Vogue Boy : Year One

One year and 1.5 million views later, I’m still in a state of astonishment when I force myself to fully appreciate that one of the most-viewed videos of my childhood has become a tiny but permanent little piece of the internet. In the original form, remixed videos, excerpted stills, or that wildly popular .GIF file that keeps getting reposted on Tumblr, The Vogue Boy just keeps on dancing. 

The truth is I don’t have much interest in viral videos myself. "Vogue Boy" was purely my ABBA-esque attempt to steal the spotlight through a means that no one is inclined to take seriously and then to deliver pop art that people would have to take seriously. I thought that I could launch a screenwriting career with a viral video in much the same way that ABBA thought they could be taken seriously by winning the EuroVision song contest. It took the string of stellar singles that followed “Waterloo” for ABBA to reach their goal. That's why I remain optimistic my video will one day be recalled as the unexpected start of a career defined by deliciously clever works of FUN.

The Oomph Girl Herself: Miss Ann Sheridan

I appropriated that name “Vogue Boy” not as a nod to Madonna's  “Material Girl”, but rather as an homage to The Oomph Girl, Ann Sheridan. (I thought that referring to my inner child as The Oomph Boy made me sound a bit TOO precocious!) Otherwise, I might have coined “The Vogue Kid”, because I hate to ascribe a gender to my identity. In fact, I can’t say I haven’t been tempted to start a rumor that I’m really an androgynous female, as on an unconscious level that is how I have always thought of myself. Better judgment prevailed, for the significance that that video ended up having to many gay male viewers in particular warmed my heart and truly changed my life.

I’m forever grateful to the hundreds of people who left comments on my Vimeo and Facebook pages. In the year since, whenever I need to lift my spirits, I just scroll through and try to convince myself that the words they are writing were actually written to and about me. It was also a unique and massive thrill to be not only discovered but posted about by so many bloggers. I was featured on some of my favorite blogs, such as Boy Culture, GangsterSaysRelax, Wicked Gay Blog, and Andrew Sullivan's The Dish, as well as DListed, The Huffington Post, Entertainment Weekly, Towleroad, DallasVoice, HyperVocal, The Daily What, The Bulge Report, The Kiss 102.5 FM Blog, MostWatchedVideos, Jezebel, PudWhacker's Madonna Scrapbook, PureJuice, A.V. Club, Good Culture, and PerezHilton. The video was broadcast on the syndicated series The Daily Buzz, and an excerpt of it was shown on Anderson Cooper 360 and in Jessica Frech's 2012 music video, "Dance."

DJ Paul V gave me the opportunity to contribute my growing-up story to his incredible project The Born This Way Blog and Megan Johnson interviewed me about the video for her blog The Assistant. Perhaps the most exciting outcome of all was the clip's use in video projects and art exhibitions, the first of which was Gerald Hubert's "Beauty's Where You Find It" at The POParazzi Gallery in Roanoke, VA in Summer 2011. The video will be given its first UK presentation as part of "Mistaken Identities", an exhibition by Marcus Keating and The New Happiness that is being presented at Modern Art Oxford from June 8-10th, 2012 as part of Oxford Pride. "Vogue Boy" inspired the song "Video Boy" by Swedish artist Cristian Dinamarca and the single artwork for the song "Ecstasy" by Japanese artist Masculin. 

Since the video was downloadable for many months, numerous people uploaded it to YouTube. The video was viewed tens of thousands of times on various YouTube channels before Warner Music Group pulled most of them--including a fabulous tribute by a Japanese fan that paired my video alongside Madonna's original. However, they left up an assortment of fan videos made by people who put their own spin on my home movie. Now, enjoy this trio of my favorites. They are all brilliant, and they all make me feel more special than I can put into words. In the event the people who made them should ever read this post: THANK YOU for the smile that you put on my face by making this clip into amazing new works of art.

Now, out of respect to those who made the original version of this video a viral hit, allow me to link you back via one of my favorite Madonna quotes:

"Ain't nothin' like the REAL thing." 

;)

The Hollywood Queen Who Came To Dinner

The first of three classic Bette Davis films released in 1942 & the ONLY film that ever paired The Queen of Warner Brothers with The Oomph Girl, Ann Sheridan: Happy 70TH Anniversary to William Keighley’s The Man Who Came to Dinner!

The Man Who Came To Dinner was based on a smash Broadway play written by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart and starring Monty Wooley as the titular Sheridan Whiteside. It was written for the screen by the legendary Julius J. Epstein and Philip G. Epstein. The Epstein Brothers went on to write the brilliant screenplay for the last film to earn Bette Davis an Oscar nomination for “Best Actress” while at Warner Bros, Vincent Sherman’s Mr. Skeffinton, but they are best known for winning the Academy Award for "Best Original Screenplay" for Casbablanca. (Casey Robinson, whose credits include Now, Voyager, Dark Victory, and Kings Row, declined to share screen credit for his own contributions to Casablanca and was thus sadly ineligible for Oscar gold.)

Bette Davis loved seeing The Man Who Came To Dinner on Broadway and persuaded Jack Warner to buy the screen rights as a vehicle that would pair her with John Barrymore. But when the eldest Barrymore proved to be too ill to play the part, Monty Wooley was flown in from Broadway to reprise his role. It made Wooley a movie star and the film a box office smash, but Bette always expressed her disappointment at not having been given the chance to fulfill her dream of playing off of John Barrymore, even though the 1942 “Warner Bros. Breakdowns” blooper reel proves she maintained a good sense of humor (jump to 3:05 below).

Until the end of her life, Ann Sheridan noted how well she and Bette got on together, in spite of attempts by the WB press department to make everyone think that The Queen and The Princess were at war on the lot. Although Bette Davis never worked again with Ann Sheridan, one can assume she also got on well with Mary Wickes, who made her feature film debut reprising the role of “Miss Preen” that she had previously played in the Broadway play. Wickes went on to be Bette Davis’s co-star later that year in Irving G. Rapper’s Now, Voyager and again in Bretaigne Windust’s June Bride (1948). In 1965, they paired up again for “The Decorator”, a failed Aaron Spelling sitcom pilot that had originally been called “The Bette Davis Show”.

Billie Burke, Reginald Gardiner, Elisabeth Fraser, and Jimmy Durante are among the other legends in the ensemble cast. It was the most celebrated of three comedies that Bette Davis made in the 1940s, but Bette’s own disappointment with the film could be in part because it never afforded Miss Davis the chance to generate the big laughs she would later get in her most celebrated film, Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s All About Eve (1950), or her most underrated, Roy Ward Baker’s The Anniversary (1967). In spite of this, The Man Who Came To Dinner was a deserved smash and remains one of the major highlights of Bette Davis’s most glorious era.