Oral History: Charles Atlas
To mark the 30th anniversary of Son of Sam and Delilah (1991), EAI’s Distribution Director Karl McCool conducted oral histories with central figures cast throughout Charles Atlas’s prolific moving-image practice. An exceptionally protean and inventive artist for over fifty years, Atlas has collaborated with an extraordinary array of choreographers, dancers, musicians, actors, and performance artists, and has himself occupied a crucial role at the intersection of the worlds of art, film, video, performance, dance, and installation. Atlas has worked as a chronicler, collaborator, and creator within the nightlife and performance scenes of New York since the 1970s, documenting historic venues such as The Pyramid Club, and prominent figures including DANCENOISE, Hapi Phace, and Lady Miss Kier. This conversation took place over Zoom; Atlas took the call from his apartment in lower Manhattan, once the set of Hapi Phace and Hattie Hathaway’s wry repartee in Son of Sam and Delilah. This oral history was conducted in 2021 and has been edited for clarity.
Hapi Phace and Hattie Hathaway in Son of Sam and Delilah (1991).
Charles Atlas: I have a lot of explaining to do, I will not lie. So should I give you background?
Well this started out in the days when Alive From Off Center and Great Performances: Dance in America was still going. Dance in America was originally instituted by PBS to record masterpieces of dance. That was their mission, because there wasn't any dance on TV. Since none of those works were conceived for the camera, I thought, “Oh, I will want to do a big hour-long program of all-new material that would be just for television.” And the way I would develop it would be through performance. I was commissioned in 1988 by The Kitchen to do a live performance in their theater. So I thought of this three-act structure, which was me doing one act, Diane Martel, a choreographer, doing one act, and David Linton, a musician, doing one act. The piece was called “S&D,” and my part is what became Son of Sam and Delilah.
Karl McCool: Why was it called S&D?
CA: Sex and Death, Samson and Delilah...
KM: Was Samson and Delilah already on your mind? Did that come from John Kelly, or did that come from you?
CA: Well, I got together the people I wanted to work with. I just wanted them to do what they were already prepared to do without a huge amount of extra work. You know, I didn't want them to learn stuff in order to perform. What John knew was the aria from Samson and Delilah, and he had the backing track on a record, and he sometimes used to do that in live performance. So that was sort of the basis. And then for my part, I also wanted to work with Hapi Phace. John Kelly was going to be Delilah, so I needed a Samson that was taller than him, and John Kelly's over six feet tall. I happened to have a friend who had long hair and was about six foot four. A dancer in the Movement Research school of dancing. And then I can't remember how I decided that he would be a serial killer. I don't know, it's almost a certain meta-fiction that he plays a serial killer, who was also Samson and was in all parts of the film. And Hapi Phace wanted to be in it as the sort of the host. But anyways—I can't remember exactly, but I made up this story and shot different scenes. I didn't get to shoot everything that I had in mind. I shot things at The Kitchen and at my house. Basically those two locations. S & D was at The Kitchen. And when I realized that I wasn't going to be able to do my dream project, I just took the film material that I had made. And the way I presented it in the live performance was as Rushes, and Hapi narrated it.
KM: Okay. So Hapi was involved in S&D live. I didn't know that.
CA: And also on the film—he was part of the film as well, but he was also a live narrator. And then I would show the rough cut of Rushes that I had just shot. That was in 1988.
KM: And at that point that you had already shot a lot of what we see in Son of Sam and Delilah?
CA: Everything.
KM: Wow. So you already had DANCENOISE involved, and the story about the serial killer.
CA: Yeah. All the club people.
KM: And I assume you initially thought of Hapi Phace as the host because he hosted Whispers?
CA: Yeah. I mean, I used to go to Whispers every week and you know, I loved Hapi. I remember doing a lot of interviews with him in preparation, which I didn't include in the final thing, but just interviews with Hapi. I just normally hang out with people, to, you know, discuss the project and see what they're thinking about and what I'm thinking about. That's just how I work, if I'm working with performers.
