In 1990, the filmmaker Jennie Livingstone made her way to the streets of New York City to meet the movers and shakers of the sub-culture often cast into Pop culture’s shadows.
What she delivered following her journey? ‘Paris is Burning’, an upbeat yet arguably despairing documentary about the lives of players in the city’s gay and drag culture.
Many of these players, now deceased, are to thank for sights and sounds popularised by the likes of Beyonce , Madonna (see origins of ‘Vogue‘) and Lady GaGa.
This year, ‘The Butler’ director Lee Daniels has revealed that he hopes to retell their stories by way of a reboot.
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In an interview to promote his new TV series ‘Star’ Daniels shared:
The show’s main characters will do whatever it takes. They’ll murder. They’ll f— you. They’ll rob you. [The characters] Star and Simone are very, very poor. They come from the foster-care system, and we explore the atrocities that happen there… That performance that Teyana Taylor did at the MTV Video Music Awards? Well, we’re going to get down in the dirt with mine. You’ll see the girls with the gay boys voguing in a way TV audiences are yet to see. It will be very much like ‘Paris Is Burning,’ which influenced me growing up. I told Queen Latifah that we should remake ‘Paris Is Burning’ as a musical.
The project’s bold take on homophobia, classism and racism saw it earn over
$3,779,620 on the back of a $500,000 budget and propel the likes of Octavia St. Laurent into the general public’s awareness.