To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar
1995 · Beeban Kidron
Manhattan drag queens Vida Boheme and Noxeema Jackson impress regional judges in competition, securing berths in the Nationals in Los Angeles. When the two meet pathetic drag novice Chi-Chi Rodriguez — one of the losers that evening — the charmed Vida and Noxeema agree to take the hopeless youngster under their joined wing. Soon the three set off on a madcap road trip across America and struggle to make it to Los Angeles in time.
dir. Beeban Kidron · 1995
A year after 'Priscilla, Queen of the Desert,' Hollywood produced its own drag road movie, and the gamble was the casting: Patrick Swayze, Wesley Snipes, and John Leguizamo — three of the era's most conspicuously macho stars — as queens stranded in a small Midwestern town when their Cadillac breaks down en route to a national pageant. British director Beeban Kidron, fresh from 'Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit,' steers the material with more warmth than edge; the politics are gentle, the town's conversion to fabulousness a fairy tale, and the queens remain chastely unattached in ways the film's own descendants would refuse. But the sincerity is disarming. Swayze in particular plays Vida Boheme not as stunt but as full characterization — grave, maternal, wounded — and earned a Golden Globe nomination for it. The title comes from a photograph of Julie Newmar, autographed with those words, that the queens carry like a relic. Look for RuPaul, presiding over the opening pageant in the years before drag conquered television.
Lines of influence
- The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994) — Supplies the entire chassis To Wong Foo copies — three drag queens crossing a continent in a broken-down vehicle, stranded among rural squares, staging lip-synced diva numbers — transplanted from the Australian outback to small-town America.
- Some Like It Hot (1959) — Establishes the comic grammar of hyper-masculine male stars 'passing' in full femme, where both the laughs and the tenderness come from the gap between the actor's body and the gown — the device that makes Swayze and Snipes' casting register.
- Tootsie (1982) — Models the straight leading-man-in-a-dress as an engine for gender empathy and a community's re-education, the template for casting macho stars against type so their femininity teaches the people around them.
- La Cage aux Folles (1978) — Pioneers the mainstream-crossover gentle-queer comedy that plays drag as domestic warmth and maternal devotion rather than transgression, the tonal blueprint for Kidron's non-threatening politics.
- Paris Is Burning (1990) — Codified the drag 'house mother'/maternal-queen archetype and ballroom 'realness' that Vida Boheme's poised, protective authority over her younger charges directly draws on.
- The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) — Provides the 'conversion to fabulousness' template — glamorous gender-outlaws descend on repressed middle-American innocents and liberate them from their squareness through sheer theatrical excess.
- The Wizard of Oz (1939) — Lends the fairy-tale sincerity and stranded-travelers-transform-a-drab-town structure, plus the storybook Technicolor tonal register that Kidron adopts over any gritty realism.
- Mrs. Doubtfire (1993) — Contemporaneous hit built on the same man-in-matronly-drag-as-nurturing-mother device, where the disguise turns a male performer into the emotional caretaking center of a household/community.
- Stonewall (1995) — Same-year drag-centered queer feature bringing camp performance and gay-liberation narrative into mainstream feature form, sharing the mid-1990s move to humanize drag for general audiences.
- Wigstock: The Movie (1995) — Concurrent documentary capturing the same drag-performance milieu and lip-sync-diva star culture (including RuPaul) that To Wong Foo fictionalizes and glamorizes for Hollywood.
- The Birdcage (1996) — The immediate A-list-star mainstream drag comedy whose greenlight To Wong Foo's box office helped enable, extending gentle-queer-politics-wins-over-conservatives to a broad audience.
- Kinky Boots (2005) — Clearest inheritor of 'small-town conversion to fabulousness' — a drag performer literally revitalizes a dying provincial factory town by dazzling its skeptical working-class locals.
- Hairspray (2007) — Anchors a feel-good musical on a beloved male star in matronly drag (Travolta as Edna Turnblad) whose warmth helps win over bigoted squares, extending the man-in-drag-as-maternal-heart device.
- Connie and Carla (2004) — Fugitives hide out performing within a drag community and build a found family, echoing the queens-teach-and-embrace-outsiders warmth and the drag-troupe-as-chosen-family structure.
- Everybody's Talking About Jamie (2021) — Reworks drag-as-small-town-liberation with the same fairy-tale sincerity and a mentoring maternal queen guiding a novice into fabulousness against a provincial backdrop.
- RuPaul's Drag Race (2009) — Fulfills the film's anticipation of drag's mainstreaming — RuPaul, who cameos in To Wong Foo, turned the lip-sync-diva drag aesthetic into mass-audience television.
Appears in courses