Alan Cumming as Klaus Nomi?

    Last month I participated in a "Hollywood Tupperware Party" which was also a benefit for the New York based theater company The Drama Dept.  Artistic director Douglas Carter Beane told me a story that night that I meant to blog about right away but somehow it slipped through the cracks.
    Now here 'tis:
    Apparently playwright and screenwriter Beane was approached by a production company to direct a movie biopic of German-born New Wave-meets-grand-opera pop star  Klaus Nomi. If you've seen the documentary "The Nomi Song" you know that Klaus debuted his aria-singing alien persona at the New Wave Vaudeville Show at Irving Plaza in 1978 (a show directed by yours truly) and then went on to be a big club sensation in NYC. This led to even greater things like singing back-up with David Bowie on Saturday Night Live not to mention several albums released as his "Nomi" character which yielded one or two modest hits in Europe. Klaus became a big star in Paris but Americans never quite got him. At least not the Americans outside of Manhattan's hipper districts (and in a handful of arty enclaves in other parts of the country).
    One of the more memorable scenes in "The Nomi Song" is when Klaus is inexplicably booked by his bonehead manager to open up for Twisted Sister in a bar in New Jersey! The results were predictably disasterous.
    Klaus was part of a group of us kids (wow, now THAT was a while ago!) who lived in the East Village and lived for putting on a show.  It was a time when none of us were very career minded (or career saavy)...except for Klaus. He was older and more than ready to be a full-fledged star. And as "The Nomi Song" accurately depicts, this desire led him to strike a Faustian bargain with the wrong "investors." He certainly signed away most of his rights and ended up in an kind of  indentured servitude to people who had no understanding of who he really was as an artist...or a person. They also had no sympathy for him when he contracted "gay cancer." Klaus sadly ended up one of the first victims of the horrible AIDS plague that would claim so many of our friends and family.
    Doug Beane and I were talking about something that night of the benefit when the subject turned to Klaus, the East Village and "The Nomi Song." Beane then told me about this film project that he had been approached to do  that would star Alan Cumming as Klaus.
    Say WHAT?
    Alan Cumming as Klaus Nomi? Now I think Cumming was brilliant in CABARET and maybe that 'emcee' character is Nomi-adjacent but........I dunno. Well, maybe.
    Then Beane dropped the real bombshell.
     "And in the notes they handed me" Beane said, "There were explicit directions to write 'An Ann Magnuson character' and "A Joey Arias character'.
    I had to hold onto my chair. Oh. My. God. This is what happens when you live long enough -- you end up as a character in someone else's version of your life. It was bad enough to see our glory days in the East Village turned into a cheesey musical like "RENT." (I know! I know! Lots of people loved it but.......that music! Believe me, NO ONE in the East Village would've liked that music let alone sang to it! Certainly no one who frequented the Mudd Club.)
    Watching "Radiant Baby," the Keith Haring musical that George C. Wolfe staged a few years ago at the Public Theater, was akin to having an out of body experience. Keith and the late photographer Tseng Kwong Chi -- who was a character in the show as Keith's best friend -- would've loved being mythologized but both would've hated that sappy RENT-like music! And they would've laughed their heads off at their sentimentalized stage lives. My first reaction was: Needs more cocks and more cocaine. My second? THANK GOD they cut the Club 57 scene! My third? Why don't they get someone like the Pet Shop Boys to write the music? Their song "Being Boring" says it all!
    As Beane went on to describe the demands of the producers I began to get queasy.
    "The draft of the script I was given and the direction they were interested in," he told me, "was a very sympathetic portrayal of the gentle soul artist who could not sell out -- unlike his friends Ann and Joey who represented Hollywood and Vegas."
    Oh. My. Fucking. God. If ONLY Joey and I could claim we climbed the heights of superstardom in Hollywood and Vegas! Doug Beane and I both cackled hysterically as Beane shouted, "And Klaus was the biggest fame whore in town!" That's not news. Everyone had dreams of making it one day but Klaus was way ahead of the pack in terms of ambition.  Klaus did unfortunately alienate a lot of people with his diva-ness but most of us also loved him for it. Klaus (like Madonna in many ways) had always been The Star -- even when he was a pastry chef  making yummy tortes for Windows on the World -- and we were all ecstatic for him as he went off to Europe to ride around in limos and be feted by gay and straight Parisians!
    And when he got sick and ended back in his apartment on St. Mark's Place? He wasn't completely abandoned by his friends. That's the one thing the otherwise excellent film "The Nomi Song' got wrong.
    Yes, there was fear - abject TERROR really - about this weird virus (I'm not even sure there was a real name for it back in the early 80s). Anyone visiting friends who were ensconsed in those hospital wards reserved for "the doomed" had to be dressed head to toe in scrubs that looked like haz-mat-wear. And wear surgical masks! There was a lot of hysteria at the time and it made people afraid to even hug the people we loved so much who were suffering so horribly. We watched friends and family disintegrate and die -- some not even thirty years old -- and it was sheer hell.  It was a terrible, terrible time and no one who experienced the cruelties of that horible plague will be forever scarred by it.
    But many people did rally around Klaus. Many times he did not want the attention. There is a voice at the end of  the first Bongwater record "Breaking No New Ground" that is from Klaus. He left the message on my answering machine after I left yet another message for him wondering how he was doing. He tells me he doesn't want visitors and adds wearily "I'm sorry. People mean well but it makes me sicker than I already am." Either he didn't want to be the center of a pity party or he just had to deal with his illness in his own isolated way.
    I told this story for the documentary but it was left out -- as the cinematic story probably plays better as a tragic drama with everyone abandoning him.
    Truth is a tricky thing and history, as they say, belongs to the victors (or whoever has the money to bankroll a movie biopic).
    Joey Arias chose not to be interviewed for "The Nomi Song" at all. One day he'll tell the full story. Or at least his story. And believe me -- THAT is one helluva story! Maybe he'll even make his own movie. Maybe he and I can bankroll it with all that Hollywood and Vegas dough we're supposedly rolling in!
    But I don't think it'll star Alan Cumming (methinks he's a bit long in the tooth now for that part - although I'm sure he could do a stunning job.) Hmmmmm...maybe Justin Timberlake? In this breakout Brokeback Mountain "gay role"?
     Gosh, who would make a good Klaus Nomi?
    "I wanted to do it as a musical" Beane told me before we moved on to another subject. "But when I realized I would be looking for singing and dancing Cookie Muellers, I knew it was not for me."
    But wait a minute.....Singing and dancing Cookie Muellers? That could be a GREAT movie!

    Reconsider Doug! Reconsider!

FYI: Douglas Carter Beane's new play, "The Little Dog Laughed" will be at the Cort Theater on Broadway starting October 26th. The Drama Dept.'s live theater Prime Time Soap Opera "The Cartells" is on Monday nights at 8 PM starting October 16th at Comix.