THREE high-spirited big-city drag queens hit the road in search of fame and fortune, encounter prejudice in a small town, but love conquers all in the end. You've heard this story before, right? But perhaps not. We're talking about Steven Spielberg's To Wong Foo, Thanks For Everything, Julie Newmar - not Australia's The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.
It's odd that there are now two movies about three drag queens on the road within the space of one year. And that both have silly titles which studiously avoid the subject matter; 'Three Gay Men in a Bus/Car' would be more apt, but who would go to see that? They're standing in line to watch Ghost's Patrick Swayze, Drop Zone's Wesley Snipes and stand-up comic John Leguizamo trussed up in spangly frocks, however - Americans have spent US$30 million (HK$231 million) in three weeks on tickets to Wong Foo.
'I have a feeling,' says a chain-smoking Patrick Swayze in his New York hotel room - he of the self-admitted 'Swayze paws and Popeye forearms' - 'that this movie is going to be big. And I know that it's made me into the actor I've dreamed of becoming all my life.' Swayze, who defines a drag queen as 'a gay man with too much fashion sense for one gender', was the last actor to be cast in Wong Foo.
But let's hop back to stage one, when Douglas Carter Beane saw RuPaul on television and wrote a story about three drag queens - called Vida Boheme (Swayze), Noxeema (Snipes) and Chi Chi (John Leguizamo) - who win a drag contest in New York and hit the road to Hollywood to claim their first prize of a chance to compete in the drag world's Mr/s Universe.
The title comes from a picture Vida steals off the walls of a New York restaurant called Wong Foo's - autographed by Catwoman herself, Julie Newmar - and keeps as a talisman en route. And the three 'girls' need it.
They are derailed by a homophobic cop (Chris Penn) and wind up in the tiny midwestern town of Snydersville, where they are mistaken for 'large career women'.
Carter Beane shopped his script around Hollywood, where it came to the attention of Steven Spielberg, Hollywood's foremost purveyor of family values.