*** the GAY GIRLS RIDING CLUB ***

Drag?

No thanks.

r1 is also:

*Lauren Boebert calls WH Spokesperson Karine Jean Pierre, a "DEI hire"*

[quote]All this outrage as if Karine Jean Pierre wasn't exactly that?

I noticed they used an actual Baby Jane doll. I wonder how they got their hands on it.

In early 1960s Los Angeles, a diverse group of gay men and recreational cross-dressers known as the Gay Girls Riding Club became sensations within California’s burgeoning homosexual underground. In addition to their actual equestrian outings—and a legendary annual Halloween costume ball—the GGRC made their name with a series of surprisingly elaborate 16mm amateur films that spoofed Hollywood fare. The boys donned wigs and make-up (lots of it!) to rework the tragic tale of the Hudson sisters in What Really Happened to Baby Jane, shot only months after the initial release of Robert Aldrich’s classic; they transformed Jules Dassin’s prostitution comedy Never on Sunday into their own Always on Sunday, the title nodding to the gang’s weekend brunch meet-ups; and in the GGRC’s manicured hands, Warner Brothers’s adaptation of Tennessee Williams’s drama The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone was refashioned as The Roman Springs on Mrs. Stone.

With non-stop scenery-chewing and scrupulous attention to original sources, the GGRC’s movies play something like West Coast variants of early Kuchar brothers parodies, but with a somewhat more impressive access to locations and props (marvel, for instance, as a broad-shouldered, pancake-faced Baby Jane Hudson drives away in a genuine Rolls Royce). Indeed, many of the Club’s members were employed in the entertainment industry, including James Crabe, who would become an award-winning cinematographer on later films like Rocky and The Karate Kid and GGRC screenwriter Ray Harrison, who worked as an assistant on TV’s The Spike Jones Show. The pictures typically premiered at GGRC parties, sometimes preceded by extravagant live numbers, and the prints found their way to gay bars and more adventurous “art cinemas” around Los Angeles and San Francisco. Yet despite their reputation among the lavender demimonde of their era, these invaluable records of mid-century drag culture have, in more recent decades, been exceedingly difficult to see.

It wasn't that difficult to find one back then, R3, since they were being given away to promote WEHTBJ:

"Bette Davis and Joan Crawford worked hard to promote the film, both knowing that their profit percentage points would pay off in spades with the film's success. Davis traveled to 17 theaters across the state of New York in three days for personal appearances and helped give away promotional "Baby Jane" dolls to patrons with a "lucky envelope" under their seat."

The dolls they were giving away were generic dolls, r5, not like the one in the movie.

I'm halfway through The Roman Springs on Mrs. Stone. They're...committed. It's like a cross between John Waters and Charles Ludlam.

I loved Fonda Peters' electrocution in Spy on the Fly.

All About Alice is too long, but you *do* get the 1971 FOLLIES marquee *and* a nude hunk getting simulated(?) oral.

"Scream, Teen, Scream"

Love it, r10.

bump