Event Information

**Lightstruck** is honored to present the Los Angeles premiere of a new 16mm preservation print of Jill Godmilow’s riveting and empathetic film of Ron Vawter’s singular performance piece, *Roy Cohn/Jack Smith*. Vawter – influential actor and founding member of the famed Wooster Group – devised the original one-man show in 1992, focusing on two wildly different and intricately complex gay icons, with the Roy Cohn segment written by Gary Indiana and the Jack Smith segment a recreation of Smith’s 1981 performance, “What’s Underground About Marshmallows”. With mesmerizing engagement, Vawter dually inhabits the figures of the closeted Cohn, notorious lawyer/prosecutor who counted Joseph McCarthy and Donald Trump among his close associates, and the extraordinary Smith, a one-of-a-kind artist and filmmaker whose legendary performances unapologetically celebrated his radically queer and kaleidoscopic sensibility. Both men were of a similar age and died from AIDS-related complications in the late 1980s, as would Vawter himself only months after the filming of this restaged 1993 performance at The Kitchen with Godmilow. In exploring both men’s public images as similarly eccentric and flamboyant personas, Vawter’s own presence as embodying actor hovers vividly near the surface, accentuated by Godmilow’s approach to intercutting the originally separate halves of the piece. The result is a fascinating triple portrait scrutinizing the social and political complexities of generational gay identity in the immediate wake of the homophobic denial and bigotry of the 1980s. Program by Zena Grey and Mark Toscano. Notes by Mark Toscano. New 16mm print courtesy of the Academy Film Archive. Special thanks to Jill Godmilow and Ricky Herbst. Presented by Lightstruck This is an 18+ event