In 2016, Taylor Mac performed a one-time-only, 24-hour immersive theatrical experience in front of a live audience at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn. The concert offered an alternative take on U.S. history, narrated through music that was popular from the nation’s founding to the present, with Mac transforming hourly by changing into elaborate, decade-specific costumes by his longtime collaborator Machine Dazzle. The HBO documentary directed by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, Taylor Mac’s 24-Decade History of Popular Music, captures Mac’s marathon performance in New York, alongside footage from other shows on the tour, which played throughout the world, and interviews that offer insight into its creation. In the show, Mac and 24 musicians interpret 24 decades of songs, from “Yankee Doodle” to “Gimme Shelter,” “Born to Run” and “Gloria,” with one performer leaving the stage each hour, until Mac is on stage alone in the final 24th hour.
Forming their San Francisco-based production company Telling Pictures in 1987, Epstein and Friedman have built a rich body of work chronicling and examining queer lives over the last century, many of the films are landmark, seminal works which not only form an integral part of cinema history but have helped to shape our perception of ourselves and our place in the world, while creating meaningful LGBTQ visibility. Among their many previous collaborations are the Academy Award-winning AIDS documentary, Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt; the Emmy-nominated, Peabody-winning documentary The Celluloid Closet, a study of queer images in Hollywood movies based on Vito Russo’s book; the Teddy-winning Paragraph 175 which examines the persecution of gay men in Germany under its titular sodomy law; the Sundance Grand Jury Prize-nominated Howl, which recreates the 1957 obscenity trial following the publication of Ginsberg’s poem; and the 2013 biopic Lovelace starring Amanda Seyfried as the star of the notorious 1970s adult film Deep Throat. Epstein and Friedman’s 1992 documentary Where Are We? Our Trip Through America, saw the filmmakers take a road trip through an America unknown to them, seeking to find some common ground with those they encountered at a time of sharp divisions in the country over LGBTQ issues and the Gulf War.
With Emmy voting now underway and Taylor Mac’s 24-Decade History of Popular Music streaming on Max, Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman speak exclusively with The Queer Review’s editor James Kleinmann about documenting this monumental work.
How familiar were each of you with Taylor Mac before you became involved as directors on this film?
Rob Epstein: “The first time I saw Taylor on stage was during a performance that Justin Vivian Bond was doing in San Francisco at the Castro Theatre. Taylor was asked to come up and do a number with Viv and it brought down the house and I thought, who is this creature? When he was back in San Francisco doing The Lily’s Revenge in 2011, which was also fully immersive, that was the first show of his that I saw and I’ve been following him ever since. I’ve seen his holiday shows and I had read about the 24-hour show but I hadn’t seen it.”
Jeffrey Friedman: “I also caught up with him at The Lily’s Revenge at the Magic Theatre in San Francisco. That was a really interesting experimental theatrical production and I became fascinated with him as an innovative theatre artist.”
Neither of you were present for the 24-hour performance in Brooklyn, but I imagine that when this came to you as an idea there must have been a huge amount of footage to select from.
Jeffrey: “There really was. Taylor and his people had filmed the 24-hour show and also filmed the LA performances which were done as six-hour shows over four nights. They had all this footage with multiple cameras of each performance as well as a lot of rehearsal footage. When we heard that they wanted to adapt it for the screen we immediately threw our names into the hat.”
When you did start working on it, how collaborative was the process with Taylor Mac? Did he give you a vision of what he would like the film to be or leave you to your own devices?
Rob: “From the beginning he said, ‘This is your film, I want you to figure it out’. So we were tasked with that and he was certainly true to his word. We showed him cuts and he would give his feedback but it was all in the form of suggestion. The first thing that the three of us did was sit down and watch the 24-hour show and we decided what we could eliminate right off the bat. So there was around 10% of the 24 hours that we collectively agreed that we didn’t have to consider. Then Jeffrey and I, with our editor Brian Johnson, spent the next 10 months shaping it.”
“Jeffrey and I felt that there needed to be more context for the show and when Taylor mentioned that they were going to doing a photoshoot of Machine Dazzle’s costumes, we thought that would be a great opportunity for us to do a documentary element. So we used that situation to get interviews with the key creatives and that became the underpinning for the concert film.”
How did you go about striking that balance so well of using those interviews sparingly, but giving us such a great insight into the show and contextualizing it?
