When I saw the trailer for Big Joy; The James Broughton Story and was intrigued with the persona of the man, but what I learned was Broughton was a Queer Pioneer in the same league as Harry Hay (They had an affair back in the 30's) and was part of the Radical poet group, Pre-Beatnik (The Allen Ginsberg era) and an Avant Garde Filmmaker, Pre-Warhol.
During this year's SIFF (Seattle International Film Festival), I had a chance to chat with the Filmmaker of the fascinating Doc.
MK: I’m here talking to Eric Slade and Stephen Sila and they are the Directors of Big Joy: the James Broughton Story. And I’d like to first find out what first got you involved in the project.
Stephen: Well, I met James at a radical Faerie gathering in 1989 at Brighton Bush Hot Springs in Oregon. We’d rented the same cabin, James and his partner Joel. And we became friends and he became a mentor of mine, and we were great playmates and soul mates in a way, and during the last ten years as this 85 and a half year life. So I didn’t realize how important he was in American literature and film until I started working on this film. Originally I’m a print journalist by trade, so I thought I would write a book, but I realized it really had to be a film because James made 23 wildly different and beautiful experimental films and wrote 23 books of poetry. So the first person I called was Eric Slade because I had seen his film, Hopeful on the Wind, which is the story of Harry Hay who founded the Mattachine Society. And Eric said, I asked him if he would help me with this film because I realized I needed to work with people who knew what they were doing, since I had never made a film, I long film. I had done short PSAs and stuff. And Eric said, yeah, as long as you raise the money.
Eric: And Stephen and I both come from the radical era background, so we have known each other for many years. And I had met James at Radical Faerie gathering I think it was Wolf Creek in Oregon, the great sanctuary. So I met him, we weren’t close or anything like that, but I had seen the Bed, which had become his most popular film, I don’t know it was probably the late ‘80s when I saw it, and I kind of, it really stuck with me. And the imagery is so striking. I kept wanting him to play with those same images with my own film, so it’s great to be able to work on a film all about Jim.
MK: One thing is that young people are not aware of him. And based on my research I was surprised that he was a poet before Allen Ginsberg, and became big as well as even a filmmaker before Andy Warhol got into films as well. So it sounds like he was a true pioneer on that.
Eric: Oh, yeah, I mean, he created the first, what they say is the first experimental film in the Bay Area of San Francisco back in 1946 called the Potted Psalm. So he really built the foundation and then he was one of the primary people in the San Francisco Renaissance which was the movement that kind of gave birth to the Beats later on. It’s kind of amazing that when we started working on it that nobody has ever done a film on the San Francisco Renaissance because it’s an incredibly rich, poetic, it’s not just poetry, there’s film, architecture and dance, and all these disciplines were kind of merging together and they were like cross pollinating with each other. It really deserves its own film for sure.
MK: And of course I had always knew about Harry Haig knowing that he, that James had something to do with the beginning of Radical Fairies.
Stephen: Well, when Harry called the first Radical Fairy gathering he called James right away and told him we want you there. And James couldn’t attend, but the next gathering after that, the second gathering, James was there.
Eric: He was the correspondent about the Fairy Gathering for that first one, and that actually had an affair in 1933 in Stamford.
Stephen: Yeah, it’s really interesting I mean Harry worked on both of those because I think they’re both about radical social change. They both wanted to see the world become a much better place in such different ways. Harry was hard life and political, and James was a wild, creative artist. And they worked great, for sure, right? I mean about how, what is the right way to transform society? And they also converged the two points.
MK: Yeah, and I was just in San Francisco last month where I got a little bit of a lesson, I went on a tour about the North Beach area to get a little bit of an understanding because they had heard of the beatnik area and things like that.
Eric: Mm-hmm. And that Beach Blanket Babylon is now playing was a theatre where James Broughton and Michael McClure and other …Yeah, I mean, that was one of the places where, one of the things James helped give birth do is public poetry reading. Poetry, where people would come together for a whole day, or a whole evening, or a whole week.
