The Story
There's a dead body in a swimming pool, and it could be anyone who did it. Four friends in a precarious love quadrangle gather at the home of a Hollywood Starlet to meet a wealthy and interested benefactor, who brings a brooding Detective along for the ride. He tasks them with strange and performative whims, but is he really steering the ship? With her cast of noir tropes and a script of zippy one-liners, the Hollywood Starlet is our window into the unraveling of this fated evening, daring us to guess who gets hurt and who stands to benefit. The Genre Queer Noir blends traditions and tropes of classic Hollywood films from the 1940s & 50s with a contemporary, critical attitude that reflects today's intellectual, aesthetic, and political challenges. Through deconstructing the familiar roles of seedy noir—the snappy Gal-Friday, the abusive drunk, the hard-boiled detective, the ingenue, the glamorous star—we wanted to examine how the past relates to the ways we interact now, both narratively and stylistically. We wanted to transgress genre boundaries in order to better understand the fluid nature of gender and identity, and to discover new ways of being and interacting. SLEEPWALK is a chamber ensemble character piece that is equal parts love letter to cinema and noir-murder mystery-melodrama. The film is intended to be a meditation on our art form, and how it's treated in this city of angels. What drives otherwise sane, self-respecting people to subject themselves to scrutiny? All of our characters feel there's someone else they should be when the cameras roll. We want to explore how those dualities affect the way they identify themselves, and to wonder what they could be if unobserved. |