Theater legend Charles Busch premieres his film Psycho Beach Party, a hilarious spoof of 1960s surfer movies based on his popular Off-Broadway play on Reel 13 this weekend (Sat, Nov. 1, 10:45 pm). Busch started his career with camp theater, but his work has recently moved to the serious as well. Read interview….

Busch’s plays are greatly inspired by classic films, but he’s no stranger to the independent film scene. He wrote and starred in the film adaptations of his plays Psycho Beach Party and Die, Mommie, Die!, and made his directorial debut with A Very Serious Person, which received honorable mention at the 2006 Tribeca Film Festival. He is also the subject of the documentary The Lady in Question is Charles Busch.

REEL 13: Public television viewers have enjoyed your appearances on In the Life (as host; as subject) and Theater Talk (Die Mommie Die; Our Leading Lady). With the November 1st broadcast of Psycho Beach Party, you’re making your Reel 13 debut.

CHARLES BUSCH: I’m so thrilled. Legit at last! And it’s not even the month of June. Sometimes I feel a little ghettoized when a movie of mine is broadcast in June (LGBT Pride Month), so it’s nice that Psycho Beach Party is airing in November – just in time for Thanksgiving.

REEL 13: The film is airing Halloween weekend. Pretty appropriate, don’t you agree?

CB: Yes, my life sort of is Halloween.

REEL 13: Do you have any exciting Halloween plans? Perhaps a costume party starring you as Joan Crawford or Marie Antoinette?

CB: Halloween is 365 days a year for me, so I never get dressed up. A few years ago, I wore a fabulous bride of death costume to a Halloween party, but I was incredibly bored because wearing a costume and not being in a play is a frustrating experience for me. Being in costume gets my imagination going, so I need lines to say, I need situations. I automatically want to be in a play, whether the costume is drag or not. Drag for me has never been a sexual fetish or just a campy thing to do. I wasn’t one of those little boys who dressed up in his mother’s clothes. Drag has always been an extension of my obsession with the theater. I always used to say it wasn’t that I wanted to be a woman, I just wanted to be an actress.

REEL 13: You’ve had a lifelong love affair with classic movies and film history. Was it a dream come true seeing Psycho Beach Party come to the silver screen?

CB: It actually wasn’t my idea to do a film version of Psycho Beach Party. Jeff Melnick, my wonderful manager for almost 20 years, kept insisting that it should be a movie, but I didn’t really envision it as a film. I thought it was just a little stage piece, but he pursued the idea for years. After about eight years of pitching the idea to various studios, he started managing a young director named Bob King, whom I knew socially. Strand Releasing wanted to produce a feature film of Bob’s because they’d successfully released a short film he did. Jeff suggested that Bob direct Psycho Beach Party. Bob loved the idea. I still was kind of skeptical, but Bob had some great ideas for the screenplay, which was helpful since I’d never really written a screenplay. In the play, a villain is drugging surfer kids and shaving their bodies, and Bob wisely thought the stakes should be upped a little bit, so he suggested we make it more of a slasher film. I was dubious because the play is strictly a parody of Gidget and the beach party movies of the early sixties, while the slasher movies are from the seventies. I’m such a rigid film historian, so there’s not too much room for anachronism in my work. But Bob convinced me that we needed something a little more intense than body shaving to make the story succeed as a film.

REEL 13: You played Chicklet in the original stage production in 1987. Why didn’t you reprise your role in the movie?

CB: When we made the movie, I was in my mid-forties, so it would have been a very stylized film if I played a 16-year-old heroine. We always assumed we’d get a young actress to play Chicklet and we cast Lauren Ambrose, who was completely unknown at the time. She was very young, it was an extremely challenging part, and she was just perfect. She really would have played that part if she’d been around in the sixties. We really lucked out. After Psycho Beach Party, she did Six Feet Under and became a big star. Amy Adams, who played Marvel Ann, has also become a big star with films like Charlie Wilson’s War and Enchanted. She was awfully good back then and she was spot on in the film. It’s so wonderful seeing her career blossom.

REEL 13: Did you consider playing any of the other female roles in the film?

CB: I’m very specific about parts I think should be played by men and ones that should be played by biological actresses. I considered playing the mother, but having an actor in drag portray her seemed kind of obvious. My dear friend Meghan Robinson, who created the role onstage, was so marvelous because she somehow had the authority and gravity of a man and yet she was a real woman. When she was made up and in costume, she looked just like Joan Crawford. I knew I didn’t want to step into those shoes, so I thought if there’s a killer loose in the film, there should be a sleuth and I can play a Susan Hayward-esque lady police detective. So I wrote the new part of Captain Monica Stark and thought, wouldn’t it be fun if she’d actually had an affair with Kanaka years before?

