A Life Through Film #001: To Wong Foo: Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar
My film retrospective begins fabulously
Release Date: 9/8/1995
First Weekend At Number One: 9/8/1995
Weekends at Number One: 2
Thanks for reading! This is my ongoing series where I track the evolution of American culture in my life by reviewing every number one film at the weekend box office since I was born in chronological order. If you haven’t already, I highly recommend reading my introduction post here.
When you buy a movie ticket, sit in your seat, and help make a movie a success, do you feel part of something bigger? If the movie you see ends up topping the box office charts that weekend, do you get a sense of helping reflect the realities of the current culture?
You likely don’t think about stuff like this when you go see the newest action movie, prestige drama, or shlocky horror flick. You may just want to enjoy the next two hours with something that can entertain you. But if enough people care so much for a movie that it ends up being the most profitable movie in America, even for a week, surely that says something about the world those people are coming from.
Right?
As I discussed in Episode #000 of this column, I’ve decided to reflect back on my life and the world I’ve lived it in by reviewing every movie that has ever topped the American weekend box office while I’ve been alive. Some of these films I’ve seen, some of these I even saw in theaters.
For this inaugural film, however, we’re starting with something entirely new to me.
To Wong Foo: Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar is a comedy that debuted at the top of the weekend box office the weekend of September 8th, 1995, and carried that dominance through the following weekend. By that metric, it was the most popular movie in America the day I was born. Of all the movies to be the biggest in the country when I began existence, I could do a whole lot worse, even if just conceptually.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Patrick Swayze, Wesley Snipes, and John Leguizamo star as drag queens Vida, Noxeema, and Chi-Chi (respectively) who, while on a cross-country road trip from New York to Los Angeles, get stuck with car trouble in a small backwater in middle America, where the fish-out-of-water jokes come just as quickly as the outfit changes. Over the course of an in-film weekend, the three queens bring life and fabulous color to the drab people and businesses of Snydersville while they wait for their car to get fixed.
The opening credits scene that shows the careful process of Vida and Noxeema getting into their drag personas might actually be the best part of the movie. Fantastic set design sets the mood to watch the special attention shown to the meticulous work that goes into the fabulous craft of drag. Swayze and Snipes prepare in parallel isolation, the only time we see either actor as anything other than queens. It’s a killer way to both welcome and endear us to this subculture.
This scene also establishes early on that the fashion of this movie is going to be unreal. Spoiler alert for my final rating, but I added a full half star to it based on the exceptional costume design of Marlene Stewart, an industry veteran whose work has appeared across many, many genres of film. The fact that she wasn’t even nominated for the Best Costume Design Oscar at the ‘96 Academy Awards baffles my brain.
All of the queens’ outfits pop off the screen, uniformly fantastic as well as unique to each protagonist. Vida wears big dresses and “Say Something” hats reminiscent of the 50s and early 60s. Noxeema is constantly decked out in glittery disco wear. Chi-Chi rocks 80’s inspired Chicana fashion that show off her killer legs (I’m not kidding about that at all. John Leguizamo’s body will not effing quit in this movie).
The three main performances of Swayze, Snipes, and Leguizamo carry the film hard. Swayze and Snipes were already established movie stars at this point in 1995, but Leguizamo was still relatively fresh to the mainstream, especially as a leading man. The casting of these three famous, straight actors as drag queens who almost never appear out of wig and costume is a big swing, but holy crap does it work.
Swayze legitimately disappears into Vida, carrying the character with a level of poise and grace that mesmerizes. Before this, he had proven his ability to physically act with incredible body control in 80s fare like Dirty Dancing [3/5] and Road House, but there’s something about the subtlety of his performance that really brings the character, as lacking in development as she is, to life. Vida is the wise den mother of the trio, so while she doesn’t get the chance to have many laugh out loud lines, Swayze still delivers funny bits that don’t feel out of character.
Leguizamo is the only actor of the main trio who comes into the movie from the world of comedy, and he absolutely crushes the role of Chi-Chi because of it. A naïve newbie in the drag scene, Chi-Chi’s unwavering and undeserved confidence shine through in her provocative outfits and brash line deliveries. Her arc about learning to focus on herself instead of trying to immediately jump into bed with a handsome townie is pretty uninteresting, but I was never bored because of Leguizamo’s performance.
