DAVID WEISSMAN & BILL WEBER of

THE COCKETTES

April 8, 2002 in San Francisco offices

"The Cockettes" is the first feature and first documentary for David Weissman (Co-director/Producer) and Bill Weber (Co-director/Editor), although they are both filmmaking veterans. Weissman has worked on a number of independent short films that have made their way through the film festival circuit, including "Complaints" and "Song from an Angel". Weber has spent most of his career as an editor, working on commercials, music videos, and other independent films. Some of his former clients include: Sting, Alanis Morissette, The Grateful Dead, ILM, Coca Cola, and AT&T.

How did you two meet?
(Weissman): "We met in the early nineties... We both individually had seen The Cockettes in our distant youth."

Both filmmakers were teenagers when The Cockettes were at their peak.

How did you decide to work together?
(Weissman): I had never thought about making a documentary in my life and it just popped into my head in a conversation. I was sitting with the guy who played Lady Bird Johnson in the Cockette's film. And the idea came up and I thought, 'well somebody needs to make a movie'. And I thought, 'maybe it should be me'. And I very quickly called Bill, knowing that it was something I was completely incapable of doing on my own. And Bill was immediately interested.

(Weber) I had had a love for The Cockettes without even knowing much about them. Just from seeing 'Tricia's Wedding' (a mockumentary about Patricia Nixon's wedding in 1971) when I was a teenager and magazine articles. And that had enough of an impact on me that when David suggested doing a documentary on them, I was like 'sure'.

Describe your experiences with independent financing of this film.
(Weissman) "It was a different situation for Bill than for me. Bill had a successful career as a commercial editor; and I had a very starving artist career, trying to make short films. So it was a step forward in terms of ambition, but it basically continued the starving artist thing, though. "

(Weber) "We're very lucky that this movie is doing as well as it is. And it's not a good way to get rich quick; and we are on the very, very lucky end of it."

Did you ever think of approaching some of the financially successful people influenced by the Cockettes, like David Bowie or maybe Elton John?
(Weissman) Well, fundraising from people in the industry is very difficult, for reasons that I don't know, but every filmmaker says that 'you'll never get money from anyone in the industry'. So no, we didn't really- well, people knew about it... but that kind of fundraising is really hard to do amongst celebrities. We thought about interviewing some of them. We thought about interviewing Bette Midler and, you know, people who came into the glitter rock and kind of campy performance mode, shortly after the Cockettes. But, we sort of decided to shy away from that and not have the film be trying to analyze.

(Weber) - "or contextualize"

(Weissman) "And just sort of let the question of what their influence was be left to the eye of the viewer; rather than have us offer an interpretative film, in that sense. Or to have experts or people reflecting. It's really good- the movie is told from an experiential point of view from people who were in it."

(Weber) And to me in some ways, it doesn't really matter if they did have a big influence. I mean they did on me. But to me, it's such a great story that captures so much of a time and place that I liked a lot. And that is a lot of the impetus for me to tell this story. And not such much being a huge influence on other people.

(Weissman) One Cockette remembered hearing Bowie on the radio, the first time Bowie came to San Francisco (1970). And the interviewer said to Bowie, 'well, what do you really want to do while you are in San Francisco?' And he said 'well, I want to go see The Cockettes'.... We really hope that the movie can reclaim San Francisco's place as being a really vital cultural center of the twentieth century. That's part of San Francisco's history because it was at that time (late 1960s and early 1970s). I mean, the world looked to San Francisco for the newest, the wildest, the freakiest, the most idealistic aspects of youth culture.

Tell me about some of the challenges you faced making the Cockettes, as first time feature filmmakers?
(Weber) Editing this long a form of a piece with so many good stories was certainly a bit of a challenge. They all had endless stories (those interviewed for the film). And they were all very colorful and evocative, and irreverent stories that a lot of which would be great to have in the film, but at some point you really have to start to thin it out and focus on things. So that certainly was the challenge on my end.

(Weissman) First of all, it was a very long haul, I mean, it has been four years since we started the film. Financially it has been very stressful both personally and in terms of raising the money to make a film like this. You can't get money from the NEA (National Endowment for the Arts), an official government agency, for a film called 'The Cockettes', about hippies, and drag queens and LSD. So I think fundraising was the most difficult and anxiety-provoking.

There were lots of difficult situations around trying to get access to material, that we knew existed that were not being made easily available to us. And I think just the on-going stress of- 'we're putting all this work in, are we going to finish it?' and then 'if we finish it, is it going to be good?' Now having said all that, it was a thrilling experience. Working with Bill was just extraordinary. I think very few creative collaborations work better than this one has. Our vision of the film was very unified from the beginning. Plus we both brought very different skills to the project, and respected each other enough that he would do his part and I would do my part, without either one of us worrying that the other was doing something that the other one wouldn't like- and that was fantastic! The relationship with The Cockettes was fantastic, with people who had photos. I mean, incredible, wonderful, generous people came forth in this process too. (For example the partner of now deceased Martin Worman, who had started a Ph.D. about The Cockettes.)...

