the plotting relatively simple but revel in the details.
Charles: And be accurate. As a lifelong amateur movie historian, it always kind of rankles me when I watch movies or TV shows and they just don't really get it right. Like, where it's so exaggerated. You know, if they have a fictional character who's an actress: "And she won six Academy Awards!" [Laughs.] So it was important that, even though the movie has a certain stylized quality where people go into disguises and people believe them, we really wanted the world of those collectors to be very accurate. We know those people. I've been to those strange parties with the strange old woman who, in this case, was stirring a cauldron of chili and sweating into it - it was rather repulsive! - while the topic of some rare Theda Bara film was being discussed...and very passionately.
Carl: Very passionately. It's always like that.
Charles: Yeah, because that's those people! [Laughs.] I mean, there are so many stories, even about people I know, that were run over by a car of a rival collector. So we really wanted to evoke that feeling of the obsessive collector.
Carl: Yeah, we were just sort of imagining that our movie collectors, our cinephiles, were as determined and passionate about their interests as the devil worshippers in Rosemary's Baby were. [Laughs.] You know, they're just so into it. It's, like, "What's going on in New York? What's happening behind those closed doors? What's hidden?" That intrigued us. So we wanted to put it in this milieu.
Now, if it was me, it would've taken me longer to narrow down what the lost film was going to be than to actually make the movie. How did you land on the one you used?
Charles: I think we wanted something that was really believable, and we both had known of the legend behind London After Midnight, and rather than inventing a movie with an invented star, like Sean Craney or whatever... [Laughs.] I thought it'd be fun to really be specific! Now, I love in Billy Wilder movies that he has it being a very recognizable world, like where James Cagney in 1, 2, 3 works for Coca-Cola, or in Sunset Boulevard, using Buster Keaton as one of the "Waxworks," and just really creating that very real, specific world.
Carl: There's a wonderful novel that Charles turned me onto when we first met called Running Time, by Gavin Lambert, where he's basically telling the history of Hollywood through fictional characters' eyes, but real-life characters and actual figures populate the story as well, so you're really getting a fun history version through the eyes of these characters. I always loved that juxtaposition, like in Billy Wilder movies, too, so we thought, "Oh, yeah, let's do a Running Time on it and have these fictional people, but what they're actually looking for is something that these people would actually get really excited about, as opposed to something that the audience has to take at face value, like, "Oh, that's the thing."
That's funny: one of the first books I remember reading as a teenager that was clearly geared more toward adult readers was Murder on the Yellow Brick Road, by Stuart Kaminsky, which... I don't know if you're familiar with that one or not.
Charles: No, I don't think I know that one.
The premise is that there was a murder on the set of The Wizard of Oz. Someone had murdered a Munchkin.
Charles: Oh, how cool! Yeah, I love books like that, but it often just drives me crazy if the author exaggerates so much and just veers from the reality of what we really know about the stars or the movies. It's so rare when you get the novel where the person really does know the world that he's set it in. So when you get that, it's so cool.
I was pleased to see Tim Daly in the trailer. That's quite the British accent he's got going.
Charles: That was his idea! He's a very intelligent guy, and the role, I think, was a little underwritten. It was kind of the love interest, basically.
Carl: Yeah, as far as we went with the love interest was just sort of how he figured in the plot, and there was a large coloring book that could be taken from that part. But then Tim talked to us and had wonderful ideas. Sometimes when actors have ideas, you get a little nervous, but his ideas were all good! So we really enjoyed collaborating with him.
Charles: And as I say, he's very smart, so he doesn't do it on the set. Before we started shooting, he had different ideas for various scenes, and they all were really good...thank God! [Laughs.]
Carl: Exactly! So it allowed us to give the character a little bit more mystery and a little bit more color, a little bit more substance. So it was great fun, and I think he really got a kick out of the fact that we were so collaborative and that we were so into what he had to say.
Charles: Yeah, it was a great idea that the character is British, but people are always wondering whether it's a put-on or not.
I can't decide which I'm happier about: that Andre de Shields is in the film, or that his character's name is Gavin Plimsoll.
Carl: I'm just crazy about him. I was so excited when he agreed to be in the movie, and he's just such a delight.
Charles: Yeah, you know, he and Patrick Page, who plays Mr. Beltrane, they're both in the Broadway show Hadestown, so if it wasn't for the pandemic, they wouldn't have been available. Actually, I'd imagine that, had things been in normal times, a large part of our cast would've been otherwise engaged!
