The boys discuss 17 of their favorite movies and TV shows. Here’s an excerpt:
The Eyes of Tammy Faye (2000):
To this day, people tell us how much they love this film. Tammy Faye truly changed our lives, and to have known her was such a gift. One day while filming we decided to visit Heritage USA, the amusement park that Jim and Tammy built at their PTL ministry. The day we visited, the park was abandoned, and there were chains across the entrance. Tammy got out of the car, removed the chain, and roamed the park. She had not been back since the scandal that brought them down. It was all highly emotional, and we walked around in silence until Tammy came upon a table and chairs, and she just couldn’t resist putting them back in their place. It was like a Bergman film. Interesting tidbit: RuPaul narrates the film.
101 Rent Boys (2000):
We filmed Tammy Faye by day and 101 Rent Boys by night. Today the hustlers of Santa Monica Boulevard have all but disappeared and gone online, but at the end of the last century they were still there. In this film, we decided to pay 101 of them not for sex but for their stories. Sex workers are people too, and as smart and sensitive as they are marginalized and disrespected. One of our interviewees blew us away when he made the case that religious ecstasy and sexual communion are cut from the same cloth.
Heidi Fleiss: The Would-Be Madame of Crystal (2008)
We set out to make a film following this savvy madam as she started a new life and built a new kind of brothel, where women were the clients and men the escorts. Instead we ended up following a woman in the throes of drug addiction, living alone in the desert. It was one of the most difficult and disheartening projects we have ever worked on, until the day Heidi introduced us to her next-door neighbor, another former madam who lived in a trailer with a collection of exotic birds. When she died, Heidi took the birds under her wing. And then the most amazing thing happened. Heidi fell in love—with Dalton, a parakeet.
Read all 17 picks here.
