Archive

Michelle Tea on “Valencia: The Movie”

Memoirs oftentimes are the best source material for a great film but leave it to out filmmaker Michelle Tea to go a step further and put a different spin on the film adaptation of her memoir, Valencia.

Tea had 20 different filmmakers (including Cheryl Dunye and Jill Soloway) each take a chapter from her book, cast their own actress to play the role of Michelle and then, with the help of director Hilary Goldberg, bring the pieces together to make Valencia, the film, which is screening at Outfest on Sunday.

We grabbed some time with Tea to talk about bringing her own life to the screen as well as whether there are more books — memoirs or not — in her future.

AfterEllen: What were the origins of the film and the way you took it from your memoir?

Michelle Tea: I just was hanging out with a bunch of filmmaker friends of mine who were all part of it. You know, Hilary Goldberg, who wound up being the producer, as well as a filmmaker. Silas Howard and Michelle Lawler and Peter Pizzi. We were all hanging out at Frameline (the San Francisco LGBT film festival), and I just had this idea brewing in my head for a while of having Valencia made into a film.

And I know so many filmmakers but they’re all sort of struggling. They’re able to put together a short but feature film is a different story and I couldn’t imagine going up to anybody and being like, “Will you make a feature out of my book? “I thought, ‘Oh, but everybody knows how to hustle a short, and maybe we could do it this way.'” So I just kind of mentioned it to them and the four of them just jumped all over it, and they’re like, “I want to do this chapter.”

I’ve never done a film before so I needed some help. I met with some producers to see if anyone wanted to jump in but nobody wanted to touch it. People just thought it was going to be a mess. And it just wasn’t. Everybody did what they said they’d do. Everybody made their film. It was actually a really peaceful, awesome process. It was great.

AE: Did you have any input into the various Michelles in everybody’s films, and did you agree with the Michelles you saw?

MT: I didn’t have any creative input. I didn’t want any. I feel like I got my creative say with the book and the book is out there and the book will always be out there. But it was more interesting, to me, not to have my vision put onto the screen but to see all these different filmmakers, who I totally respect and so interested in their work and their vision, to see what they would do with the material. And how it would come out on the other end. That’s what was really exciting and interesting to me.

After all these films came in, we’d watch them and were in love with all of them and they were all perfect. And then when we kind of strung them together into a feature, we realized it was kind of a mess. Even though they all worked individually, we were going to have to do a little bit of work, me and Hilary, to make it cohere and be something that somebody could sit through at a theater without wanting to kill themselves. So we did end up having to make some edits, and people were great about it, thank God.

AE: Did you assign chapters, or did people put in their wish lists for which ones they wanted? MT: People just picked the chapters that they wanted until it got more towards the end and then it was just like those last latecomers kind of got what was left. Everybody seemed to really like the chapters they got. AE: I have a very important question. True or false, pickles are incredibly sexy? One of the shorts has a scene that is kind of erotic involving eating pickles out of the jar.

MT: You know, that actress, Annie Danger, she’s a performance artist and she’s just so good. I feel like she did make pickles sexy. I think she made it a lot sexier than I made it during the time. I think I was sort of stumbling and goofy but she’s so good in that. She’s like very magnetic.

You know, a lot of the people who were cast in it are working performance artists or writers or just people who create culture in their particular little queer community. So in a way, a lot of these chapters function as snapshots of the great queer scenes across the United States.

AE: There’s kind of a movie mash-up in one of the shorts. How did that come about?

MT: Those filmmakers, Chris Vargas and Greg Youmans, came on a little bit later in the game and didn’t really have the time to sort of do the casting and the shooting and everything. And so they did kind of like a visual sampling and it’s so brilliant. I mean, I think it’s one of the highlights of the entire film. I’m so happy. But again, because of the constraints of reality, again, and creating something that’s just so special. And they’re awesome.

AE: Were there guidelines that you gave the filmmakers? Maybe like time length or something like that?

MT: We had to give them some technical guidelines…but there’s the format of the short and how it had to be delivered to [Hilary]. It was pretty specific, and unfortunately, we had a couple of really great films that were shot before we had come up with those guidelines, and the difference between the quality was so drastically different that we couldn’t use them. Really a bummer. But nothing was supposed to be longer than, I think, five to seven minutes. Everyone pushed at that boundary.

AE: You said you’re somewhat new to filmmaking so is it safe to say you’ve caught the bug now?

MT: Well, I feel like I’ve had it, you know? I’ve been in a couple of Hilary Goldberg’s films. I’ve been in a couple of Peter Pizzi’s films. So, yeah, I would love to keep doing stuff like this. But at the moment, I’m contracted to write three books, so I’m kind of crazy right now with books.

AE: Are these book projects also memoirs? Fiction? Queer-centric?

MT: It’s all of those things. I had a book that just came out this spring called Mermaid in Chelsea Creek, and it’s the first in a young adult trilogy. I’m pretty much at the end of the second installment right now. Ad after that, I’m doing a book with Penguin called How to Grow Up, and it’s a memoir, but it’s different than my other memoirs. When I wrote them, I kind of wanted them to be very novelistic, like you’re just reading a novel, like you’re very in that moment. And this is going to be a totally different angle of more like looking back.

Valencia premieres at Outfest tonight. For more information on future screenings, visit the website. Outfest continues through July 21st in Los Angeles. For information on the films and tickets, visit the website. You can also follow Michelle Tea on Twitter.

 

Lesbian Apparel and Accessories Gay All Day sweatshirt -- AE exclusive

Related Articles

Leave a Reply

Back to top button