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esbian fantasies in the form of grand musical numbers are the reigning motif in Jennie Livingston's new short film Who's the Top? Livingston made her mark with her 1991 film Paris is Burning, which documented rollicking festivals called "balls" in '80s New York City, where men dressed up as beautiful women or ruddy sailors. Currently making the festival rounds, Who's the Top? has been a long time in the making. Originally conceived as a feature-length drama, in 1998 Livingston shot a trailer that evolved into its current form, a twenty-two-minute short. The film centers around twentysomething Alixe, who is frustrated with a girlfriend who doesn't want to explore sexually. Alixe travels to San Francisco to interview a poet for her zine, and has an encounter with Mars, a hot top. The short includes Alixe's fantasies, which come in elaborately choreographed dance sequences with over twenty dancers, Steve Buscemi as the poet CYMON Blank, and the best Marie Antoinette fantasy we've ever seen. Hooksexup sat down with Livingston over chocolate sorbet. — Sarah Harrison

When did you get the idea for Who's The Top?

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I was living for a couple of years in San Francisco, and I was in a bar with a friend of mine, the brilliant experimental novelist Kathy Acker. We were at this pub in the Mission and there was this woman doing a really amazing striptease. The dancer is in high femme drag, and at the end she had this shaved head and a really big facial piercing. Kathy said to me, "So are you going to make a movie about this?" and I said, "What do you mean — about this striptease?" and she said, "No, no, the whole thing. You're in the midst of something subcultural and you think it's going to last forever, but I've seen all these things, and they're all gone. You gotta make a movie about it!" And I thought, "I don't want to make a documentary about the whole gender-bending leather-sex club thing."

So you made a fantasy film instead. Why?
Because to me what's interesting about sex is that it's internal. It's cliché, but it's true. You can make a documentary like Paris is Burning because balls are what they are. They are a biological man dressed as a woman who's not a woman or they are a man dressed as an executive who's not an executive, they are a witty drag queen going on and on about brilliant things. You can capture some essence that is somewhat true. But to me what was interesting about that whole '90s scene was how as a person you experience a transformation because you have sex with someone or read pornography and it suggests to you what your interests in sex and power are. The other inspiration for wanting to do this film was you never see nerdy girls; they're off in the corner being the fat, funny friend. A central character who's both intelligent and sexual — I've not seen it.

There's Saving Face.
Absolutely, but she's not nerdy. You know she's smart, but essentially she's a beautiful, sensual character. Saving Face is amazing, it totally breaks ground, but it's not about a Woody-Allen kind of a character, whose intellectual-ness and awkwardness does battle with libido.

I read that the film was about "the lesbian sex wars in the '90s."

Jennie Livingston

Can you tell me about that? In the '80s, women created a very lesbian version of sex clubs, S+M, role playing, butch-femme, bucking, all of that stuff that feminists in the '70s said was toxic. The oppositional '70s gals said it was regressive, selling out to the patriarchy and allowing women to engage in their own subjugation. And that's the lesbian sex wars.

What's going on with lesbians now?
I'm trying to figure out what's going on now, because I'm newly single! I was with a partner for nine years, so now I'm like, "What is going on?" But this is what someone said to me and I thought it was true: "What's hot is babies."

Do you think it's going to get easier to be a lesbian filmmaker?
I don't know. I think the culture has gotten shockingly conservative. I think the centrist cultural view is very far right, and very unquestioning. The hope is that there will be a hunger and a need for new movies to come in. I think the best movie this year is Wallace and Gromit. It's brilliant. And it's political in this weird way.

How did you decide how much sex to show?
This is kind of a funny story, and no one ever asks about this, so I never get to tell it! Originally, the thing that's now the movie was a trailer to sell the idea of the feature, so the first time we didn't shoot a sex scene at all, because it's already ambitious to do the musical number. We did four days of shooting, and we had a cut of the trailer, and my then-girlfriend looked at it and said, "You know, Jennie, you have a movie about sex and there's no sex in it!" So I thought, we can do that.

How do you keep it intimate when you're directing a sex scene?
Casting is 90% of your work. I think part of it was just that there was chemistry between them. On the set, no one was allowed in the room except the DP and me. At one point one actress felt it was too intense, and she told me, and I had to talk to the other one and say, "Hey, you gotta scale that back." I think an actor has to be willing to put themselves on the line and you as a director have to be really respectful of that because it's so brave to use your body to express something.

Why did you decide to use musical numbers as a way to express fantasies?
I'm not a really big musical fan, but I like the Hollywood convention of taking what's gnarly and awful and turning it into a show. Certainly the musical was very popular during the Depression when people wanted to be taken out of their bad reality and entertained. And I like the idea of taking something that's considered very bad and wrong and dark, and make it something totally sweet and beautiful and sexy. To this character it's a liberation to explore her sexuality. That's the kind of epiphany that a musical number suggests — that moment of true love, or that moment of connection was the kind of mood that I wanted to suggest.

How did you come up with the actual fantasies? Some are crazy, like the one with the vagina-shaped skirt . . .
The Marie Antoinette thing! I don't remember the origin of it. There are so many crazy fantasies in this script, fantasies based on the game show Jeopardy and all these things from popular culture and from history. But the Marie Antoinette thing was really about the idea of Alixe being a sexual revolutionary. The movie deals a lot with the border between fantasy and reality.

How much you think people should give in to their fantasies?
I don't think people should freak out if they have a fantasy that's a little bit violent, because our society and all our entertainment is suffused in violence. It couldn't not come up in your fantasy life or your dream life. I think what's wrong is that sometimes people have a fantasy that is a little scary and they think, "Oh my God! I had sex with twenty men! What does that mean?" Well, it means you had a fantasy and you need to get together with your husband and have sex because you're bubbling over with this erotic energy. Kinsey said we're all bisexual, and for me, my fantasy life has never been just about women. It's also about men — men on the street, men in my head, lots of men everywhere.

How did you learn about sex as a child?
I think I learned through TV. Isn't that how everybody learned about sex? I remember my mother, when I got old enough to discuss sex with her, she said sex is fantastic, it's great, and she had a lot of boyfriends in college and boys are great. I remember her saying, when we were talking about drugs, "You don't need to take drugs; sex is better than any drug you could take."

Would you say that the movie has a similar message?
The goal of Who's the Top? is that someone would watch it and say, "Yeah, I have something in me that I'm embarrassed of and that I don't know what to do with, but it's really okay."  n°

  ©2006 Sarah Harrison and hooksexup.com.