Q&A: Variety

Bette Gordon's Variety is a fascinating document of seedy, pre-Guiliani New York from the 1980s. Gordon has been an important figure in downtown New York (as documented in another Festival film, Celine Danhier's documentary Blank City), and Variety is something that can be looked at as emblematic of those times. [Note: All the stills on the site, for example, from the film, were taken by major photographer Nan Goldin, and the film's lurid neon look certainly has links and is reminscent of the world of Goldin's classic The Ballad of Sexual Dependency.]

It was a reunion after Variety's screening during the Festival, and Gordon, star Sandy McLeod, and producer Renée Shafrans looked back on that time with nostalgia and fondness: "it was a very Judy Garland/Mickey Rooney let's put on a show" experience, said the producer. When the film was chosen for Cannes' Un Certain Regard program, in order to get the money to support the film over in France, Shafranksy recalled meeting a lesbian restauranter who was in need of some money laundering. Shafransky decided to help the woman out, and she ended up having to take 15,000 in dollars in paper bags across the country. "Such is the life of an independent producer," she laughed. While they were shooting, she had a roll of twenties, where she would pay people to be in the film or to get out of the shot.

The hip New York scene that is documented in the film was more of a happy accident, according to the women. There are roles for a baby Luis Guzman, Will Patton, Nan Goldin plays "Nan," and Spaulding Gray makes a voice cameo. Gordon noted: "A lot of the people were hanging around!"

Variety's downright radical perspective, looking at women's desires and experiences of voyeurism and pornography was inspired by Laura Mulvey's work on looking and the pleasure of looking. "I wanted to switch that so women would be the subject and not the object. I wanted to put pleasure in the hands of women," said Gordon. "I was thinking about fantasy for women. There was a big anti-porn divide [at the time]; I was fascinated by these images and I wanted to try them on."

Over twenty years later, Variety still feels fresh and foreign, exploring female desire from a rare perspective.
 

Variety: Photographs by Nan Goldin, featuring Goldin's stills from the shooting of the film, will be released by Skira Rizzoli in September.