U.S. marriage equality inspires Sordid sequel

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This article was published 30/04/2016 (3811 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It was 20 years ago when actor-writer Del Shores debuted his play, Sordid Lives, in his adoptive hometown of Los Angeles. The kernel of the story — a young actor goes to the west Texas backwater of his birth to tell his mother he’s gay — was autobiographical for Shores. For the rest, which touches on the lives of a panoply of small-town eccentrics living up to the “sordid” description of the title, Shores freely embellished, inspired by the town’s blend of oppressive Southern Baptist-steeped morality and comparatively liberating bad behaviour.

The play inspired a 2000 movie of the same name and a single season of a TV series in 2008.

Shores, a fit and youthful 58, will spend the 20th anniversary shooting a long-gestating sequel, A Very Sordid Wedding, in Winnipeg and Selkirk in an intensive two-week schedule beginning May 2.

The movie features cast members from both the film and TV iterations, including — as that embattled mother-son pairing — Bonnie Bedelia as Letrelle and Kirk Geiger as Ty, as well as Dale Dickey (Winter’s Bone) as Letrelle’s aunt Sissy, Canadian comedian Caroline Rhea as Sissy’s audacious next-door neighbour Noleta, and Emmy-winning actor Leslie Jordan as impassioned Tammy Wynette impersonator Earl (Brother Boy) Ingram.

In production offices adjoining Buffalo Gal Pictures’ Exchange District headquarters on Arthur Street, Shores, with his producer partner Emerson Collins, says he came to Canada at Rhea’s suggestion. Best known as Melissa Joan Hart’s witchy aunt Hilda on Sabrina, the Teenage Witch, Rhea pointed out the advantages of a low Canadian dollar and an aggressive tax-credit program for filmmakers. (The comparatively paltry tax credits offered by Texas were reduced by the state legislature last year, causing an exodus of Lone Star state production.)

Shores had worked as a writer and producer on the Toronto-lensed drama series Queer as Folk, so he consulted with one of that show’s producers, Michael MacLennan.

“He said there was this great operation in Winnipeg, and they have the best tax incentives and suggested I investigate. But he didn’t have a contact, so we just went online and I found (Buffalo Gal Pictures producer Phyllis Laing).

“We literally called her and we never ever explored anywhere else,” says Shores. He rhapsodizes about Selkirk as a match for the west Texas town of Winters.

“We’re thrilled with the architecture,” he says. “I went with our locations manager the other day and we were just driving around, and sometimes I think there’s a movie god. We literally just knocked on a door and found such a match for Sissy’s house.”

The story for the sequel came together in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark ruling on marriage equality last year, guaranteeing the right to gay marriage in all states.

“The first film was just about a gay man coming out to his crazy southern Texas family,” says Collins. “And in moving it forward, this is about what happens when marriage equality comes to a town that’s not quite ready for it.”

“We didn’t have to reach too far to come up with the story,” Shores says. “The local church in Winters is having an anti-equality revival and they’re calling it that because equality is not biblical. There’s a part of the script where the pastor is trying to make Runnels County a ‘sanctuary’ for traditional marriage. Their goal is to never have a gay marriage in that county.

“It almost sounds ludicrous but it’s real,” he says. “Sometimes, when I need more material, I just go home.”

Shores says he has reached a point where he doesn’t hesitate to return to Ted Cruz country in Winters, despite the intolerance he may face.

“This is who I am,” he says. “My dad was a Southern Baptist preacher, my brother still is, and my mother was the high school drama teacher, so I always say: theatrics on both sides of the family.

“It took them a long time to deal with my being gay, with all the religious bigotry that I grew up with,” he says. “I didn’t want to be ‘that person’ that they described and unworthy of God’s love. It took a while for a lot of my family but most of them have come around. They’re still appalled by some of the things I say and write but they let me sit down at the dinner table these days.”

Collins says they hope the sequel will resonate in the same way Sordid Lives did.

“Del got so many letters after the first film from people who told him: ‘I used your movie to come out to my family and the gift of that comedy made it a comfortable subject for us to talk about.’” Collins says. “Where we are now with marriage equality and dealing with equal rights can be just as challenging, and my hope is that, through the gift of what he’s done this time, he can do the same thing.”

randall.king@freepress.mb.caTwitter: @FreepKing