The summer before my senior year of high school, I went to New York and made a nonunion film called Camp. It was a unique film in many ways. People have either never heard of it or they want to tell me that it changed their life, no matter how inappropriate the circumstances. I am very glad this movie helped you come out to your parents, and as I was saying, my insurance only covers the generic form of RectaGel.
Camp was written and directed by Todd Graff, based on his real experiences at Stagedoor Manor, the (in)famous children’s theater camp in upstate New York. Stagedoor is a haven for every young misfit out there who’d just die if they were forced to be in one more school-sanctioned production of Peter Pan. The camp is known for putting on arguably inappropriate shows with its young campers. Imagine The Glass Menagerie or Once on This Island—a musical about tensions between the light-and dark-skinned Haitians—with an all-white preteen cast. It’s not universally relatable material for a movie.
Because the movie was replete with song and dance, a monthlong rehearsal period was scheduled in Manhattan. Most of the cast members were local, but some of us had nowhere to stay for the duration of rehearsals, so indie production company Killer Films found competitively priced living spaces to accommodate their out-of-town actors. For example, I lived in the walk-in pantry of a small uptown apartment shared by three film students. Don’t worry, the film students were really nice and the pantry was mostly empty.
I had no complaints. It was summer, I was sixteen, I got to take the subway to work in the morning and learn music and choreography all day. I was going to internet cafés to check my email, the film students were explaining things like “establishing shots”I and “coverage”II to me, and I was on my own. Sure, I wasn’t really a New York resident, and I wasn’t getting paid, but I felt like such a grown-up. Wait ’til the kids at choir camp hear what I did this summer.
Toward the end of the rehearsal period, our choreographer, Broadway legend Jerry Mitchell, stopped us for a pep talk. We were exhausted and he was about to tell us to get our shit together. He said that whether we liked it or not, this movie was going to be around forever and that what we put on film in the coming months would, unlike theater, exist long after we were dead. It was super dark and probably should have scared me off making movies forever.
What can I say? I was living in a pantry, I was getting yelled at in dance rehearsal—if I wasn’t living the dream, I don’t know who was.
Weirdly, my excitement did not stem from the fact that I was about to be in my first film. I guess, if I’m honest, it didn’t feel like we were making a real movie. Real movies had famous actors in them, like Tom Hanks or the German lady from Austin Powers (my metric was all over the place). And films about teenagers had gorgeous, polished, twenty-five-year-old actors, and the plots revolved around summer crushes—not going to prom in drag and getting your ass kicked.
I don’t mean to suggest that I didn’t believe in what we were doing, I just couldn’t imagine a world where anyone outside the cast was ever going to see it. I knew that tiny films like Clerks or The Blair Witch Project could be huge, but I wasn’t sure that musical numbers from Burt Bacharach’s Promises, Promises or jokes about Stephen Sondheim were going to play wide. I also knew that Killer Films had made dark, important films like Kids and Boys Don’t Cry, but again, Promises, Promises and Stephen Sondheim.
My big problem was Fritzi, a weird girl with greasy hair and terrible clothes who happened to be the character I was playing. Fritzi was the camp loser and she was obsessed with (and probably in love with) Jill, the hot, popular girl at camp.
Today, I would be thrilled to play such a twisted little character. At the time, I just wanted to wear makeup and have my hair done, like the other girls in the cast. I wanted to downplay the ambiguously sexual nature of Fritzi’s (very much unrequited) interest in Jill. I wanted to be likable onscreen. I still had to go back to high school once this was over, and I so badly wanted to be the hot girl in a movie, not the girl who washes the hot girl’s underwear by hand.
A few years ago, Diane Lane gave an interview where she admitted that she was equally conflicted about one of her first film roles. She played the talentless front woman of a rock band in (the wonderful) Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains, and she hated that the band was supposed to be terrible. She wanted to be an onscreen rock star. I hear that, sister. Sixteen-year-old insecurity is a real impediment to truth in art.