It’s been a long while since I’ve blogged, and for good reason I guess: I’ve been working my tail off finishing the film, BIG JOY: The Adventures of James Broughton.
And we’re almost there – what a triumph and a relief. It will be released next year, just in time for Broughton’s Centennial! At the same time, how sad. You work on a film for four years, molding and shaping it, creating and then “killing your children” as you edit out scenes. And once it’s “in the can” (one of many gloriously outdated expressions in filmmaking), you can’t change anything.
We ritually gave birth to the film last month, all 82 minutes of it, at the annual Summer Gathering of Radical Faeries at Breitenbush Hot Springs in Detroit, Oregon. It was apt and poetic that we staged a sneak preview of our work-in-progress there. For it was there that I met James Broughton in 1989, at a winter gathering of Radical Faeries; we were assigned to the same cabin.
I had seen a few of his films 10 years earlier when I stumbled into them at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. There, I was transfixed by his visions of a world where things are perfect after the fuddy-duddies get overturned, nudity is natural, humor hugged and contradictions embraced.
Here’s how we described it in some 24 meetings we had during Independent Film Week September 16-20 in New York: “Big Joy is a documentary about living your passions and becoming the person of your dreams, disguised as an inspiring biopic about the wild and crazy California filmmaker and poet James Broughton.”