by Anthony Glassman, contributor

Every once in a while, two people work together and become fast friends. Decades of friendship and collaborations follow, and the world is just that little bit better for it.

Such is the case with Charles Busch, who if I were to engage in cultural appropriation might be described as my spirit animal, and his friend, co-writer, co-director and all-around incredibly pleasant person, Carl Andress.

Because of the refusal to engage in cultural appropriation, Busch is instead my Yiddishe Camp Goddess. Andress, with whom I’m less familiar, is my incredibly pleasant person who I interviewed earlier this week, since he and Busch are premiering their new film, The Sixth Reel, as the Special Tribute Centerpiece of Outfest Los Angeles 2021, honoring producer Ash Christian, who died at 35 years of age last year. The screening will also benefit SAGE, the national advocacy and services organization for LGBTQ+ elders. The film debuts on August 19, and online and in-person tickets are available at www.TheSixthReel.com.

Busch is an Off-Broadway icon, known for Lesbian Vampires of Sodom, Broadway hit The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife, and Psycho Beach Party and Die, Mommie, Die!, the latter two both having also been turned into films. Andress has made a name for himself directing and acting, and he and Busch have worked together on the stage many times over their 25-year friendship, as well as having created the film A Very Serious Person together.

“I can’t even compute how many plays we’ve done together,” Andress said. 

“Carl is one of my adopted nephews,” Busch recounted. “I met him, he was just 23. We met and I immediately saw the value and intelligence of this young guy. I started relying on his advice and artistic opinion really quickly, and we became colleagues.”

That collegial relationship has now culminated in The Sixth Reel, which they wrote together over Skype during the cold, dark months of COVID quarantine in New York City. They’d had the idea kicking around, but the enforced solitude of lockdown provided the impetus to get it done.

The addition of Christian was fortuitous.

“The year before, Charles had met Ash Christian at the premiere of one of his movies, and it was low budget but looked very expensive,” Andress recalled. 

“I was desperate to make another movie for a long, long time, for a decade,” Busch said. He and Andress were originally looking at adapting Busch’s play The Confession of Lily Dare, which was nominated for Drama Desk and Lucille Lortel Awards in 2020. However, Lily Dare would have been too big an undertaking, perhaps.

“To be done well, it would be very expensive,” he said, “it’s period and has musical numbers. We had to come up with a movie that is contemporary and we can shoot quickly here in New York City.” 

“We envisioned shooting in friends’ apartments,” Andress noted, saying that they had different peoples’ buildings in mind for the various sets in the film.

So they took one of their great loves, the cinema, and make a movie about… well… movies. A particular movie, in fact, one that is lost to the annals of history, and would make any true lover of film pluck out his or her eyeteeth for a chance to see it, even if only its… sixth reel.

Joining Busch onscreen is Julie Halston, who he has long referred to as his muse, and seeing them play off each other, it is easy to see why. “Carl thought it would be good to capture on film that stage dynamic,” Busch said.

“So therefore we instantly knew from scenarios that they had played before, demeanors on the top of our head quite quickly,” Andress said. “So many people love Charles and Julie onstage, and I thought it was important to catch that magic on film.”

“The first play we did together was Lesbian Vampires of Sodom, Julie played the Succubus,” Busch said. “Over the years, she’s really succeeded in that role.”

“There are 13 speaking roles in the film, and we didn’t audition people,” he continued. “These roles were written for the actors.”

“Margaret Cho was the first person we asked and she was the first person to come back with a yes, so we started Zooming with her,” Andress said. 

The cast also includes the legendary André De Shields, Doug Plaut, Patrick Page, and Tim Daly, among other wonderful talents. And Daly is the third 1990s TV icon Busch gets to schtup in a film, after Thomas Gibson and Jason Priestley. He was cagey about which television hunk would be his next target.

The film was shot in October 2020, under strict Screen Actors Guild COVID protocols.

“It’s kind of scary to do this and to be in a low budget film, but they all wanted to do it,” Busch said, noting that much of the cast wouldn’t have been available had COVID not shuttered their shows. 

Andress pointed out that one of the film’s greatest accomplishments might never really be recognized. “We managed to keep 80 people COVID-free for a month. We just did it right, all the guidelines, not a single person in the cast or crew broke the rules, and we made the movie.”

While they had originally intended it to be shot in situ, the reality of the situation had a different scenario in mind.

“If there had not been COVID, we might have tried that, and it would have been agonizing shooting in tiny Village apartments,” he said, noting that they instead used Umbra Studios, just outside New York City. “What was really interesting was that none of us involved in the film had an experience shooting a movie in this very classic Hollywood way on a soundstage. It really was kind of fabulous.”

“The two big apartments in the movie were completely constructed on the soundstage, and they’re complete apartments, bathrooms, sinks, everything,” he continued, while Andress noted that the set decorator was besides herself trying to layer coat of paint upon coat of paint to make it seem like an authentic New York City apartment. “I remember her saying, ‘I’m worried about the paint,’” he laughed.

“Scouting in New York for the exteriors informed what the interiors whould be,” Andress continued. “It was a lot of planning in a tight amount of the time. We had to do 10 hour days and only had 15 days to shoot.”

“There was one day we were worried we didn’t have enough coverage for a very vital scene, and we were worried we would have to go back,” he remembered.

“It’s normal that there’s never enough time and important scenes are never shot,” Busch said, “but I think we did everything we wanted to do. There was nothing cut because of expediency.”

Busch and Andress noted another tragedy that hit the film, the suicide of sound mixer and boom operator Wolf Snyder, who was also 35.

“That was a horrible, sudden tragedy, and they were both 35 years old. I wish I’d gotten to know both of them better,” Busch said. 

“[Snyder] was recommended to us because we were trying to keep the crew small, and he was known for being able to be the sound engineer and the boom operator,” Andress said. “We’re very lucky we were able to enjoy his very particular artistry. We were so charmed by him.”

Bush laughed at the memory of a conversation he had with Snyder. “Wolf’s life was really about film, he didn’t follow theater at all. He didn’t know who Julie and I were at all.” Complimenting them on the depth and clarity of their lines, Snyder asked, “Have you ever done a play?”

While The Sixth Reel deals with the shameful history of Hollywood and its neglect of its films, allowing thousands upon thousands to decay into oblivion, the idea of a lost film is not that far from reality for even recent releases. 

“Die, Mommie, Die! is almost a lost film,” Busch said, noting that the murky situation over who owns the rights for video releases and streaming following the original distributor going belly-up makes it difficult to figure out where the film stands. “I just wrote to the producers of that this morning.” 

He gets offers from film festivals, but does not know how to help them with securing a copy to screen.

“It’s amazing what you can find,” Andress posited, “but it’s a frustration with films that I remember as a kid but you just can’t find anymore.”

Find more here about The Sixth Reel playing at Outfest on Thursday, August 19 and via virtual cinemas starting Friday, August 20.