That performance, though, did cause some friction behind the scenes. According to an interview he did with Yahoo! in 2020, Leguizamo claimed that, after a long day of shooting and a little too much improv on his part, he nearly got into a fist fight with a tired Swayze. If the idea of Patrick Swayze and John Leguizamo getting into a heated fist fight while both fully in drag sounds like the most bonkers thing you can imagine, the actors noticed that too, and it stopped the men from coming to blows.
“We were about to fight, but were like: ‘Take a look at ourselves - we’re in hot pants and fuck me pumps.’ It was ridiculous! So we stopped and hugged.”
You’d never think while watching To Wong Foo that the actors nearly physically attacked each other between takes, but I like to think it’s because the two men cared a lot about getting the movie right. Swayze, who died in 2009 and whose mother was a choreographer who got him into ballet as a child, told Alan Frutkin from Advocate that he was personally invested in the project because of his long personal history with drag queens. He also opened up about the struggle of being seen as a male sex icon, and using that struggle to further dive into the role of Vida.
He’s not bad by any means, but Wesley Snipes stands as the odd queen out of the trio. Unfortunately, Noxeema is never really given much to do. She has funny lines, sure, but her character is the most static in the entire movie, which is saying something when you look at the roster of uninteresting characters that fill up the town of Snydersville. The only changes to Noxeema by the end are her outfit and that she befriended an old woman over a shared love of early 20th century Hollywood starlets. The movie seems to know this isn’t all that interesting either, since she gets very few scenes where she’s the focus. Though he does well with what he’s given, Snipes’s character suffers the most from the film’s issues with story and characters.
The best thing I can say about the plot of To Wong Foo is that, at its best, it’s a charming execution of a simple premise. Screenwriter Douglas Carter Beane, primarily a playwright, told Advocate back in 1995 that he was inspired to write the story after watching the far-right propaganda video The Gay Agenda.
“There’s a scene where they show drag queens going through a town, and the narrator is warning viewers that these people will take over your town. And I thought, Well, that would be fun.”
I agree! And so did Steven Spielberg. He got his hands on Beane’s script and loved it, putting the full force of Amblin Entertainment behind it. Spielberg was in the middle of possibly his greatest run as a director, so his clout as a producer made lot of people interested in the movie early on. I’m curious what he loved about the screenplay, though.
While I’m all for the reason behind its making, the script of To Wong Foo sacrifices interesting character development and conversations about drag culture for a more straightforward, surface level depiction of the art. While this makes the movie a breezy, decently funny time for the most part, it does mean that attempts at serious subject matter come off as disjointed and inappropriate.
The most jarring scene in the movie comes towards the end of the first act. Lost and afraid, the main trio are verbally harassed and nearly sexually assaulted by the antagonist of the movie, the hateful Sheriff Dollard. Played by the late Chris Penn, the character keeps up the actor’s tradition of stealing scenes like he did in Reservoir Dogs [4/5] and the original Footloose [also a 4/5]. But while his performance is memorable, it’s for the wrong reasons; the violent threat he poses for the back half of the movie left me feeling uneasy while watching.
That initial scene with him comes the closest in the whole movie to giving the queens any kind of meaningful obstacle to their journey and even their continued existence. But after knocking Dollard out and leaving him for dead, they recover from this trauma with a group outfit change and some hitchhiking to the main plot of the movie.
(TW in the clip before for racist language and sexual harassment)
The sanding down of the sharper points of the story was intentional. Talking to The Advocate, production designer Wynn Thomas admits that, as a gay man, it was important to him to only display the positives of drag.
“The fact of the matter is, there’s an edge to the drag world we didn’t want in this picture. This is a comedy, not a drama…We eliminated the edge, we embellished it, we made it larger than life.”
On the one hand, I understand wanting to make a comedy a happy place, where the only problems the characters have to deal with are individual assholes who want to rain on their parade. However, executive producer Bruce Cohen, also speaking to The Advocate, said that his goal with the movie was to bring the drag community and Middle America together in understanding, claiming the movie “breaks the stereotypes both ways.”
If there was a way to have To Wong Foo be an uproarious comedy and a true-to-life depiction of the drag scene that also appealed to the average straight American, I’m not sure what it would have looked like. As for the story we got, I’m not sure if it meets Cohen’s expectation.
The citizens of Snydersville live lives that are at best boring & bleak, and at worst filled with violence or the regular threat of it. This is all in service of contrast. The main trio leave the town a bright, happy, wonderful place, not at all the dusty nightmare they found themselves in initially.