KM: So, when you came up with the title S&D, you already were thinking in terms of Samson and Delilah, but also sex and death.
CA: Yeah. That was the third theme that I presented to Diane and David. As you know, I did the first act, Diane did the second act, and David did the third act, and there were intermissions in between. David's was just purely music and Diane's was a complicated dance theater piece. That was really great.
KM: And how did it engage with sex and death?
John Kelly as Delilah in Son of Sam and Delilah.
CA: Well, I mean, you have Diane Martel, you probably never saw her work because she gave up downtown choreography a long time ago and went to Hollywood. But she was very transgressive, let's say.
KM: It occurred to me that this was sort of the start of something new in your body of work. Or at least how I'm familiar with your body of work.
CA: Well it was the era of AIDS.
KM: And it was followed up with SUPERHONEY, which is very gory as well.
CA: You know, it started with The Myth of Modern Dance with the skull at the end. I did, unconsciously really, three death pieces.
KM: Which would be The Myth of Modern Dance, Son of Sam and Delilah, and SUPERHONEY? I was actually thinking of three as well, but I was thinking of a different three. I was thinking, and it might sound bonkers, Son of Sam and Delilah, SUPERHONEY and Staten Island Sex Cult.
CA: Oh, I thought you were going to say, Put Blood on the Music—
KM: Oh, good point. I guess I just thought, because Staten Island Sex Cult is, like, a porn film—obviously about sex—but it's also really dark, you know, like you're inspired by Heaven's Gate and Andrew Cunanan—
CA: It's just silly.
KM: Yeah, it's silly. When I rewatched Son of Sam and Delilah this morning so it would be fresher in my mind, I was struck in rewatching that it's very funny. I always thought of it as being both dark and funny, but what struck me this morning was more of the funny parts of it.
CA: I think it's very funny. I mean, you know, gory and funny. On Netflix it would be called dark comedy.
KM: That's what it is. Would you say that’s something SUPERHONEY came out of?
CA: SUPERHONEY is less funny. SUPERHONEY was meant to be sort of in the Georges Bataille range. We were working off of a story from Georges Bataille. And I realized after I did that, that that was really not my—I really needed to do more of a comedy. That would be more my style. I mean, I think SUPERHONEY is maybe the coolest piece I've ever done. I mean, it's like '91, '94, '98. It just seems like the nineties were a decade of very "sick and twisted."
SUPERHONEY (1994).
Samson and Delilah was the beginning of my blacklist on PBS. I was meant to be working on Art21 from the beginning. I worked on the proposal. And then when they proposed my name to PBS as a director, that's when I found out that I'd been blacklisted for the last 10 years. After Son of Sam and Delilah, and when I raised a big stink about how homophobic PBS was, that was the end of my relationship with PBS for a while. I got finishing funds from New Television, as I think it was called, an 11 o'clock on Sunday night series that was run by Susan Dowling and Lois Bianci. Anyway, they gave me finishing funds for Son of Sam to make it into a finished piece. And then it was included as part of their program all over the country, with all the stations they had. And then PBS, you know, let me know that they were not going to show it. And I called up and talked to them and complained. And it was in the New York Times and I was on CNN.
KM: Okay. And in the New York Times, they imply—they don't quote anyone as saying it—but they imply that Marlon Riggs's Tongues Untied had just shown on PBS, and Jesse Helms and all these people were outraged.
CA: Well, no, I mean, when I talked to the programming vice president of PBS, she said, "People will be upset and they won't know why." And I said, "That's exactly the point." She said, "It's too ambiguous." I said, "You mean, you've never had ambiguous artworks on PBS?" But anyway, they showed Marlon Riggs's thing because it was so explanatory and safe. It wasn't direct confrontation, and mine starts out with direct confrontation, with that homophobic monologue.
KM: Yeah. I was thinking about that too. Every time I watch it—and maybe that's why I said I was surprised by how funny it was, even though I remembered that it was funny. And I think it's because it starts with that extremely confrontational, tense scene, and you just think, “What the hell am I watching?” Like, what is this? Why did you start it that way?
