Bam Bam and Celeste Released on DVD

San Francisco native Margaret Cho is among my favorite performers/artists and one of the funniest people in the world. I’ve been waiting nearly two years to get the opportunity to see the movie she wrote—now it looks like her worst fears have been confirmed. But hey Margaret! There is an audience out there in DVD World grateful to be able to enjoy your work (and the works of a few others I can name) even on the home screen.

Here’s her 14 October 2005 blog posting:

Tickets for our Los Angeles AFI screening are available, and if you can come support our film, I would really appreciate it. We are showing the film to potential distributors, and if we can prove that Bam Bam & Celeste has an audience out there, it might actually get to a theater near you. The film world is a notoriously racist and sexist place. “Admit one only” goes not just for the ticket, but for the different levels of “minority” you might qualify for. You can be a woman, just don’t be a woman of color. You can be gay, but try to at least look straight. If you are Asian, at least master one martial art and have the decency to know your place and make the film in Asia. And if you are a comedian, the only way we will laugh is if you are a straight white man. Film people don’t get our film because it makes them question themselves. When you call out racism, it makes you very unpopular. Then adding homophobia and good old school misogyny to the mix, you have “straight to video”.

I think that this film deserves the chance to compete in the multiplex, because it is really good. And it is different. I want to make movies, to tell my story in the greatest art form there is, and I don’t want other people’s prejudice, so deep seated that they don’t even recognize it, to keep me from my dream. When you don’t see yourself reflected back in the eyes of the media, you feel like you don’t exist. Our film makes the execs feel like they don’t exist. Their voices are not here—therefore they feel like we feel all the time and they don’t like it.

This movie was incredibly difficult to make, because no one thought the story deserved telling. The powers that be felt our journey wasn’t compelling because it wasn’t theirs. I had to move “Heaven and Earth”—the only acceptable kind of Asian woman’s film—to get this picture made. It is a tiny small effort in the universe of filmmaking.

What I find inconceivable are the film critics who could be panning the blockbusters, films that have millions and millions of dollars behind them, would choose to crush our film just out of spite and their own intolerance. Just because our film isn’t told backwards, doesn’t star Aaron Eckhart, doesn’t have that weird film stock that makes everyone look like a zombie from 28 Days Later—they want to thrash us into oblivion. It isn’t fair. It’s not like I am some Hollywood kid either. I am no Penn, not a Paltrow, not a Coppola, not a Gyllenhaal, not even a Deschanel. I came from nothing and I did it all without ANYONE’S help. But now I need your help. SOS. Support Our Shit. We need to make our voices heard.