Stephen: We all improv’d the poetry slams. Yeah, he was part of the group that started it.
Eric: Yeah this was a great thing to have events where poets got together and read out loud. Poetry has been this kind of academic affair on the page, and you’re like, you tinkered with every word until it was this perfect little thing, and they were like, we want it, it should be read out loud, it should be rolled in front of people and have an audience interaction. So that which we kind of associated with the beats, but these guys, the San Francisco Renaissance guys, including James, were the ones who pioneered them.
Stephen: And we interviewed Lawrence Fragetti, who said I was just an interloper to Broughton and his friends were doing this long before I moved here.
MK: And I’m very surprised that he was also involved in the beginnings of the Sisters of the Perpetual Indulgence, .Which I do believe San Francisco was one of the very first.
Stephen: Absolutely, it was the first in 1979. He was part of their, they would do performances together, where he would read his poetry and the sisters would do dance and whatever. Oh, he was Sister Sermenta, (Laugh) And we’ve been really lucky that the sisters in every city we’ve been in, I guess except Hong Kong, right?
Eric: Hong Kong and Florida.
Stephen: And Florida, have come out in mass to each of our openings, and people handing out poetry to the people coming to see their films, so the sisters have been a huge support for us.
Eric: They’ve done a blessing before most of the screenings. And the sisters, I didn’t know this, the sisters, they’re getting bigger and bigger now.
MK: They’re everywhere.
Eric: There are like 300 chapters and over 1000 sisters now around the world.
Stephen: And the rate of growth is huge.
MK: The same thing about Radical Fairies too.
Eric: There does seem to be.
Stephen: I used to say yesterday, I thought Radical Fairies was kind of dying down, but now it’s like huge, there are so many gatherings this summer in sanctuaries aross the country.
MK: The same people who are interested in the Radical Fairies are also the same people who do Burning Man.
Stephen: Is that right? I don’t know that. You would know more than I do, but.
Eric: I think that’s true.
Stephen: There’s certainly a Radical Fairies presence in Burning Man. I’m going for my first time this year. Partly because of my work on this film.
Eric: That’s one of James’ slogans; follow your own weird, so we’ve been teaching people the American Sign Language word for weird which is the letter W going like this. And people respond to that quite well.
Stephen: And just to be clear when he said weird he didn’t mean do the weirdest thing you can think of, he meant find what’s true and what’s core to you and follow that. So follow that, kind of like follow your bliss, or find what’s most important to you in the core of your life.
Eric: It comes from the Celtic word, it means fate or destiny. So to me follow your own weird means be as true as you can to your reason for being, and as far as on your creative edge as you can be.
Stephen: But I think the weird part is good because it allows you to do the things that might look ridiculous, or might not be the thing that society most applauds you for.
MK: Well, going back to the beginnings of James, he had a very difficult relationship with his mother. Now how do you think that shaped his life?
Stephen: (Laugh) Well, he spent a lot of his creative energy working out his relationships with his mother, in film, in poetry and, you know, and in union therapy. So it really played a huge role in his life.
MK: Do you think she ever knew that?
Stephen: Oh, I’m sure she did. You could see their correspondence at his archive in Kent State. And yeah, it was definitely a challenging relationship.
Eric: I mean the thing I love about James though is that everyone struggles with their parents in some way, I mean, there are very people who have had a perfect childhood. But James took it and brought it into his art. So he took kind of a lot of these universal experiences and then made art out of them in a way that made it accessible or made it something that you can examine and take away. And he was so, he didn’t shy away from the difficult, or the deep, or the challenging, and that’s one of the things I love about him. He talked about, his work was about his death, and sex and the things that a lot of people just don’t want to talk about.
MK: And what about his relationship with his wife, Pauline?