Homophobic rant scene in Son of Sam and Delilah.
CA: Well, there are many motivations for making any artwork, but I was so angry. I mean, this was the era of gay bashing on the street. And I had been, yelled at and screamed at and confronted and stuff. So instead of actually doing it in person, I did it on film. I wanted to shoot them. So I shot mid-sentence.
KM: I found the timing interesting because I was just reading this book called Last Call about the Last Call Killer. Do you remember this from the ‘90s? I mean, it was a different scene than you or any of the people in the video, but he was this serial killer who lived on Staten Island in the ‘90s. He targeted gay men who went to piano bars. Not dive bars, not clubs, but piano bars. So a lot of them were white and upper middle class. A lot of them were actually closeted.
CA: Probably on the Upper East Side.
KM: Right. Or closeted guys from Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Connecticut, who went to these gay piano bars when they were in the city on business. But, you know, he started in '92, killing gay men. And that was the same year that Marsha P. Johnson died. It just intrigued me that in the year after the piece came out, there were all these protests against LGBT hate crimes and violence and things.
CA: I don't remember all the things, but ideas sort of accumulated and got put into the piece. I mean, I wasn't part of a movement or anything. I shot it in '88. It was really an '88 piece. That was a couple of years after I lost a good friend, an early AIDS victim. So when I was thinking of serial killers, Son of Sam came to me and I thought, that's just a play on Samson. In fact, most people just call it Samson and Delilah. They just can't get to the Son of Sam part.
KM: I think in one of the EAI catalogs you say something like you wanted to make a video with a serial killer and with drag queens. So I wanted to ask you about both of those things. First, the serial killer part. Why did you want to make something about a serial killer?
CA: I can't believe it now, but I was very into splatter films.
KM: Because you wouldn't watch them now?
CA: I can't watch it. I can't even come near one. Now, there's too much violence, I can't stand violence. I'd never done anything with blood before and afterwards, I was thinking, "gee, I'm really afraid, this is weird to me, I'm really going for it this time.” It was all low budget. I got someone who did blood effects for cheap horror movies. It was a friend of a friend.
KM: Do you remember what the movies were, the splatter movies that you were particularly interested in or that you loved?
CA: Just in general, violence and gore.
KM: When did that change? At what point did you no longer want to watch that?
CA: I don't know, but it's reached its crescendo now. I was saying to Joe¹ the other night, I'm really getting old: the only thing I can stand anymore is PBS! I can actually watch a series and women aren't tortured, people aren't violently killed.
KM: And you made those things yourself, in the ‘90s at least.
CA: I was sort of embracing genre filmmaking.
KM: That's a good point too. So from that start, you wanted to bring that kind of genre filmmaking into dance and PBS—
CA: No, I wasn't thinking PBS, and I wasn't thinking dance. I was thinking, "just get something shot for this piece." So I just assembled the people I wanted to work with and did things that were appropriate to do with them, given what my story was. There were supposed to be more scenes of different people getting killed—you know, there was just the one with Anna Thomson with her neck slit, and then the rehearsal interruption with Lucy and Annie. There were supposed to be three more scenes of him going around killing people, but I ran out of time and money.
DANCENOISE (Lucy Sexton and Anne Lobst) in Son of Sam and Delilah.
KM: Well, he kills some Club Kids, I guess.
CA: Yeah, there's death in the disco, of course. So it was really just my life—elements from my life outside of art—these are the people that I could get to work with me.
KM: Was this the first time you worked with drag queens?
CA: I shot a lot of club footage, but I never made a video with drag in it, I think.
KM: Right, you shot a lot of footage at the Pyramid Club and places like that, but you didn't really make a work out of it. Because that, too, it seems like a first in your filmography/videography.
CA: Well it followed on from my coming back to New York, after Hail the New Puritan (1987) and being involved in the Pyramid scene. That's where John Kelly was from, that's where Hapi Phace was from. Anne and Lucy were from the Wah-Wah.³ So it was really the downtown performance art/drag/queer scene.
