Directors: Bill Weber, David Weissman
Documentary

- Reviewed by Linda

This will be one of those reviews where I'll start with the disclaimer that I probably wasn't the intended audience for this film. Now that that's out in the open, I'll point out that many people I talked to loved this film. Thought it was great. A load of fun. A joyous blast from the hippie-past. But if your tolerance is low for smug ex-hippies laughing about how they spent a good couple of years (a least) living off the dole (more specifically "disability" fer cryin' out loud), taking drugs, having sex with everything that moved, and dressing in drag, well, The Cockettes may make you restless. I was restless. I wanted to give these "goddamn hippies" a good, swift kick in the ass a good twenty minutes into the film.

The Cockettes were a gay-hippie-acid-freak-drag-queen performance art troupe in San Francisco in the late 60s and early 70s. Perhaps the most interesting part of the story, I thought, was that the founder was a guy named George Harris. You may be familiar with this very famous 1960s photo of a young blonde man in a puffy sweater, gently placing a flower in the barrel of a soldier's rifle. That's George. He had stopped in D.C. to protest the war on his way to the West Coast. Next thing you know, by the time he was in San Francisco, his hair and beard had grown out in shaggy glory, he pranced around with sparkles and paint in his hair, and called himself Hibiscus. Yes, Hibiscus.

Hibiscus was the ringleader for a group of "artists" that dubbed themselves The Cockettes. They were men and women, gay and straight, who dressed in outrageous drag and costumes, putting on musical shows in edgy San Francisco theaters with all of their bits hanging out and flopping about in all their glory. Their shows became hugely popular, selling out whenever they performed, until there was a buzz that spread across the country. 

And this is where my favorite part of the move came in: The Cockettes were invited to New York City to play two sold-out shows. And guess what? They bombed. The critics hated them. The audience (full of celebrities and scenesters of the time) hated them. At this point of the film (where I had become severely bored of the navel-gazing ruminations of how clever and creative these people were), I felt like jumping out of my seat and applauding, pointing at the screen defiantly and saying, "That's RIGHT!"—then fleeing the theater. But I stayed... because I knew that once they went home from New York with their tails between their legs, I knew the troupe (and the film) wouldn't last much longer. And I was right.

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