Next year will mark the 25th anniversary of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, the 2001 cult queer musical and directorial debut of veteran stage actor John Cameron Mitchell. First debuting in Sundance before hitting theaters later that summer, Hedwig (based on the 1998 off-Broadway play Mitchell co-wrote and starred in) became a favorite for those who like their rock musicals anarchic and androgynous.
Mitchell will be celebrating Hedwig’s anniversary early – right here in Houston. This Sunday, December 28, the film will be shown at legendary Montrose club Numbers, and Mitchell will be there for a live director’s commentary and a post-screening live performance. The screening is one part of a day-long event for Mitchell, who will be teaching a sold-out master class at Cafe Brasil later that day.
Local nonprofit Arthouse Houston reached out to Mitchell about revisiting Hedwig in H-Town. “I got good buddies from there,” the El Paso-born military brat, 62, tells CultureMap during a Zoom call from his New Orleans home. “My friend Amber Martin, who's from the area and who I’ve sung and DJed with for many, many years, is coming – especially for this. She used to go to Numbers as a kid. My friend Jonathan Caouette, who directed the film Tarnation, lives there. He used to go to Visions in the '80s. So, it's kind of fun to come to an old, classic club and show the film, do some songs, hang around, and do a drunk live director's commentary – or maybe stoned, depending on my feelings that day.”
Guitarist Chapman Welch will perform with John Cameron Mitchell at Numbers this Sunday, December 28.Courtesy of John Cameron Mitchell
For Mitchell, revisiting Hedwig takes him back to a simpler time, when an actor/playwright could get a film about a gay, East German rocker whose signature song is about his botched sex reassignment surgery (now you know where “angry inch” comes from) financed and distributed by a major studio. Even though Hedwig flopped in theaters, it would eventually gain a cult following. Mitchell would follow it up with an even more provocative film, the 2005 ensemble comedy Shortbus, which featured actors engaging in graphic, unsimulated sex.
“That was the last golden age of independent film in the U.S.,” he says. “It was the '90s and 2000s, which pretty much ended at the financial collapse of 2006, which coincided with the rise of the streamers, which really put the final nail in the coffin for independent film as we know it in terms of it being a viable commercial thing. So, a lot of people made fewer films. They had to have more stars. They had to have more Oscar gloss. And the habit of going to see the best-reviewed film that week just because the critics were telling you went away, of course.”
MItchell still does the acting thing from time-to-time – in February, he’ll take over as Mary Todd Lincoln in Cole Escola’s Broadway drag hit Oh Mary!. But, these days, he;s been teaching master classes and film courses at various colleges (like his “Problemagic Cinema” course at the University of Michigan).
Along with teaching them film history, he encourages his students to take things – whether it’s a film they want to make or a movement they want to start – in their own hands. “I'm telling my students it's like this: now is the time to create a new kind of underground film, and other things,” he says. “The big question, of course, is how do you get them out there? How do you monetize them so there can be more? I can't quite answer that, but I also know that when corporations abandon a certain form, that's the time to step up and take it back.”