KM: How long had you been back in New York?
CA: A couple of years. I didn't realize it until way after that it was really about people dying of AIDS. I wasn't thinking of that at all. I was like, I wonder why I'm doing all this blood. It was like one of those pieces that you don't really know what it is until after you've finished it. It was one of those. I just did it. I mean, it was about having different narrative elements go in throughout the film, you know?
John Kelly on stage at The Kitchen in Son of Sam and Delilah.
KM: So then The Kitchen was involved in terms of S&D?
CA: They were involved in S&D, and then leading up to S&D, I shot the John Kelly scenes, and the DANCENOISE scene, and the disco scene, all on the second floor of The Kitchen. Those two backdrops were painted by Scott Lipschitz. He was a co-organizer, with Bunny, of Wigstock. He was gonna do the backdrops for the two John Kelly pieces. For the first piece, I wanted the background to be like the Babylonian scene in Intolerance, so he did that exactly. D.W. Griffith was one of my favorite filmmakers at the time. I loved all the silent movies—not Birth of a Nation (1915) so much. And then the second one, he painted the scene from the cover of the Trojan condoms. If you look at the end, it zooms into the Trojan condoms on the desk on the table next to the guy in the bed. And it's the same scene as what the background is. He basically painted the box of the Trojans as the backdrop. They're huge backdrops. They're really beautiful.
KM: How come you hadn’t worked with Lady Bunny before?
CA: You know, in the early days, she would make me turn off my camera before she came on stage. She didn't want to be filmed at all at the Pyramid. So I never filmed her. Maybe I did a couple of times, but…. And then I heard from someone that she said to someone, "I don't want anyone to film me, except for Charlie Atlas." She never told me that! So I kind of, after all these years, thought that she really didn't want to be filmed by me. When I made Teach, she was supposed to be a part of the story. We were going to have a little story before the song where Bunny beats up Lee and punctures his face and pins the lips on, but Bunny was busy that day, and I just went ahead with Lee. And then when I finally did The Waning of Justice, I called her up and said, "You're on my bucket list. You have to do this." So anyway, that's how that happened. Because she and Leigh were the most transgressive London and New York people that I knew.
KM: I always think it's interesting too that she doesn't want to be photographed or filmed out of drag and maybe not even in drag sometimes, and yet lived with Nelson Sullivan who filmed everything around him all the time.
CA: Is she in any of those Nelson pictures?
KM: She's in some of them. But I think maybe there was a rule that it was never out of drag, you know? So another thing that struck me when I watched Hail again this morning—and maybe it's because this is also representing the New York performance scene of the time—was how sort of meta and artificial it is. Like, when John Kelly as Delilah is about to sing to Samson...the first time you see Samson off set, finishing his cigarette really quickly, there's a really hilarious scene where Hapi is just staring at the toaster on fire until the clapboard comes in and somebody says, action. And, you know, we hear you say cut at some point.
CA: Yeah, it's very much, like, putting out some potentially very scary images and then undercutting them. And then there's the scene where the gun doesn't go off and she goes, "Oh, well."
KM: And the other thing I was going to ask you about was the Club Kids scenes. For one thing, it reminded me a lot of the similar sequence in Hail the New Puritan.
CA: Yeah. It's the same approach. I just put up a glitter curtain in the background. I put some lights on it, and then I got people in one at a time, and whoever wanted to be shot had to get a blood pouch. And they would just dance for a while, to the music. We had that glitter curtain for one day. Probably wasn't even a full day. It was like in the Hail the New Puritan. It was just like a quick way of getting a lot different, crazy looking people in the shot.
KM: Did you start that with Hail the New Puritan? I guess I could see how that would lead into Turning or—I feel like you've done a few pieces where you've had people sit for you or perform for you, or the live video editing that you did at PARTICIPANT and also at Vilma Gold, Instant Fame.