REEL 13: So Captain Monica Stark has quite the juicy back story.

CB: She’s a woman with a past. It was so funny making this movie with all these young, up-and-coming actors in starring roles while I had a featured role as the older woman. It reminded me of the parts Joan Crawford had in The Best of Everything and Susan Hayward in Valley of the Dolls. You know, the great actresses playing a supporting role with all the new young contract players.

REEL 13: But you still managed to have a hilariously memorable love scene with Thomas Gibson – in a car!

CB: I must say I’m like Barbra Streisand in that respect. I now have a long list of gorgeous young leading men I’ve had love scenes with – Jason Priestley in Die, Mommie, Die! and Thomas Gibson in Psycho Beach Party – and both fellas were completely cool and fun to be with.

REEL 13: In 2006, you wrote, directed, and starred in the independent film A Very Serious Person, a gay coming-of-age story about a 13-year-old’s last summer with his dying grandmother and her melancholy male nurse. It was a bold departure from your trademark camp parodies. What was it like to venture outside your comfort zone while taking on such a daunting task as directing your first movie?

CB: I was very fortunate in the sense that I was very protected during the entire filmmaking process. Everyone was watching out for me – the cinematographer, the producer, my friend Carl Andress, who co-wrote the script and played the hairdresser. The other actors were helping me, including the marvelous Polly Bergen. We shot the film very quickly and on a very low budget. After we finished the movie, I thought: did I direct this or was I just kind of the CEO? Maybe that’s what being a director is: being the CEO. Then I looked at the film again and saw so many of my ideas in it and I thought, wow, I did direct it. It’s funny, even after all my experiences, I had this unrealistic notion of being Erich von Stroheim wearing jodhpurs and a monocle, shouting orders.

REEL 13: Would you like to direct another feature film?

CB: Definitely. Once you direct a film, you really want to try it again. I learned so much and made so many mistakes the first time around, I figure the next time I can really get it right. But I need to decide which project to do next since it takes so long to get a film made – although I suppose every project has its own unique lifespan. Psycho Beach Party took eight years to place with a producer while Die, Mommie, Die! happened amazingly quickly – within a year of doing the play we were making a movie. And with A Very Serious Person, not since Warner Bros. in 1932 had a movie been made so quickly. Carl and I wrote the script and within a few months, we were shooting it.

REEL 13: If you were a guest programmer for Reel 13, which films would you schedule?

CB: I have so many favorite classic films, it’s hard to narrow down the list. But I suppose I’d pick I’m No Angel. I love Mae West and she certainly was a role model for me as someone who created her own career against all odds. And I’m No Angel is a perfect comedy. Every single line is funny and perfect. I think it’s up there with The Importance of Being Earnest in terms of being a comic masterpiece. For the indie, I’d select Mysterious Skin, a Gregg Araki movie about two teenaged boys and their childhood demons. A disturbing and fascinating film.

REEL 13: Is it true that you’re addicted to reality television?

CB: Yes, I live for those shows. It’s pathetic! I never miss an episode of Survivor. You really can learn a lot about group interactions and sociology by watching how people respond to the situations on that show. As a matter of fact, a few years ago when Rosie O’Donnell and I were working on the Broadway musical Taboo, we noticed all these similarities between working on a big Broadway musical and Survivor. We voted people off our little Broadway island. It was fascinating.

REEL 13: Do you ever take a break from reality TV and watch public television?

CB: Absolutely. I love American Masters. I’d heard of Zora Neale Hurston, but never really knew anything about her until I watched that great American Masters documentary last year. Judy Garland: By Myself was absolutely brilliant. I also enjoy the Ken Burns documentaries and Antiques Roadshow. And I think it’s really wonderful that Thirteen shows commercial-free, uncut films every Saturday night on Reel 13. When I was a kid — obviously this was pre-cable — there were old movies on TV all the time. I got my whole film education from watching The Million Dollar Movie, The Late Show, and The 4:30 Movie. In the seventies, they stopped showing classic movies on TV. Today we have TCM and AMC, but Thirteen is the only non-cable venue where you can watch classic films on Saturday nights.

REEL 13: And now a question for the fashionistas and drag artists out there: what’s your favorite MAC lipstick?

CB: That MAC Russian Red is damned good. I love it. They also have wonderful full-coverage facial foundation, which is very useful to a man in drag.

Psycho Beach Party airs on Reel 13 Saturday, November 1 at 10:45 p.m. on Thirteen/WNET and Thirteen HD.

Take the Charles Busch Trivia Quiz for the chance to win a Psycho Beach Party DVD.