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SF BAY GUARDIAN
BAY TIMES
EAST BAY EXPRESS
SF CHRONICLE
SF 360
SF BAY GUARDIAN
Lulu Gets a Facelift (Marc Huestis, USA, 2006)
Oh Lulu, you aren't the city treasurer, but you are a city treasure,
whether writhing around in bed in your zebra Roberto Cavalli briefs
explaining why it's better to be a bottom or joking about a look
you didn't ask for (I'm not repeating it here) after surgery. In
between the relevant Sunset Boulevard and What Ever Happened to
Baby Jane? quotes and a brilliant use of Billie Holiday's "I'm
a Fool to Want You". Huestis's doc leaves room for at least
one of Lulu's friends to criticize her decision. It also steers
clear of the bloody surgery footage and "cosmetic surgery
is only for delusional people" cliches of shows such as MTV's
I Want a Famous Face. By the end, when a baby picture socks viewers
in the gut and a "40- to 60-year-old" Lulu has outed
herself as an unashamedly youthful 54, this movie has gone more
than skin deep into everyday issues that only seem shallow on the
surface. Fri/16, 6 p.m., Victoria. (Huston)
BAY TIMES
LULU GETS A FACELIFT- This rollicking world
premiere is a hot ticket. Who would have thought that a film about
an aging drag queen's crow feet would inspire. But Marc Huestis,
Frameline's co-founder, has made a film about his friend Lulu's
adventure in the world of nip tuck that is way more than a hoot.
Of course, it helps when your star loves the camera almost more
thaan yourself. Lulu's wit, humor and sly honesty make the film
sing. The drag icon who has blessed San Francisco's stages since
the seventies, muses on getting older and why she wants tto go
under the knife. Like Norma Desmond in SUNSET BOULEVARD it's high
time for Lulu's "return." However not all her friends
are willing to get on-board including Esmerelda who honestly and
forthrightly expresses her doubts in a well crafted letter. But
Lulu goes through the lift. As a testament to true friendship,
when Lulu is first out of surgery, Esmerelda is right there holding
her hand and taking care of the wounded warrior of beauty. But
recovery is just round the corner and filmmaker Huestis chases
Lulu in her bandages and veils throughout the Castro and the girl
is a sight to behold. The mayhem climaxes two years later in a
truly transformational performance at Trannyshack- Erica Marcus-
BAY TIMES
EAST BAY EXPRESS
Of the festival's documentaries, Lulu Gets a Facelift has the
most entertainment value. Directed by San Francisco's Marc Huestis
(impresario and founder of the LGBT Festival) and starring talkative
drag performer Lulu, the doc shows what happens when the veteran
artiste decides he's getting a little too veteran, and opts for
plastic surgery - sort of a how-to for aging cross-dressers, culminating
in a "Plastic Surgery Disasters" night at the Trannyshack
club. It's shown with 4 Beauties, a hectic live-action-cartoon
short with drag stars (including Lulu) in overdrive, backed with
generic '60s music. Kelly Vance - East Bay Express
SF CHRONICLE
by LEAH GARCHIK
Tuesday, June 20, 2006
It's Pride Week, and the whole darn city
is bustin' its buttons. Having breakfast at Cafe Flore last week,
Randall Koll overheard one customer ask another: "What's a frittata?'' "I
think all of his rainbow flag privileges should be revoked for
at least a week,'' says Koll.
By 6 p.m. Friday, when Marc Huestis' "Lulu
Gets a Facelift'' screened in Frameline30's San Francisco LGBT
Film Festival, just about every seat in the Victoria Theatre
was taken, many by men with women's names: Heklina, Juanita More,
Cookie Dough and the star of the movie, drag queen Lulu.
Huestis, familiar on the local showbiz
scene, produces Castro Theatre evenings in which classic stars
appear at showings of their movies. Some are a little, well,
showing the patina of age by the time they hit the Castro. It
happens; we all get old. And "Lulu
Gets a Facelift'' is a movie about a fit middle-aged man's decision
to use all his resources to battle that inexorable process.
There's not lots of footage of cutting
and stitching; there is lots of Lulu debating whether to take
the plunge into artificial rejuvenation. The operation is successful.
But near the end of the movie, when all the swelling's gone down,
the bruising healed and the face wrinkle free, handsome Louis/Lulu
says "nothing
has changed'' in her social life. So what's the use of it all?
During the question-and-answer period,
the answer came into emotional focus in talk about scenes shot
at Lulu's bedside. The unusual thing for gays, says Huestis,
was to see bedside scenes "where
friends were not taking care of other friends with AIDS. ... It
was a blast to shoot that hospital scene -- and kind of liberating.
Somebody's not dying, and from their point of view, they're improving
themselves.''
Huestis said that many gay men had spent
years holding the hands of friends who weakened daily and whose
former good looks were ravaged by Kaposi's sarcoma. Lulu's decision
was a positive response: "I'm
going to do something for beauty.''
Charlotte and George Shultz
took Nancy and Henry Kissinger to dinner at Tommy Toy's over
the weekend. And the foursome -- never mind political differences
-- showed up to literally throw rose petals over Dianne Feinstein,
who was celebrating her birthday in the banquet room of the Big
Four.
