Inside the Spooky Screening for “Brim Broome Boulevard”

The screening of a stop-motion short film is, perhaps, not the most likely place to find drag queens, designers, socialites, and editors on a Friday night in New York City. Yet the viewing party of “Brim Broome Boulevard,” written and directed by PJ Magerko-Liquorice, brought together a colorful crowd that reflected the project’s artistic daring.

Upon arriving at NeueHouse on East 25th Street, guests were immediately immersed in surrealism when greeted by nearly identical actors, donning dark wigs and headsets, in the role of overly eager PRs. The subtle blending of performance and reality continued through the night.

The subterranean theater filled with anticipation. Over the course of a year and a half, Magerko-Liquorice collaborated with exceptional artists to realize his vision. Jackson Wiederhoeft of Wiederhoeft, a finalist in this year’s CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund, created sublime costumes. Photographer Jordan Millington Liquorice, PJ’s husband, creative-directed the film. HouseSpecial in Portland, Oregon, served as the studio. Stop-motion is an infamously laborious mode of movie-making, yet one nearly as old as cinema itself. The first full-length stop-motion film, Ladislas Starevich’s The Tale of the Fox (1937), premiered eight months before Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). In subsequent decades, filmmakers like Tim Burton, Wes Anderson, and Arthur Rankin Jr. have returned to the medium for its special whimsy and imaginative opportunity.

“Brim Broome Boulevard,” which will be shown throughout the country in festivals over the coming months, employs the plot device used in many familiar children’s stories: a colorful land (Wonderland, Narnia, Oz) can be secretly entered by a child, who is in need of escape or education.  A shy trick-or-treater named Jasper stumbles, à la Alice or Dorthy, into a magical department store, presided over by a campy shopkeeper, voiced by the drag artist Jaymes Mansfield. The Bergdorf Goodman-esque boutique offers the young boy all the sartorial tools necessary for expression and invention. By positioning clothing as the primary means of metamorphosis echoes cinematic transformations like My Fair Lady, Pretty Woman, Devil Wears Prada, and countless others.

After the film, writer Kristen Bateman, who is herself a chronicler on the transformational aspects of clothing, spoke with Magerko-Liquorice about his process and inspirations.

“The story has been brewing my whole life,” Magerko-Liquorice said. “After graduating from film school, I wasn’t getting a lot of work in the industry so I got a seasonal job at New York’s iconic costume shop, Abracadabra— it was not where I expected to be six months after graduating but it was a blessing in disguise. It was very humbling renting out costumes to a lot of my peers I went to school with. But I was happy and inspired to be helping people transform for my favorite holiday.”

Earlier that day, Magerko-Liquorice spoke to Vogue about the personal influences that went into the story and film. He described being bullied in high school “mostly because of what I was wearing. I was very proud of my look but growing up in southwestern Pennsylvania, in a rural town, I felt ahead of time and good in what I was wearing. But it showed the power of a look, which is what ‘Brim Broome Boulevard’ is about, and begs the question how a look can be so potent?”

The traumatic incident stoked Magerko-Liquorice’s desire to escape to a place where creativity was celebrated instead of punished. Magerko-Liquorice attended boarding school, followed by Parsons at The New School, before graduating from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. The duality of self-expression— an aspect fundamental to both artistic and queer identity— is the driving force of the film.

After the screening, guests—including Susanne Bartsch, David Burtka, Tanner Richie, and Fletcher Kasell of Tanner Fletcher—journeyed upstairs to an exhibition of the film’s costumes and sets. In her review of the latest Wiederhoeft collection, Vogue’s Laia Garcia-Furtado defined the brand’s aesthetic as “very ladylike and totally unexpected.” The costumes reflected this sensibility with exaggerated femininity, a penchant for corsetry, and an abundance of romance— always undercut with a subversive twist.

The screening signaled the arrival of a promising new filmmaker and a reminder of the role artists play in creating a safer world for young people to grow into themselves.