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No sick days, mandatory diets, boob jobs, four-inch heels, wigs and fake lashes. What they did for love and a steady job in the Las Vegas spotlight.
A playful, sexy and poignant look into the lives of women and men who have committed themselves to make a Las Vegas topless revue into the best show that budget and time constraints will allow. Employing an innovative blend of high-energy dance numbers, verité footage and home video shot by the cast, "Showgirls: Glitz & Angst" is a fast-paced, narratively driven rush of hopes, dreams and harsh realities. The film's multiple cameras chronicle the backstage tensions - weigh-ins, company politics, frank girl talk, untimely injuries and even firings, from auditions through rehearsals. And the dancers' hand-held cameras (given to them when they're hired) focus on a home life where kids have to be picked up from school, dad's parole board hearing is coming up, and boyfriends take off on motorcycles with no promise to return. Through all this, the 12 dancers must stay thin, beautiful and healthy while learning fifteen intricate dance numbers in just 25 days, wearing 20-pound headdresses and four-inch heels, and changing costumes in the blink of an eye.
A documentary with energy, wit and heart, "Showgirls: Glitz & Angst" celebrates the iconography of the female, hanging out with a diverse, athletic and hilariously honest group of working women who put on and quick change 15 barely-there stage-lit costumes of male fantasy every night. But what is glimpsed beyond the shimmering seven veils of colored wigs, feathered headdresses and peekaboo pants is the warm flesh of love, loss, and the miraculous near-impossibility of artistic collaboration.
SHOWGIRLS: GLITZ & ANGST spotlights the tumultuous relationship between Mistinguett, the show's talented and temperamental choreographer, and Greg Thompson, the show's producer. Mistinguett is a six-foot-tall former showgirl who began choreographing Thompson's shows nearly 20 years ago, and was his lover for 15 years. Though Thompson owes much of his success to their creative collaboration, he recently married Sunny, a bubbly, much younger blonde woman, who currently stars in many of his shows. Now it's up to Mistinguett to choreograph a sexy and beguiling show for the very woman who took her place. As opening night draws closer and friction builds between the former lovers, the strain takes its toll on Mistinguett and the entire cast. As SHOWGIRLS: GLITZ & ANGST concludes, opening night is at hand. The documentary reveals the strange warmth of a large, dysfunctional family hard at work. The personalities are larger than life, yet touchingly human. But when the curtain rises on opening night, the backstage drama gives way to the dazzling display of flesh, feathers and flash that makes the Vegas showgirl the legend that she is.
Showgirls was directed by Kirby Dick and produced by Eddie Schmidt. Dick is an award-winning LA filmmaker whose last work, "Derrida", premiered at the 2002 Sundance Film Festival and won the Golden Gate Award at the San Francisco Film Festival. Dick also directed "Chain Camera", a riveting portrayal of contemporary teenage life, which also premiered at Sundance and, in September 2001, as part of the Cinemax Reel Life series. In 1997, Dick directed the internationally acclaimed "Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist", which won the Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival and the Grand Prize at the Los Angeles Film Festival.
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