SF 360
Marc Huestis and a wrinkle in time (Jun 13, 2006)
By Susan Gerhard
http://www.sf360.org/features/2006/06/by_susan_gerhar_1.html
If the Hollywood Walk
of Fame could talk, it might sound something like Marc Huestis's
answering machine. That's Jane Russell, cooing "Bye
bye darlin'," and Sylvia Miles barking "Why didn't you
tell me you were in New York?" There's Carol Lynley, rendering
a complete "Happy Birthday to You," and I think I recognize
that next voice to be Shelley Winters, slurring something about
a person upstairs? The halls of San Francisco's Redstone Building
(built in 1914 as the San Francisco Temple of Labor) have stories
of their own; but Huestis's Outsider Productions office has managed
to cram in a couple hundred more with his archives of the shows
he's recently produced for a cavalcade of aging A, B, and Z-list
stars at the Castro theater.
With his latest project, a film he directed, Huestis features the
very true story a local diva whose playful vanities may rival any
of Huestis's feted femmes of yesteryear. This time, it's local
drag celebutante and Huestis friend Lulu getting the lifetime achievement
tribute, at the very same time he receives some fundamental restructuring
in "Lulu Gets a Facelift." For Huestis, it seems the
Golden Years could stretch from 30 to 100, though: Age has played
no small part in any of Huestis's non-fiction features, from one
he made 20 years ago, "Chuck Solomon: Coming of Age" (1987),
to "Life Begins at 40" (1995, or your best guess). This
latest take on the topic premieres Friday at the SF International
LGBT Film Festival, which, coincidentally, traces its roots back
to a shoestring production Huestis himself engineered back in 1977,
with help from filmmaker friends who frequented Harvey Milk's photo
shop in the Castro. I talked recently with Huestis about time,
and what it's telling us.
Marc
Huestis: Turning 40 was really the worst.
SF360: [laughs] Why?
Huestis: Vanity.
SF360: But you look great....
Huestis: You let go of a lot of that stuff
that you hung on to. I never thought of myself as a cute young
thing, but now I look back at pictures of when I was young and
I see that I really was a cute young thing. I'm dealing with my
dad now, who's turning 80. It's really tough on him. It doesn't
get any easier. Everything for me is also counterbalanced by the
whole HIV thing, which I survived, so there you go. I like it that
there was a vanity issue when I turned 40, even though I was HIV
positive. HIV was a lot less important to me than my wrinkles were.
SF360: And you know, you don't really have wrinkles.
Huestis: I think you can really direct your aging process. If you
maintain some spark, or fire within. It's something that overrides
the aging thing. We shall see.
SF360: Thanks for giving me the press release from the first Lesbian
and Gay Film Festival in San Francisco.
Huestis: Isn't it cute?
SF360: It's a little apologetic. Like, I'm sorry to bother you....
Let me read from it: 'For your own information, I would like to
describe briefly what happened at the last festival. It took place
at 32 Page Street.... About 200 people crowded into a room normally
holding 126. About 100 other people were turned away... many of
whom suggested another showing. Therefore we think it important
that this information be gotten out as soon as possible.'
Huestis: Right now! Breaking news!
SF360: Who were you writing this to?
Huestis: That's the thing; I don't even remember who we were writing
that too. You know how we got the word out, mainly, was the B.A.R.
[Bay Area Reporter]. God bless the B.A.R. Mostly it was putting
posters up on lamp posts. I used to go to Buena Vista Park and
staple posters to trees in the cruising area -- which is not very
environmentally correct [laughs]. And I actually got arrested once
on Castro Street for putting up posters. That's how it got out.
It was word of mouth. I really hate when people romanticize the
'70s, but it was really a golden period in terms of the energy
on Castro Street. There was a lot of stuff happening. Our group
of filmmakers used to get our films developed at Harvey Milk's
photo store. There was such symbiosis within the gay community.
That's how I met Danny Nicoletta -- he worked with Harvey. We'd
get our little discounts and we'd all be happy. Everybody did it
because they had to do it. I really don't think something like
this could happen again in this town because of the reality of
living in San Francisco. We were all on welfare. We all lived with
20,000 people in collectives with dirt cheap rent. Everybody lived
on a dime and a prayer. Being gay was being gay from the moment
you woke up to the moment you went to sleep -- and you usually
went to sleep late at night. Back then I was involved in Angels
of Light. And the Angels energy -- which was the Cockettes energy
-- shifted and changed.... It was just really amazing time. Even
Film Arts was starting around the same time. It was a cauldron
for arts. The American Independent film movement started shortly
thereafter. You can see on the press release, these were all Super
8mm films. None of them had synch sound. We showed them on a rinky
dink projector onto a bed sheet. Lulu actually put up the bed sheet,
so he was there, too. The splices would break in the middle of
it. There was a real embrace of seeing ourselves without any filter.
And even then, there were kernels of what gay filmmaking would
become. There was animation, there was computer generated stuff,
drag stuff, documentary. It was the birth of what was going to
be independent gay film.
SF360: In your wildest imagination, did you see where this was
all headed?
Huestis: The only thing I'm connected to right now is myself, making
a living, and being able to survive. What we did was important,
but when Michael Lumpkin came in about two years later, he really
made it what it was. He had the organizational skills and vision.
This whole movie was made because Lulu loves the festival. Most
of these movies are never gonna see the light of day.
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