Give John Cameron Mitchell an inch and he'll take a mile. Midway through shooting this adaptation of his play -- about a bewigged wannabe rock star with a botched sex change operation -- the 37-year-old auteur decreed an on-set ''Drag Day.'' The crew happily complied: The grips wore fake breasts; the script girl sported a beard; a beefy, tattooed stuntman donned a hot pink dress. The set (actually, a Toronto restaurant) looked like transvestite night at your friendly neighborhood watering hole. ''Girls will be boys and boys will be girls,'' quips Mitchell, who grabbed this year's Directing Award at Sundance (the film also picked up the festival's Audience Award for drama).
And with ''The Rocky Horror Show'' currently doing the time warp again on Broadway, the time may be just right for a musical tragicomedy that has all the earmarks of a cult classic. ''And what's wrong with cult?'' asks Arianne Phillips, designer of the film's fabulously debauched costumes. ''My God, to have been involved in 'Rocky Horror' or 'Night of the Living Dead' -- how cool would that have been?'' And how cool is the possibility of a Hedwig fragrance, which is already in the works? Smells like a winner to us.
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