In senior high school, Michael Lucid was an arty, friendly kid who sailed around in one campus clique to another. "I had been more friendly and youngsters felt comfortable speaking in my experience,Inch he states of his time at Santa Monica's Crossroads School, where he graduated in 1996.
Because Lucid was likeable and reliable, his teenage peers granted him the type of insider access to their lives that many filmmakers only dream of taking on film. Filmmakers like Ray Clark (Kids, Wassup Rockers), Catherine Hardwicke (Lords of Dogtown, 13) and Penelope Spheeris (Decline of Western Civilization, Suburbia) all released their careers by looking into making films that portrayed the tough facts of yankee teenagers' lives, but Lucid had a benefit over many of these filmmakers: he was themself a higher schooler as he shot his gritty, shateringly intimate documentary Dirty Women, which is now an immediate cult sensation since it had been submitted to Youtube this month.
Possibly you have often seen the 17-minute film within the roughly two days becasue it is resurfaced on the web, 17 years after it had been initially shot with a 17-year-old throughout the path of just two school days. Maybe you have often seen the still frame of two untidy-haired youthful women being questioned inside a senior high school auditorium -- a picture that's become ubiquitous after getting been reblogged 1000's of occasions by fans on Tumblr.
Lucid's short documentary begins by helping cover their the next text: "In Spring of 1996, my senior year of senior high school, I recorded several eighth grade women who have been well known for his or her crass behavior and allegedly bad hygiene...." The eighth grade women he's mentioning to would be the film's eponymous dirty women, a clique of feminist riot grrrls brought by siblings Amber and Harper, who grew to become campus stories once they placed on a punk rock show in the school's beginning-of-year "alley party" and smeared lipstick throughout their faces. Lucid takes note of the performance being provocative and angry, a lot to ensure that it sparked a continuing flurry of gossip -- and also the coining from the term "dirty women" -- that ongoing through the school year of '96.
Lucid was at an after-school program known as L.A. Links, where Wendy Clarke, the daughter of radical, sixties, Oscar-nominated documentarian Shirley Clarke, recommended he document the women. His footage eventually grew to become the foundation to have an hour-lengthy documentary he shot with an 8mm camera and edited using two VCRS. He later tested it for the entire school in the finish of his senior year.
"Used to do get to talk with kids of all the major identifiable clique on campus, in the jocks towards the punky kids," he informs us over the telephone. "Everybody got to set up their two cents concerning the dirty women. And So I had that type of total access."
Fast-forward a couple of several years to 2000. Lucid was signed up for a documentary class at NYU, where he was at production with an entirely different film about amputees and phantom braches. As he off-handedly pointed out he had this documentary from the dirty women from his senior high school years, it immediately spurred the eye of his instructor, a documentary filmmaker named Judith Helfand, who urged him to re-cut the footage. So he shelved the amputee footage and began editing Dirty Women, that they eventually tested in the New You are able to Subterranean Film Festival and a number of gay film festivals round the country.
"Used to do a little of going with rapid and that i place it inside a box and managed to move on with my existence," Lucid informs us. But lately he was approached by Dirty Looks, a brand new You are able to-based queer film festival whose coordinators had heard about the film and desired to program it inside a riot grrrl-designed segment from the festival in April.
"The programmer requested me basically could upload it to YouTube so he could consider the short," stated Lucid. All of a sudden and almost unintentionally, the recording he shot 17 years back a project to have an after-school program was circulating throughout Tumbr and Facebook.
That Dirty Women is Lucid's greatest Internet success is ironic, thinking about his regular job writing, carrying out and uploading web videos for Realm of Question, the development company behind shows like RuPaul's Drag Race featuring such as the Eyes of Tammy Faye and Party Monster. And, within an oddly fitting coincidence, he's came back to meeting with and confirming -- but through his drag persona, Damiana Garcia, whom he describes as "an smart lady reporter," showing up in Realm of Question videos online.
After Dirty Women was published on Realm of Wonder's website around the evening of March 6, Harmful Minds, your blog that riffs on new artistic representations and Internet oddities, immediately selected up and re-blogged it. Lucid did not even understand that Worldwide Women's Day was on March 7, compelling a massive curiosity about the very feminist video.
"And out of the blue, everybody I visited our prime school with, and also the dirty women, and everybody within the movie, approached me. It's one large ongoing reunion," he states, proclaiming YouTube the right home for Dirty Women. "Prior to the social networking, it had been difficult to find a location to exhibit Dirty Women or anybody to locate it."
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