Eric: Well, that got, as he says in his journal, his therapist told him that his relationship with Pauline was a reflection of his relationship with his mother. And so it was very problematic. (Laughter) She was a very strong willed woman and, and I think their attraction to each other was partly because they were both creative, opinionated, strong, interesting, folks during that Renaissance period. She went on to write, after they split up, she moved to LA and wrote a play, do you remember the name of the play?
Stephen: But the character in it is absolutely James Broughton, and he is not portrayed very sympathetically.
MK: That was for the tell all book.
Stephen: Yes, and I think they actually performed it on KPFK radio, KPFK in LA, but they performed that play. It’s pretty funny.
Eric: There’s a recording of it, yeah. It’s one of the many things we had to cut out of the film.
But they remained friends throughout the rest of his life and it was cordial.
MK: Toward the end of his life, after all those great years in San Francisco, he chose to come to Washington State to spend the last ten years of his life.
Eric: Yeah, and that was mainly because they couldn’t afford to live in San Francisco anymore. It was getting, you know, they were never very wealthy. You know, the life of a struggling poet.
MK: The life of the bohemian.
Eric: Yeah, exactly. But they had a friend, Gayland, who had moved to Port Townsend, who had lived here, and they visited him and said, you know, this might be a good place. And so they found a house there and moved in in ’89 and that is when I got to know them. We actually shot the interview with Joel in that house. We got permission from the current owners.
Stephen: And one thing you will see later in the film is his friend, Ryan, you know, Ryan said he wasn’t a bad father, just that he wasn’t here very often. And you get a sense that he wasn’t a good parent, but one thing that’s interesting to know is that Ryan later moved to Fort Hampton because his father was there. So even though it seems like there is this strain in the relationship there is also a lot of love there too. That Ryan really cared about his father and moved to Port Townsend and He still lives inPort Townsend.
MK: What’s next for you? For the film, do you have a distributor?
Stephen: Not yet. We’re working on that. We have some bites. And we really want a distributor who is passionate about the film because were part of the IFP, the Independent Filmmaker Project labs last year, the documentary labs, and we learned there that if you settle your rights to your film it’s like giving away your baby. And the distributor has all the rights, or whatever rights you give them, for X number of years. And they’ll usually put energy into it the first year. And if it doesn’t become a blockbuster they just forget about it. They still have the rights. So we’re really being careful about, like we’ll probably do educational distribution on our own. We’ll probably find the ethical distributor who will do limited theatrical. We’ll probably do some special event theatrical this year because this is the 100th birthday of James Broughton. He would be 100 in November. So we’ve been encouraging film festivals and others to do Broughton perspectives. The Hong Kong International Film Festival did two programs on Broughton films, and they’re showing our film.
: Right. We want to make sure that this film gets out there in a big way and not just showing the film, but also doing events with poetry and screenings of other films about James. Turn it into creative events that are happening around the country.
MK: Absolutely. And also I would think that young people, especially young queer people, need to see the film to know that this guy loves the Warhol, before Warhol, before Ginsberg, it was him.
Eric: Well said. I’m gonna quote you. (Laughter)
MK: So, yeah. So good. So what’s the next project?
Stephen: You know, I don’t know. We’re getting the film out in the world and that’s certainly a big job right now. I like bringing the queer industry to life, you know, bringing that presence.
MK: One more question. What do you think his message would be to the queer youth today?
Eric: We’d probably still be following our weird. Don’t live the life that anybody else can life. Live the life that only you can live, and express yourself in the deepest way you can.
Stephen: Yeah, I think … it used to be just being queer was radical, and now it’s kind of, it’s becoming more and more acceptable. So you see sort of a mainstreaming of your culture, and it’s easier to live a very easy mainstream life and be queer. And I think James would say don’t follow that path that’s been laid out. Make your own path. And risk doing things that people aren’t going to like. See wild films and let your true spirit flow.
UPDATE: Big Joy won the KCTS REEL NW awards and will be playing on PBS in the Future. They also expected to be at a Gay Film Fest near you!
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