Jimmie Michaels

Picking up the story first presented in I Don’t Know (1970), Hats Off to Hollywood (1972) brazenly and brilliantly mixes documentary reality with fully staged recreations/reimaginings of episodes in the lives of Jennifer and Dana, a loving, bickering couple who challenge the notion of homonormativity. Drugs, poverty, disease, bigotry and prostitution all figure into this disarmingly candid and often hilarious film, a remarkable work that is the apotheosis of director Spheeris’ early work, and a luminous signpost leading directly to The Decline of Western Civilization (1979-1997). Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2012.

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A truly major work, I Don’t Know observes the relationship between a lesbian and a transgender person who prefers to be identified somewhere in between male and female, in an expression of personal ambiguity suggested by the film’s title. This nonfiction film – an unusual, partly staged work of semi-verité – is the first of Spheeris’s films to fully embrace what would become her characteristic documentary style: probing, intimate, uncompromising. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2014.

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The humorous narrator explains the sex habits of the twelve signs of the zodiac as the ancient Roman festival of Venus presided by the goddess herself begins.

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A hard-core pop musical camp exposé of a young country boy led adrift by Sweet Lady Mary in Hollywood.

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A couple hire a detective to locate their missing daughter. He finds her in a "house of ill-repute."

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Directed by pioneering gay documentary and erotica filmmaker Pat Rocco, Changes is a profile of Jennifer Michaels, a trans person living in Los Angeles.

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A collection of short films by Pat Rocco.

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Three guys have their car broken down the road. Lucky for them there is a house of ill repute nearby...

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