It leaves the movie wanting to have it both ways. The drag world is safe, clean, fun, a good time for everyone at all times. The outside world is filled with homophobes, rapist cops, and a general malaise that threatens to swallow everyone into oblivion. Yet, when the drag queens run into this misery, it’s still expected to be taken in as a comedy.
One questionable subplot has Vida trying to convince the innkeeper to leave her abusive marriage to the town mechanic. Eventually, Swayze’s character takes matters into her own hands and kicks the shit out of him before tossing the wifebeater out of his own home. The scene is basically empowering, but it and another moment earlier in the movie where Chi-Chi is implied to be in danger of gang rape play so weirdly next to scenes of sashaying and makeovers, especially given that the film’s score refuses to keep it anything but light and bouncy.
This is also another movie that thinks that a character having a stutter is, by itself, comedy gold. This trope isn’t as egregiously mean as it is in something like A Fish Called Wanda [3.5/5], but it still leads to scenes where the movie expects me to be laughing at this otherwise regular store owner having difficulty expressing his points due to a physical disability. Not nearly as upsetting as the domestic violence and sexual assault stuff here, but it’s still another disappointing knock against To Wong Foo, especially when the scene around the character is so focused on empowerment and expressing yourself.
Director (and future member of the House of Lords) Beeban Kidron had never directed a major motion picture before To Wong Foo, instead cutting her teeth on acclaimed British television dramas and documentaries; one notable piece of her pre-1995 filmography is Vroom, a Channel4 movie that was the feature length debut of Clive Owen.
I wouldn’t say Kidron’s work on To Wong Foo is brilliant, auteur stuff, but she occasionally displayed a strong eye for visual storytelling. The group shots of the drag awards at the beginning of the movie were fantastic, contrasting well with the isolation and empty space of Snydersville. And there’s this shot at the end of the movie that captures a zoomed out view on the final celebration in town. You can’t tell who’s a drag queen and who isn’t, but it doesn’t matter, since they’re all joined in harmonious joy. Nice stuff!
Does To Wong Foo work well as a time capsule to let me know what America was like the week I was born? Textually speaking, not really. Snydersville pulls more aesthetically from the 50s than the 90s as a way to accentuate the difference between the glamorous New York City energy of the main trio and their temporary surroundings. Even the scenes in the big city at the start of the movie don’t feel visually tied to the mid 1990s.
The most 90s thing about To Wong Foo is its tangential place in the New Queer Cinema movement. Coined by culture writer B. Ruby Rich in 1992, the term referred initially to LGBT-focused films taking critical festivals like Sundance by storm. She pointed to Paris is Burning and Todd Hayne’s Poison as the most notable movies in the scene at the time, but as Rich said in her defining article:
“The new queer films and videos aren’t all the same, and don’t share a single aesthetic vocabulary or strategy or concern. Yet they are nonetheless united by a common style…there are traces in all of them of appropriation and pastiche, irony, as well as a reworking of history with social constructionism very much in mind…above all, they’re full of pleasure. They’re here, they’re queer, get hip to them.”
The rest of the 1990s would continue to see movies that fit somewhere in that broad definition of a genre. Indie fare like The Incredibly True Adventures of Two Girls in Love [3/5] and the Wachowski-directed Bound, big multiplex crowd pleasers like To Wong Foo and The Birdcage (what a movie, can’t wait to write about it), and films caught somewhere in between like But I’m A Cheerleader [4/5] and Orlando were just a small part of the New Queer Cinema movement. Each movie in this scene had something to say about the evolving state of queerness in the aftermath of the AIDS crisis.
Amid the movies I listed above, To Wong Foo is probably the most overtly commercial attempt by a big studio at a film to be considered New Queer Cinema. That doesn’t mean it lacks pastiche or irony though, and it does have a relevant LGBT-related topic to explore with those tools.
What To Wong Foo captures specifically about this time was an increased visibility and acceptance in drag culture. Obscure in the 80s, the New York drag scene rose from the turmoil of Reagan and AIDS to express artistic freedom and liveliness.
Emblematic of this was the concurrent rise of RuPaul (who brilliantly cameos in the movie as a Confederacy-themed queen named Rachel Tensions). With appearance on talk shows like The Arsenio Hall Show, a friendship with Kurt Cobain at the height of his fame, and even a charting dance hit with “Supermodel,” the queen was establishing the roots of a mainstream presence that would persist to now. Against the backdrop of the Drag Boom, To Wong Foo acts as a fun (albeit whitewashed) depiction of a subculture already becoming in vogue with the average ticket-buying American.
