John Cameron Mitchell Brings Hedwig Back to Houston

John Cameron Mitchell returns to Houston with a special screening of Hedwig and the Angry Inch presented by Arthouse Houston on December 28. The film, playing at Numbers Nightclub right before the new year, will be accompanied by a live commentary from the film’s writer, director, and lead actor.

For those who are unfamiliar, the 2001 indie musical classic follows Hedwig, an East Berliner transplant and lead singer in a band, who is chasing down his ex for stealing his songs. The road-trip film is a kaleidoscope of the fringes, showcasing a punk scene that involved anyone defying labels.

It’s also adapted from a musical that Mitchell produced with his collaborator, Stephen Trask. Together, they came up with the idea, built the characters, wrote the script and music, and produced the production off-Broadway. “I had been hanging out in the drag and rock-and-roll clubs in the late ’80s and early ’90s, and the energy and excitement I would see at those performances didn’t outstrip the excitement I would feel in a musical or on Broadway,” says Mitchell. “So I wanted to bring the energy of punk and drag to a Broadway-style musical.”

While it took almost 20 years for the production to actually transition to Broadway (where it won four Tonys, including Best Revival of a Musical), Mitchell didn’t hesitate in finding his own adaptations of the material. “Bob Shaye, from New Line Cinema, liked how I operated. He later gave me $6 million to direct the film version, having never made a short. It was a different time—pre corporate, pre-digital—where one person could make a decision like that. It was a wonderful opportunity to be free and to learn from my collaborators and just stay in the same vein as Hedwig.”

These collaborators, sometimes on set and others behind the scenes, really helped champion Mitchell’s vision and find the right outlet. While it was Bob who helped give him the financial means and freedom, it was through the Sundance Filmmakers Lab that he was really able to find the right visionaries to execute the film version that Mitchell intended.

“The lab was really important for that. Michelle Satter, who runs it, paired me with my cinematographer who ended up doing the film.” It also helped to find the people who would work off the clock to find the right voice and ideas for the final film. They had a full year to work on it, culminating in a Sundance premiere where Mitchell won the Best Director prize.

While the film didn’t exactly light the box office on fire, it completely changed Mitchell’s life. “Hedwig was a flop, commercially,” he admits, “but it’s opened up every door in my life, introduced me to the most important people in my life, and continues to give.”

Mitchell grounded his next career steps in making projects he believed in, wanting to be proud of every project he was involved in rather than making choices in response to expectations. “Usually, the Hollywood path is you make an interesting film and then Hollywood grabs you and throws money at you and makes you do a Marvel movie or something,” he says. “They don’t give those to established directors. They give them to new directors so they can pay them less, control them, and then somehow co-opt their talent. I just knew I wouldn’t like myself in an environment where I was doing something I didn’t care about. So I just went on to do Shortbus.”

Mitchell’s commitment to determining his own career path has led him to direct four feature-length films, alongside a plethora of projects producing, writing, acting, podcasting, and more. “It’s all the same storytelling tradition,” he says, “just in different forms.”

Elevating storytelling above a particular medium is central to his ideology, and how he envisions his role in inspiring future generations. “I’ll always be trying new things, as well as trying to mentor people and help them along and find their own voices. I do college tours and try to remind the kids that things were worse,” he says.

It’s also vital in the current political climate to combat the contemporary wave of right-wing resurgence. “It’s time to let go of some of the tools that people were taught, which tend to be more about political correctness and identity politics. That’s irrelevant today. You can’t cancel a dictator,” he says. 

This sentiment is rooted in the continual misunderstanding of Hedwig as a trans character, even though he never identifies as such in the film. For Mitchell, there’s freedom in the absence of classification, which is part of the excitement around the culture of punk. He hesitates to even classify Hedwig as a gay movie. Mitchell sees the punk scene as a space that bridges differences rather than demarcating them, even publishing a New York Times opinion piece earlier this year calling for young people to find ways of organizing outside of approved systems.

The commitment to the possibilities of punk are integral to everything Mitchell does, including his recent endeavors with both the Origins of Love tour (familiar to anyone who has seen Hedwig) and his David Bowie persona, Queen Bitch. Both will be highlighted at Numbers, where Mitchell will follow the film with a live performance alongside Amber Martin and Chapman Welch. Martin, a native Texan (Port Arthur, specifically), will be bringing out some of her country originals including “I Left My Weed in Texas, and That Ain’t Cool.”

In addition to the screening of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Mitchell will be presenting a free masterclass from 12 to 2 p.m. on Friday, December 28, aimed at film and arts students. “I’ll be talking about strategies of storytelling, strategies of resistance, and using art as a kind of resistance—because it comes through the same source as truth. In my view, when all news is fake, then all stories are true, for better or worse. Some of them are conspiracy theories that explain our failures or the failure of society, and others are beautiful, imaginative metaphors that help us live and feel empathy for someone that we are not. That is the point of fiction. Now that facts are dead, maybe the only thing we have left that brings us together is narrative—identifying with someone who is not you because it’s good and it rings true.”

WHAT: Special screening of Hedwig and the Angry Inch presented by Arthouse Houston
WHEN: December 28
WHERE: Numbers Nightclub, 300 Westheimer Rd.
INFO: arthousehtx.org