Carl: Oh, yeah. But people weren't busy yet. Now people are busier. There's a lot more being shot. But we were lucky.
Charles: Yeah, it seems to me that there was basically one other thing being shot last October, and that was this big HBO series, The Gilded Age. And it was interesting, too, because we were inquiring about certain actors, and they were all in their quarantine bubble and couldn't escape.
Carl: Yeah, they were under contract, so they had to stay in their quarantine bubble. Interesting times. We were all quarantined, staying in the same hotel up in Fishkill, New York, but we never really got to hang out with each other. Everybody was in their cells!
So many of these actors know each other, and we did sort of a Zoom readthrough with the whole cast one day while Charles and I and the team were in pre-production upstate, so the questions were, like, "Well, when we're in the hotel, can we hang out in each other's rooms?" And at that time, the answer was, "No! You have to really stay apart, and you can't eat in the lobby for the breakfast..." All those things that you would normally think would be a great time to hang out and catch up! Unfortunately, we had to really be cautious.
Charles: Yeah, there were just two nights, late at night, where we all sat outside around this strange barbeque pit or whatever it was.
Carl: [Laughs.] I think it was a firepit. But we had to sit six feet apart, and our COVID watchman even oversaw that, so we wouldn't sit too close to each other even outside!
Charles: Yeah, it was crazy. Crazy times. But as I say, it was last October, so it was at the height of the hysteria.
I talked to Bruce McGill when he was up in Toronto doing an Amazon series, and he said it was just ridiculous how little time he actually spent filming and how much he spent just being under quarantine.
Carl: Yeah, our schedule was very aggressive, because we were shooting this feature in 15 days, and we were doing shortened days. We were doing only 10 hours in order to stay within guidelines for the unions. So there was no time to waste. We were scheduled down to every second, and there was no time for reshoots if we missed anything. But we were constantly getting tested and masked and shielded and all of that, so...it was intense!
I wanted to ask you about some other things in your back catalog, and you mentioned this one offhanded a few minutes ago. How was the experience of working on A Very Serious Person? I know you got to work with Polly Bergen.
Carl: Oh, that was a great joy. She was so wonderful on that movie. We just loved her. She was great fun.
Charles: Oh, yeah. The range of people that she knew... I mean, she just knew everyone. Now, back then, we could have very nice lunches each day, and each day she would regale us with anecdotes on a different subject. One day it would be famous male singers she had known, and the next day it would be female singers, and then it would be gangsters she had know. She knew Bugsy Siegel! She'd really seen everything and knew everyone and was a great storyteller. Oh, that was just great.
Carl: And we were filming on location in this house in Rockaway, and the neighbors - all the summer residents - got very upset that there were these film trucks in their neighborhood, blocking their neighborhood. And they came over, these middle-aged people, very upset, wanting to complain and wanting to see the permits, and we were a little scared of them! So our producer brought Polly out...and, of course, they're all huge Polly Bergen fans! [Laughs.] So she talked them down.
Who would you say is your favorite underrated drag performer?
Charles: You know, I'll tell you, a very good friend of mine is John Epperson, who goes by the character Lypsinka, and John really invented, I'd say, the contemporary performance art concept of lip-synching. And, you know, I think the young performers, the ones who really experienced it in the past - Sasha Velour, for instance - credit John as a big inspiration, and you can certainly see it. So, yeah, I think John is fascinating.
Carl: I echo that sentiment. I really echo that sentiment, because I think he's wonderful.
Charles: He's sort of a genius, really.
Carl: Yeah, Charles and I have spoken about that often when we've just gone to his shows and been, like, "The things that he thinks of, the minutiae, the detail... It's extraordinary."
I know that you did a commentary with him for the Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? DVD.
Carl: Oh, that was fun.
Charles: Yes! He's so smart. He came up with thoughts that day that hadn't even occurred to me! In particular, I remember... Well, you know, people have always thought, "Oh, Baby Jane is certainly influenced by Sunset Boulevard," but he brought up that, in a way, the movie that was actually more influential for Baby Jane was Psycho, which had only come out a year before, and the whole kind of television look of the movie, and the bright, sunny contemporary world and then the dark house where these people are living, and even how Norman Bates and Jane Hudson are terrifying and yet oddly pathetic and even sympathetic in a way. I thought that was really smart. That hadn't occurred to me. Warner Brothers had actually approached us with the idea that we would start with Baby Jane and then do a whole bunch of Crawford / Davis movies, and we thought we did a great job, but months go by...