In fact, according to famous drag queen Lady Bunny, the movie not only acted as a reflection of drag’s increasing popularity, but a boon to it as well. “That was a tipping point,” she said to NBC news in 2020. “With that movie, you had a lot of the queens, including me, who were in it with male action stars in drag. And you knew that drag is mainstream…You are something for a mainstream audience.”
Many people tend to over nostalgize the 90s as this beautiful era where everything was good and nothing bad happened, which of course is a crock of shit. Still, it’s tough to read a quote like that or watch a movie like To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar and not feel a little wistful for a time when drag queens could not only be accepted but embraced by mainstream society. The continued popularity of shows like RuPaul’s Drag Race is small comfort when drag shows across the United States have faced hundreds of threats and acts of violence since 2022.
I would be remiss if I didn’t also mention the other notable movie about traveling drag queens that came out the year before To Wong Foo. The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert is an Australian dark comedy about two drag queens and a transgender woman venturing across Australia in order to make it to a cushy performing job. Along the way, they run into both new friends and hostile townies that make no secret of their animosity towards the trio.
While never the sole focus, Priscilla doesn’t shy away from showing real, hateful violence being threatened and nearly committed against our protagonists for the mere act of being queer and visible. The movie was a critical hit in America and grossed over $30 million here on a $2 million budget, a huge success considering its subject matter and niche Australian references. Many contemporaneous reviews of To Wong Foo compare the two movies, though I find them much more different than those critics did at the time.
While the two are both road trip movies involving drag queens, ultimately the American production aims to be more of a mainstream crowd pleaser, while the Australian film leans into darker moments and complicated characterization.
At no point during To Wong Foo are we really meant to root against any of the main trio; Vida, Noxeema, and Chi-Chi have some minor differences and disagreements between them, but they’re basically always on the same page. Meanwhile, there are many times when Guy Pearce’s character in Priscilla acts antagonistically towards everyone including the other protagonists, nearly getting them killed and acting like a total jackass for no reason except for the fun of it all. It leads to more charged interactions and relationships, but I’d argue it’s part of what makes the movie more compelling than its American counterpart.
After seeing both movies, it’s impossible to ignore the differences in quality. I’d recommend To Wong Foo if the concept sounds interesting to you and you pass by it on a streaming service on a lazy Saturday afternoon. Meanwhile I think you should actively seek out and watch The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. It’s a great movie with performances from Hugo Weaving and Pearce that are so killer that they elevate my esteem of the actors, both of whom I already felt were quite talented.
It isn’t perfect of course. The edges it refuses to sand off from the story lead to some questionable instances of racism and transphobia, neither of which felt remotely necessary. But I still think Priscilla is an easy 4/5, a rating that would likely go up even further on rewatch.
Critics at the time were pretty mixed on To Wong Foo, something reflected in its Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic scores. Swayze, Snipes, and Leguizamo were all commended for their performances, with Swayze and Leguizamo being nominated for Golden Globes for their turns as Vida and Chi-Chi. But the movie’s script and pacing issues are too hard to ignore, even during a casual watch. The critical split is exemplified by Siskel and Ebert on their review show: the former recommended it, the latter did not.
Producer Mitch Kohn, another gay man involved behind the scenes of To Wong Foo, wrote a wonderful retrospective on the process of getting the movie made for The Advocate in 2015, which is really worth a read in full. He acknowledges the similarities between it and Adventures of Priscilla, as well as the mixed reviews that critics hit it with at the time.
But he also connects the film back to the horror of the AIDS crisis in a beautiful, profoundly simple way.
“…Perhaps the fact that the film didn't deal with dying men -- whom straight audiences could cry over in a theater but disdain in the real world -- and instead featured three healthy, out, proud, unapologetically gay queens made its mere existence particularly noteworthy.”
If you want to explore movies in the New Queer Cinema movement that have more to say in more interesting ways, I’d start with another movie, maybe But I’m a Cheerleader. But To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar is a fun, albeit sanded down time with great performances and killer costume design. Though not incredible as a movie, it’s a fun way to start this journey. Enjoy the fashion, the queens, and the good times.
Final Rating: 3/5
Next Week: Don’t worry, the fun times don’t last forever. In the next edition of A Life Through Film, we’ll be talking about Se7en.
See you next week!
-Will