Varda the Message

script:
‘Satellite of Love’/Lou Reed begins:

EXT. CARNIVAL – SET – DUSK – 1973
 
Curt and Brian ride in neighboring rockets on the Space Spinner ride, reeling over the candy-colored lights of a traveling carnival. TRACK-IN as Curt lip-syncs to the song and Brian sings the backing arpeggios, his rocket passing Curt’s.
Behind them, the lights of the carnival recede. They are flying away.

In Shooting to Kill, Christine Vachon tells how she enjoyed seeing this 'very buoyant and freeform' scene come together. The problem was that they shot the scene before the song was cleared and the rights to use it might have been as much as $50,000. It's similar to the film Poison when Todd used ideas and quotes from the work of Jean Genet before getting clearance from Genet's estate. Luckily for us they were granted the rights in both cases.

Esoteric trivia: the cars of Curt and Brian's fairground ride are named SupaJet and High Flyer.

script:
INT. MUSIC HALL – LONDON – NIGHT – 1956

...Brian settles into a sliver of light and watches the rest of the performance with intensity.
 
Is it me or is Brian (Tommy) practicing rolling his eyes?

The wiggly, over-painted Singer is belting out a saucy number.

The Singer is the legendary Lindsay Kemp, dancer, actor, choreographer and theatre director, who, unfortunately, is often cited as a mere footnote for being David Bowie's mime teacher. The impish Kemp has portrayed Divine in his own acclaimed production of Flowers, based on Genet's Our Lady of the Flowers. He's danced Salome, portrayed Nijinksy, played Puck in A Midsummer Night's Dream and worked with film directors Ken Russell and Derek Jarman. He has claimed to trace his own theatrical ancestry back to William Kemp who was in Shakespeare's company at the Globe Theatre as a clown, but that may be as fanciful as any of the many wild stories he weaves. My lies are simply ecstatic exaggerations. A lovely portrait of him in full makeup, looking a lot like Maxwell Demon, graces the main page of Mick Rock's photography site. An interesting overview of his career and how influential his work is, here.

script:
Brian walks directly into the arms of a Sailor in white and kisses him firmly on the mouth.

The figure of the sailor as a gay icon has been around for most of the 20th Century. Sailors as objects of desire figure prominently in the works of Quentin Crisp and Jean Genet:


In a more contemporary way Jean Paul Gaultier riffs on the homoerotic image for his clothes and perfumes.


The book Hello Sailor! The Hidden History of Gay Life at Sea by Paul Baker and Jo Stanley is a fascinating account.