She said she has forbidden relatives to see the movie. When a colleague at the Canadian Broadcasting Corp congratulated her on the film and told her he couldn't wait to see it, she said, "I was like: 'Gulp! No! There's a moratorium."'
The sex that cast members had in the service of the movie seemed to stay in that context; intimate scenes didn't appear to complicate relationships among the cast members. And Mitchell asked as much of himself as he did of his cast. For a scene that shows writhing bodies in a sort of sexual mosh pit, he jumped into the fray. Showing outtakes of that scene on a television set in his West Village apartment, he took note of the extras. "I knew some of these people," he said against a backdrop of moans. "Some were friends of friends."
He drew on friends for the principal cast as well. He has known Bond for about a decade. Both of them used to drop by an apartment in the Village where DeBoy held casual parties. The three saw one another regularly at a local restaurant, the Cowgirl Hall of Fame, where Bond performed an early version of the Kiki & Herb act. And Bond once judged a certain aspect of Dawson's physiognomy during a contest at a gay bar in the East Village.
On top of all of the other odd aspects of its evolution, Shortbus represented a reunion and collaboration of fringe artists moving closer to the mainstream. Kiki & Herb, for example, recently appeared on Broadway.
As for the film? It showed out of competition -- but to rapt interest -- at the most glamorous film festival of them all. "At Cannes, we had a 10-minute standing ovation," Bond said. "We were all standing there bawling."
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