CA: With Hail the New Puritan, we had one day to do the whole club scene. This was at the end after we shot all the other shots that I had in mind. I wanted to get close on people, so I just put up a set and then ran them through. That's a lot to shoot in one day, that whole scene. Really a lot to shoot in one day. That was when we were breaking down the rest of the set, [and] I set up one area with a glitter curtain. I didn't know what I was doing. I didn't have any idea what I was going to do. This is like making material to edit with. It was the same thing for the Club Kids. I just figured out a way to edit it with the music and the dancing. It was an editing project, really. I edited it on film, I believe. You can tell in the bedroom scene the most. The quality of the light and the gradations. It doesn't look like video. I shot on film because I knew I was going to project it for the live performance. And the idea of projecting video big on the screen was not really a possibility at that point. Hail the New Puritan was made in England, and it's a completely different story. It has to do with the production in England. The last Merce films I did, '83, [were] film. The last four Merce films I did were all on film. I was just used to working in 16mm film, and I had a cameraman DP who was very good at it. I didn't have a preference. I'd shoot whatever was practical and available. After a certain point, I stopped with film because video was just everywhere. I think the last one I did on film was Put Blood in the Music, because I think Magic City USA was already on video.
KM: For me, as someone who wasn't part of that scene, some of the people are still very recognizable. Like Lady Miss Kier and Dimitri from Deee-Lite, or Kenny Kenny. How were they chosen?
CA: No, I knew all these people. They were my friends. I asked them if they wanted to do this. I remember, I was shocked that Billy Beyond wanted to be shot, and ruin that beautiful yellow costume? He'd already worn it out.
KM: Who's the person in the sunglasses who gets shot in the head?
CA: Oh, Ken Bullock. He was an original member of Deee-Lite. I forget what his name was in Deee-Lite. He was a friend of mine and that was his Deee-Lite look, with the star sunglasses. It was very Bootsy.
KM: Were there other Pyramid people or anyone in New York you wanted to be in the piece?
CA: No, I mean, all my favorite friends all came for the dancing section. They're all people that I dance next to. I was part of that club scene. And also the fact that Leigh always came with me when he was in New York. So I got a little extra cred for that.
KM: Did you introduce Leigh to New York clubs, or did he already know them?
CA: Well, he first came to New York and I was there and I went to the clubs with him. I brought him to certain things. There was the Susanne Bartsch club. There was the Dean Johnson club, Rock ’n’ Roll Fag Bar. I brought him to the Pyramid. He didn't need a guide, he could manage on his own. But he stayed with me, so we went out together a lot. When I went to London, that's where I really was immersed in a club scene. And then I sorta found that equivalent when I used to go to Studio 54 in the seventies. I was a nightlife person. Studio 54 was every night, London was the beginning of the one night a week club. That's where it started and then it carried over into New York a couple of years later. So, yeah, I used to go out four or five nights a week.
KM: Which ones did you particularly like to go to?
CA: Well, I went to every club. I went to some of the big clubs, I went to the Palladium, I went to the Sound Factory. I went to the Garage.² Everywhere. I was a gay party boy, but not circuit.
(From top to bottom) Anohni and Connie Fleming in It’s a Jackie Thing (1999).
KM: It's kind of fascinating to me because I'm probably old enough to have been a Club Kid at the very end of it, but I wasn't. It wasn't my music. Or maybe I just wasn't smart enough to see the appeal at the time. So it's especially fascinating to me now. It's a part of your work, but it only shows up here and there. I don't know that I would count even It's a Jackie Thing, because I think Jackie 60 is something different. But it really just mostly shows up with the Club Kids in Son of Sam and Delilah, and with the Disco 2000 commercial that you did. Am I forgetting anything?
CA: Well, Butcher's Vogue, I originally did to show it in a nightclub.
KM: So Son of Sam showed maybe one time on PBS?
CA: It was withdrawn all over the country. The two sponsoring stations that agreed to show it once were New York and Boston. And when it came time to show it, Boston made a mistake and put on something else. So it was only ever shown in New York once.
