Director/Producer Lesli Klainberg tracks the history of queer indies in Fabulous! The Story of Queer Cinema, premiering on IFC in July. Klainberg's credits include producing the Sundance award-winning documentary Paul Monette: Brink of Summer's End about the influential deceased gay author of Becoming A Man, and directing/producing the documentary In The Company Of Women following female directors including lesbian filmmakers Kim Peirce (Boys Don't Cry) and Lisa Cholodenko (High Art).
She currently runs film production company Orchard Films, a film production company she founded in 2000 with Fabulous! co-director Lisa Ades.
AfterEllen.com: What was the first queer film you remember seeing?
Lesli Klainberg: I would probably say that Desert Hearts was the first film I can really remember going to the movies and seeing and knowing it was a gay movie, even though I was in college at that time, I wasn't as aware of gay and lesbian films. I was in film school but I wasn't that entrenched yet in independent film--and that was the early 80's anyway--so there really wasn't that much out there.
AE: Did you identify as a lesbian at that point?
LK: I didn't really come out until I was in my late twenties and not for any good reason (laughs) that I can come up with. I wouldn't describe myself as being in the closet exactly in the sense of hiding from anything, I just wasn't as aware.
AE: But you were already out to yourself.
LK: Yeah I think I was, I just wasn't really out, out. I was out to myself…I kind of knew certain things when I was growing up, but I didn't come out really until my twenties--I mean come out to myself and come out.
AE: So when you saw Desert Hearts were you already out to yourself?
LK: Yeah I definitely knew something was up and remember being very struck my the story and particularly struck by the relationship between them because I just had never seen a sort of loving relationship really between two women and I thought it was pretty amazing. And I just loved the movie because I loved the music and I loved how it looked. There's just so many things that captured me.
AE: But when The Celluloid Closet film came out almost ten years ago, they barely touched on Desert Hearts or lesbian film really.
LK: Yeah.
AE: It was very male-centered.
LK: And it's also very Hollywood. The Celluloid Closet is really about Hollywood movies, it's about going back and queering old Hollywood movies, it really isn't about looking at contemporary movies at all. There's hardly any contemporary movies that they really look at in that film. Contemporary meaning even in the 80's.
AE: So it was refreshing to see in your film Fabulous! that lesbian cinema was equally represented and that Desert Hearts is such a strong part of the film because it definitely had an effect on women from many generations.
LK: Well I think one of the things that we tried to do in our film was that we had experts, we had people like (B.) Ruby Rich and Jenni Olson who were really giving us the real history, straight history, like this happened and then this happened and then this happened. And when we were doing our research for the film we talked to lots and lots of people and did lots of pre-interviews. You can imagine, as you know actually, there's an enormous amount of material already written on queer cinema that ranges from very, very light 100 movies for gay men kind of thing (laughs) to the very deepest kind of film theory and criticism.
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