Carl: They didn't pick up your option! [Laughs.]
Charles: I think it was two years later that John was saying, "I wonder when we're going to hear from Warner Brothers!" I said, "Honey, they want a different pair of whores." [Laughs.] He was Norma Desmond waiting for that call! "I gotta tell ya, I don't think they're gonna call. I really don't!"
Just out of curiosity, what did you guys think of Feud?
Charles: I thought it ranged from absolutely brilliant to kinda tacky. But I think, in a way, that's probably why a lot of people like it, because of that range. But there were sequences... I know people mention the last episode, the very end, but I thought the whole section on the making of Trog was really written and acted well.
Carl: It was harrowing!
Charles: And I'd never seen it before expressed the kind of desperation that... Well, forget the "legendary," just that actresses and actors have where you want to work and you're offered something that's really horrible, and you try to pretend, "Well, maybe, you know, if I'm there, I could get them to rewrite it or something..." [Laughs.] You try to convince yourself that maybe it's not so terrible. That's really humiliating. I thought that part was really good. But then there are other places where... Well, I think the problem for me was just that I knew too much about the subject.
I think if I'd only had vague interest in and knowledge of the lives of Davis and Crawford, I would've loved every second. But I knew too much, therefore I could be all nitpicky and say, "Oh, well, they never said that, she never would've done that," and stuff like that. So in a way, it's almost not fair. I think it's unfair when you know too much about a subject. I felt the same way about the Judy Garland movie with Renee Zellweger. If I only had a vague notion of Judy Garland's life, I would've just loved the whole movie. But I know I'm kind of obsessed with Judy Garland, so I know too much about it.
Carl: That's very much what happens to me as well. If I know too much, I get way too judgmental, I take myself out of it, and I have a harder time enjoying it because I'm checking off boxes. I don't want somebody doing that to me, so I try to keep those opinions to myself.
Charles: Yeah, you just try to keep your mouth shut.
Carl: I don't want to be all sour grapes. I don't want to seem bitter!
Charles: Yeah, it's, like, "Is this really true? Is it really?" I remember in the '70s when all of those older actresses were still alive, but things weren't really going very well for them, and they'd be interviewed by David Frost or Dick Cavett, and so often they would just start railing about nudity and dirty words in film and all that. I used to think, "Yeah, if somebody actually offered you a fabulous part..."
Carl: "...you'd say the dirty words in a second!" [Laughs.]
The best part about doing these Random Roles interviews for the A.V. Club is when you talk to the character actors who make it quite clear that they do not give a flying fuck at this point, and they're happy to speak out about anybody or anything that pissed them off...and God bless them for it!
[Everyone descends into laughter.]
Charles: Well, when you get older... Because, you know, I'm a veteran performer, so I get asked questions like, "What do you think about drag today? Do you think it's been watered down?" or this or that. And they're kind of hoping for me to come off as some old curmudgeonly bitter person. And I remember seeing Audrey Hepburn when she'd be asked those sorts of questions about the movies, and she never fell for it. She'd always say, "Oh, I think the movies are better than they ever were! And the acting today is better than we ever did!" and all this stuff. [Laughs.] But she came off as so young and cool, as opposed to Joan Crawford or Rosalind Russell, who'd be just sounding off about "these movies today." So I thought, "Well, I'm never going to be that person!" So I just always say, "It's all so wonderful today!"
Honestly, that's kind of why I asked you for an underrated drag performer. I'd rather get someone telling me something I might not know as opposed to trying to get them to be controversial for controversy's sake.
Carl: Yeah, or just trying to get them to be super-critical.
Charles: Well, I really do like being kind of a positive person. It bugs me sometimes on social media, like Facebook or some of these film sites, where...I guess they get a lot of comments by asking, "Who's the most underrated actor?" or "What movie do other people love that you hate?" Those things... I don't know. I was actually on time on somebody's list of most overrated people in the theater! [Laughs.] However, the other people on the list of overrated people in the theater were Vanessa Redgrave and Christopher Plummer.
Carl: Well, that's good company!
Charles: Yeah, I like being part of that group!