May Promenade in Dayton historic area
Cincy Street Rods car show
Fleurs Et Vin wine event
New url for Peach Buzz
Bookmark this new url for Peach Buzz.. We have moved to Wordpress!
Access Atlanta > Blog > Archives > 2007 > October > 17 > Entry
RuPaul returns to ATL with film remake
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The fabulous crossdresser RuPaul is coming back to Atlanta to show off the remake of a film he did for virtually no budget 20 years ago, a spoof called “Starrbooty.” The new version is being screened Thursday night at 7:30 p.m. at the Landmark Midtown Art Cinema for the “Out on Film 2007” festival. This time, he self-financed a jazzier version. The plot: Starrbooty (played by RuPaul) is an undercover cop who plays a prostitute in order to rescue a kidnapped niece. On the way, he finds out secrets about his family along the way.
RuPaul will be at the screening to take Q&A and sell copies of the film. “I’ll be dressed as Starrbooty,” he promised Buzz recently in a phone interview from his home in Manhattan.
Check out the trailer here..
The first version, RuPaul said in a recent interview, was shot in Atlanta when he was still living here in the mid-1980s. “The original was an homage to John Waters and everything that was subversive in Atlanta at the time,” he said. “Midtown was really a lot of wild childs from all over the Southeast.”
Back then, it was an art project in which he borrowed his brother-in-law’s video camera and had his friends pitch in as actors. (The original is not readily available on videotape.)
So why remake “Starrbooty” two decades later? “I thought it was time in a world that is so sterile and blue liquid correct. It had never left my mind. There were clips of the original on YouTube. It was very raw, very homemade. The difference now is I’ve made a bunch fo Hollywood films and I have more experience. We actually had a script this time. We had craft services and a crew. We had actual dressing rooms. The early one, it was all in my head. We just shot it like that.”
He wouldn’t reveal the budget of the remake but said “it looks like a million bucks on screen. It’s campy. It’s sensual. It’s sexy. It’s also completely irreverent and wrong.”
RuPaul, who has lived mostly in New York City (with a stint in L.A.) since he left Atlanta in November 1987, said he filmed “Starrbooty” in 2005 has been showing it at film festivals this year.
He said he left Atlanta because “it’s important not to stay in the same place.”
Whenever he visits about once a year, he said, “it’s like seeing a friend you used to grow up with and was best of friends. But that friend has had extensive head-to-toe plastic surgery. You know it’s your friend and you still laugh at the same things. But you can barely recognize him.”
Although RuPaul is now in his 40s, he said “I still feel 25. I keep my body fit. And I keep an influx of new ideas. Hopefully, that will keep me in a place to continue being excited about living.”
Since his “Supermodel” success in the early 1990s, he said he’s “chosen to do things that excite me rather than sell out for money.” That means mostly doing his nightclub act before friendly audiences rather than give in to the temptation of doing VH1-type celebreality shows. “I don’t want to be in a position where people laugh at me and not get on board with me,” he said. “It’s part of our cultural obsession with putting other people down to make themselves feel good.”
If you have a tip, call 404-526-2749. Or fax 404-526-5509. Or e-mail: buzz@ajc.com.
Permalink | |