But some people were not so forthcoming. Weissman explains that there were:
people who had no contact with any of this information or any of this stuff for thirty years and didn't know who we were or didn't know what we were doing with it. And thought, 'well, do I want to let my stuff out? Should I ask for money for it?' It's not stuff you could blame people for, but when you know that something's there and you know that it is very crucial to the film, and you don't know if the person is going to let you have it, it can be nerve-wracking. Some of those situations lasted for months.

(Bill Weber had to leave the interview at this point, so David Weissman responded to my further inquiries alone).

When did you start working on this project (pre-production and research)?
"Four years ago everything started, April of 98. "

When did you start shooting?
We did some shooting early on. Part of the benefit of having Martin's archives was that we had extremely detailed history; because Martin had hundreds of hours of archived interviews. So we knew their story inside and out without having to meet anyone. It was a huge boon to start from that position because normally we would have to find out what the Cockette's story was. Here we had it already in their words, without even meeting them; which also in making of the film lets you interview them fresh because you are not asking them the same question. And plus you know all the people's backgrounds... So there were some people who we interviewed early simply because they were in New York and we were doing a trip to New York and we wanted to make a promo trailer. So John Waters we interviewed very early. Silvia Miles we interviewed very early... They were interviewed within three to four months of us deciding to make a movie, some of those early interviews. And researched continued until we were done... We were in post the whole time. Bill has his own AVID. And again that enabled us to assemble different kind of promo clips, to start playing with things. So essentially we were in post, and production, and pre-production, and research, and fundraising for the entire time.

Weissman and Weber started with an eight minute promo trailer for their fundraising efforts. They were able to raise about half of their money from foundation and corporate grants and the other half from individuals. One San Francisco man who was moved by the Cockettes when he was 15, donated $100,000, a gift that Weissman says made this project possible and earned the donor a producer credit. The other individual grants ranged from $5 to $10,000 and came from a diverse group of donors. The Wells Fargo Foundation gave $50,000 due to a bold internal champion, Tim Hanlen, who recognized the value of the project. They also received a lot of equipment support from a couple of local Bay Area companies: Western Images and Varitel Video.

What were some of the joys and challenges you faced making a documentary feature?
I think the benefit is that there is a very small number of people involved. When you are doing a feature film, you have the studio, the producers, the art directors- you've got a million people with egos and opinions, and money and things that have to be engaged in every decision. And here basically, it was Bill and me. So we were able to labor pretty quietly doing our work without much interference. And I think that that was something that was really nice.

(Most of the creative freedom stems from the fact that they did not have a major funder like HBO). Weissman felt confident that "we know what we want to make and someone is going to want it when we are done."

Weissman asserted that fundraising was the biggest challenge. He explained that:
Raising money for a doc is just really, really hard. And then there is the creative challenge of how do you tell a story, you are not working from a script. You are not working from something that pre-exists as a story. You are taking disparate material and trying to make it into a story. And the lucky thing for us was that we sort of knew very early on what the story was that we wanted to tell. And I don't think that changed very much and with many documentaries that is not the case. I think this is very much thanks to the work that Martin Worman had done (a number of audio tapes) because Martin really gave us a history in a very compelling way. It was incomplete, but it was a very compelling contextualization of The Cockettes story that really served as a template for us.

What are some of your hopes and goals for "The Cockettes"?
We hope that it inspires people to think about how they can find more creativity and joy in their own lives. We hope that it gives people a richer appreciation of that period of time. I think that the Media has really reduced that era to some really wimpy clichés and our hope is that this movie captures some of the richness of the counter culture in San Francisco.

Weissman argued that he did not want this film to be solely a nostalgic work for those who had lived it. He hopes that viewing this film will relay the message that "this is what happened once, see what you can come up with" today.

What advice would you give to first time and young filmmakers?
It's hard to give advice because people's motivation is so individual. I have never been very organized in the way I plan my future. This project came and grabbed me because of the way I have lived my life. It's very hard to be an independent filmmaker. I think you need to have passion, particularly if you are a documentarian. You need to have passion and incredible perseverance and good friends, and a sense of humor.

What are your future plans?
(Weissman) "We work together really, really well. We are going to be busy with this film for a while, going through the release and everything. And I think that both of us have fairly open agendas at this point, that may or may not involve film."

Weissman joked that he also thinks about snorkeling, but what filmmaker doesn't during the recent aftermath of completing a film.

(Weber) "There is a story about a gay man who had quite a colorful past and started a hospice here in San Francisco that interests me as possibly telling that story sometime."

"The Cockettes" will start a platform release at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco on May 10th. This film transports viewers back in time to the early 1970s and let's you be the judge. Although I knew a lot about hippies and the Bay Area at that time since I grew up in the Bay Area, I was not old enough to remember first hand. Yet, I definitely recognized the impact The Cockettes have had on music and pop culture artists that followed them. I think this film will be a hit for those alive during that era and will serve as an entertaining form of education for those who were not.