We didn’t earn the nickname “ Friend of Dorothy” for nothing, you know. “The Biggest Mother of Them All”īut at what point did the gay community embrace Mommie Dearest and why? Well, for starters, the gay community has always loved the glamorous female stars of old Hollywood. (We highly recommend the video essay from Be Kind Rewind on the making of the film for the full story). That’s the fancy way of saying it was extra, as the kids say today. (We imagine afterlife Joan might regret that endorsement.) Either by the director’s insistence or Dunaway’s own decisions, her performance of Joan was best described as a sort of Kabuki theater. Ironically, in the years leading to Joan’s death, she said Dunaway was the only newer generation actress who had the right stuff to play her. Three years later, Mommie Dearest hit theaters, starring Oscar winner Faye Dunaway in the leading role with Frank Perry behind the camera. The book was a runaway smash hit though and, of course, Hollywood announced a film version right away. Readers gasped at Joan’s tirades, including wielding wire hangers as weapons. In 1978’s Mommie Dearest, Christina detailed her account of the abuse she and her brother Christopher endured at the hands of their mother, who had adopted them both as infants. One of the very first of its kind about any celebrity. After Hollywood legend Joan Crawford died in 1977, her doptive daughter Christina wrote a scathing tell-all book.
The making and aftermath of Mommie Dearest was a tangled affair. But LGBTQ communities embraced Mommie Dearest and made it their own over the last four decades. It has since become a film parodied on stage, TV, and currently in memes. It forever damaged the career of Faye Dunaway, mainly because the Oscar-winning actress portrayed Joan as if she was some kind of crazed clown.
The big-screen version of Christina Crawford’s memoir about her movie star mother Joan Crawford was a notorious critical disaster upon release on September 18, 1981. But the mother of them all, if you can pardon the pun, is Mommie Dearest. There are a lot of “so bad it’s good” Hollywood movies.
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