‘Freakish Kid’ No More

Dislocation was a constant in the formative years of John Cameron Mitchell. As an Army brat--he was the son of a general--he moved repeatedly in the U.S. and Europe. Add to that a deep-seated sense he had since childhood of being different from those around him, of being a freak.

So what better catharsis, when reaching adulthood, than to create a character who embodies freakishness, a guy who after a botched sex-change operation becomes a woman with “an angry inch” and an “internationally ignored” rock career?

This unlikely heroine for our time, a kind of glam-rock Marlene Dietrich in big hair, big shoes and big makeup, was presented in the 1998 off-Broadway hit “Hedwig and the Angry Inch,” and she has brought fame and some modest fortune to Mitchell, her creator and sometime impersonator. To spread Hedwig’s gospel, Mitchell has turned the work into a film--it opened Friday in Los Angeles--doing double duty as star and director. The movie enjoyed an enthusiastic welcome earlier this year, winning the best director and audience awards at the Sundance Film Festival.

“I would love for Hedwig to be in every tiny shopping mall,” says Mitchell, just in from New York and sitting by the Standard’s AstroTurfed poolside on Sunset Boulevard, “so every freakish kid like I was can have a broadening experience.”

In the movie, as on stage, the tale is told through a series of gigs by Hedwig and her band, the Angry Inch, on a tour of restaurants across the Eastern seaboard. At one place she belts out from behind the salad bar, at another she jumps across booths of diners who watch with dispassionate catatonia. Intercut with these gigs are flashbacks of heightened surreality.

Born in East Berlin, young Hansel grew up listening to U.S. Armed Forces Radio and fell under the spell of rock ‘n’ roll. Later he falls in love with an American GI and wants to leave the Iron Curtain and go with him to America, except that a bit of surgery is necessary to pass the physical for GI brides. The surgery gets botched, but somehow he--now named Hedwig--ends up in America anyway. Soon deserted by her man, she works out her sorrow and angst through song. She starts a band with Korean housewives and intrigues a local boy named Tommy, who eventually steals her songs and becomes a rock star.

Off screen, Mitchell, 38, is slight, a beanpole waif with a narrow frame and low-key manner. Wearing a T-shirt and jeans with strategic, horizontal rips, he could be mistaken for a local teenager about to go hang 10 on his skateboard. The clue that something else is at work here is that while on one wrist he wears a macho watch with a thick leather band, on the other he wears a ... uh ... dainty tennis bracelet.

“Isn’t it funny, why is it called a tennis bracelet?” he says, giving a small smile and fingering the sparkling chain. “It doesn’t seem very tennis, does it? I actually wear one in the movie poster, around my neck.”

The bracelet is a casual reference to the other side of Mitchell’s personality--the glittery, show-biz side, a hint of Hedwig, even of the feminine. Although he’s become identified with Hedwig, he only fell into doing drag in order to get some gigs. In fact, he has said that his own story is closer to that of the character Tommy Gnosis, the befuddled teen Hedwig discovers--and awakens--in Junction City, Kan.

Mitchell escaped all that by going into acting. At Northwestern University he studied drama, then worked in a smattering of stage and film roles through the 1980s. In the mid-’90s, Mitchell was fielding story ideas with composer Stephen Trask, then music director at New York’s Squeezebox, a rock ‘n’ roll club that featured drag queens. For some time the actor had been fascinated by Plato’s “Symposium,” a tale of how humankind was split in two due to the jealousy of the gods. As a result, each of us spends a lifetime looking for our other half.

The physical inspiration for “Hedwig” was more reality-based. As a lad of 14, Mitchell was intrigued by his brother’s babysitter Helga, a German woman who wore tube tops and capri pants and lived in a trailer in the middle of Kansas. She seemed to have a lot of “dates,” which Mitchell now realizes were probably her sexual clients.

Trask encouraged Mitchell to spin out the character--and who better to play her than Mitchell? They performed at the Squeezebox and at parties. They wrote more songs and developed a story around the character now called Hedwig, and soon they had a full-length musical, which landed at the Jane Street Theater in the West Village. It became an off-Broadway sensation, and both Mitchell and the play ended up winning Obie Awards.

“At first we didn’t know who it would appeal to except our friends,” says Trask, visiting during the L.A. premiere of “Hedwig,” which kicked off Outfest earlier this month.. “But it turns out the audience ran a full range of ages, class, sex and sexual preference.”

How to explain that? Trask believes there is a strong potential for identification with Hedwig. “It’s a story of yearning and love and missed opportunities--looking in all the wrong places for all the right things. [Hedwig] is someone who looks back on her life and sees all her mistakes and we all do that.”

On stage, Mitchell performed the lead role for a year, with Trask alongside as the bandleader Skszp. (Trask reprises his stage role in the film, as does Miriam Shor as fellow bandmate and Hedwig’s long-suffering male lover, Yitzhak.) However, after a year, Mitchell had had enough--Hedwig’s type of drag, he notes, is murder on the head (all those wigs) and feet (all those 6-inch heels). He gladly turned over the part to other performers in New York and other cities where the show toured. The idea of turning the material into a movie had been considered several times, but it didn’t click until Christine Vachon, godmother of New York indie film, broached the idea with them. “Christine was a natural choice,” says Mitchell. “I’d been cast in a lot of her movies, I knew a lot of her directors. It was the same world--New York, downtown, queer-friendly.” Vachon and her company, Killer Films, took the project under wing, co-producing it with New Line, which is releasing the film.

The decision for Mitchell to direct also came naturally. “I realized I had too many ideas to foist on a director,” he says. “Rather than do that, I thought why not just do it myself?”

Shooting took place last summer in Toronto in 28 jam-packed days. “If I had more time it would have been more pleasant,” Mitchell says, adding, “I don’t know if it would have been any better.” And even with a relatively plush budget of $6 million (for an indie film anyway), he admits he had to call in a lot of favors to get the work done.

Helping his directing duties, Mitchell found, was his longtime penchant for thinking visually--he made ample use of close-ups, quick cuts and relatively low-tech special effects. In one scene Hedwig takes a leap and “flies” over the heads of diners, but since only her upper torso is seen, no computer effects were required. There are also cleverly animated sequences hand-drawn by Emily Huble.

“I wanted no digital,” says Mitchell. “Hedwig is unabashedly analog.”

To capture the energy of a real performance, he did live vocals for four of the songs, with prerecorded backing tracks. “I wanted to keep from lip-synching the more punk-rock songs because you can usually tell,” he explains.

Facing the prospects of an expanded worldwide audience for “Hedwig” is gratifying for Mitchell. He would like to see the spread of the Hedwig legacy--in film, on stage, even toys. “It’s like the more the merrier,” he says dryly. “And if there’s plastic dolls with detachable penises offered at McDonald’s, that’s not a sellout to me. That’s evangelism.”