KM: So then what was its life after that? Did it show in clubs? Did it go…no, to EAI. To EAI rentals. That was its next life.
CA: That was its only life. And at the time, I felt it was my most personal film, and I really loved it, and I still love it. And I think it hasn't been seen enough.
KM: Most personal because it was a story that you developed?
CA: No, because when I realized what it was about, it was like, "Oh, it really expresses my feelings about a lot of things." And at the beginning, for the first five or so years after it was released, I would say it was about AIDS and no one would believe me really. They were collecting things about AIDS to show, videos about AIDS, and I would say, "I have a video about AIDS" and they're like, "No." The metaphor of it didn't become obvious until later.
KM: So back to the Marlon Riggs thing of “it's not explanatory enough, it makes people upset.”
CA: It's not explanatory at all. But I wanted to create the atmosphere of fear, fear of this thing that was going around killing people.
KM: And then, in addition to that, to some extent, because of the homophobic rant at the beginning, it was also a fear of gay bashing.
CA: Yeah, well, the whole gestalt from that period.
KM: And so you cast Hapi because of Whispers. But is it true that Hapi is the one who brought Hattie Hathaway in?
CA: Probably, yeah. I knew Hattie also. I can't remember, because we were going to do that scene in my house. Hapi used to hang out with Hattie a lot. And they had a kind of banter dialogue going.
KM: And is that scene improvised or written?
CA: Improvised. I knew Hapi from the Pyramid, so I knew that she could talk about anything for as long as needed. We did make up some kind of story about that she was some kind of evil queen. There’s the thing where she hits a shot glass with a hammer, and that sort of symbolized the party that she had the night before.
KM: So Hapi improvised? How much of this was improv?
CA: I knew them, and we worked out what it was going to be and everything, but…there was no written dialogue. I mean, for the Anna Thopson scene, I think we worked it out beforehand, and she came up with the line, "You always have to always go to auditions" and blah, blah, blah. It's all kind of ridiculous. I forget what he said, something about lunch. I can't remember. The blood knife didn't really work that well, I still have to avert my eyes every time he takes the knife to her neck.
KM: Oh, that's interesting. So you were really into gory, bloody movies in that moment, but—
CA: I'm a great audience. I do everything I'm supposed to do. I cry, I laugh. I'm moved, I'm terrified. That's why I'm a filmmaker.
Ken Bullock in Son of Sam and Delilah.
KM: The video is about, as we talked about, people lost to AIDS, some very dark things. But to watch it now is to be reminded that Brian Butterick, Hattie Hathaway, who passed away recently, the Pyramid Club, where the sign was just taken down from—granted, it had not been what it was for a very long time—but still the sign is now gone from Avenue A.
CA: Well, sad, you know. I saw a lot of great things at the Pyramid. But New York changes. I saw a lot of great things at Jackie 60, and that's not there either. Speaking of, when I was with Marina [Abromovic], I went to Yugoslavia during the Serbia-Croatia war. I went to Serbia with Marina as part of research for a piece we did together. But when I was in Serbia, the capital, in Belgrade, I was invited to show something at an art space. So I showed Son of Sam and Delilah. And what they got out of it, from all the shooting in the disco, was the war that was going on there. So it can broaden its referential field.
KM: And did they find it funny?
CA: No. No. It was kind of scary. I mean, I'm sure they'd all seen people shot. We were staying in the hotel that was the secret service police hotel. The same hotel where all the secret service were staying. You'd come down to breakfast and there would be all these guys in black leather trench coats.
KM: Huh. Protecting whom?
CA: I mean, the Serbian government was monstrous. They were fighting for greater Serbia. They wanted to take over Croatia.
KM: One more question, just to confirm. Hapi and Hattie: that's your kitchen, right?
CA: It's my kitchen, living room. When I first moved into this place. Now it's like a grandmother's attic.
Notes
Joe Westmoreland.
King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut, Glasgow.
The Paradise Garage, NYC.
Edited by Charlotte Strange.