Jeffrey: “We wanted to build a narrative within the narrative of the show, partly to stitch together the pieces but also to give a sense of how the show was conceived and where it came from in Taylor’s psyche and how it was put together. So that balance was something that we discovered through the editing process. We really wanted to find a way to show how 24-Decade History was a personal expression of Taylor’s sensibility, what it meant to Taylor and why he decided to do it in this way. The show itself becomes more personal as Taylor enters the picture as a human being in the late 20th century. His coming of age and coming out is when the history of the United States merges with Taylor’s own history and the queer perspective that Taylor has been applying to the entire range of history really begins to make sense.”
One aspect that is told beautifully and movingly in the film is the symbolism of one band member leaving the stage each hour and its connection to the AIDS crisis. What was your approach to revealing that in the film?
Jeffrey: “In the stage show the rationale for the AIDS metaphor is not revealed until after the 21st hour, so it’s something that the audience is experiencing but the thematic underpinnings are not clear until we get to that point in the history. In the documentary of the concert we felt that it would have more impact if we let the audience in on it earlier. It still doesn’t really sink in at the beginning when you learn about it, but we wanted to plant it there in the viewer’s mind so that when it was fully explained at the end it would have an even greater emotional impact.”
Some concert films never show the audience at all, but here the audience was really integral to the piece wasn’t it?
Rob: “Absolutely and we wanted to have some representation of what it was like from the experience of the audience as well as the performers. We found moments that revealed how Taylor was asking them to participate and what the expectation of that participation was from both his point of view and the audience’s experience of it.”
Jeffrey: “Part of what Taylor does in this show is that he uses the audience to illustrate his theme of communities that are building themselves as they’re being torn apart. He wanted the audience to experience that. He wanted the audience to be falling apart and coalescing as a community. That’s a big part of the magic of what Taylor is able to accomplish as a theatre artist in this show. He builds community in real time and creates an experience for the audience that becomes visceral. It goes beyond a cerebral idea of the themes, the audience is really experiencing and enacting what Taylor is illustrating.”
What were your thoughts on the way that Taylor both uncovers queer history and queers history with this show?
Jeffrey: “History has mostly been written by straight men and a lot of the queerness was bleached out of it. There’s always an assumption when a straight man is recounting history that history is straight and I think it’s refreshing and subversive in a wonderful way for somebody to approach history as something that’s queer and not assuming that everybody’s straight, but giving them the benefit of the doubt!”
Rob: “Underneath it all, through this queer lens musical interpretation, Taylor’s position is, ‘look what queer culture has to offer the world and look what we’ve contributed through the course of history’. It’s all done with such a generosity of spirit. I think that’s why it feels so inclusive for any audience who might be participating in it because it’s done in a spirit of ‘we’re all in this together’.”
Something that keeps the show extremely visually stimulating are Machine Dazzle’s costumes, how did you go about capturing them in the film?
Rob: “Words can’t do the costumes or Machine justice! His medium is costume, but he’s really a conceptual artist. Taylor’s concept was drag as metaphor and Machine did such a brilliant job of finding the metaphor in all the details.”
Jeffrey: “One of the the advantages of doing the documentary sequences during the photoshoot and interviewing Machine was that it allowed us to get close to the costumes in a way you really can’t on stage. When you’re seeing them on stage, you see them as a whole presentation that looks period appropriate. You can see some details, but you can’t see that Walt Whitman’s dress is made out of potato chip bags and torn out pages of gay porn magazines or what’s written on the hotdogs of the headdress in the Civil War costume. So those segments allowed us to explore all those fun details more fully.”
I love that Machine used his own cassettes for the shroud that he made for the 1980s costume. What a beautiful use for them.
Jeffrey: “I know, I’d love to find a use for my old CDs!”
You also directed Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice. What is your approach to capturing live music in a documentary and giving the viewer a sense of what it was like to be there?
Jeffrey: “With the Linda Ronstadt film, we knew early on that performance was going to be the central motor. So in seeing Linda and hearing her perform all of the music that defined her career, we wanted those moments to have time to breathe, so that it wouldn’t feel like a talking heads documentary with snippets of music in it the way that many documentaries are made. We really wanted the music to carry the narrative.”
Rob: “It was same with the Taylor film. Even though some of them are condensed, we wanted it to feel like you were experiencing a full number.”
By James Kleinmann
Taylor Mac’s 24-Decade History of Popular Music is streaming on Max.
