IN A ‘TANGERINE’ DREAM
‘Tangerine” star Mya Taylor adjusted her glasses, flipped her long hair off a shoulder and took in the cracked linoleum floor and the picture-heavy menu at Donut Time in Hollywood.
Outside, the roar of morning traffic burst through the open doors, filling the compact space with the din of Santa Monica Boulevard, of the life Taylor used to live, before she became a transgender star with her own awards campaign.
“It looks different in here,” she said blithely of the film’s frequent setting to director Sean Baker. “Looks like they renovated.”
Donut Time isn’t the only thing that has changed in the 18 months since “Tangerine” was filmed. The movie has won acclaim for its portrait of Hollywood’s transgender sex workers. The comic drama, shot entirely on an iPhone 5s with non-actor stars, now ranks 96% “fresh” on RottenTomatoes.com.
“We had no idea it was going to be this much a part of the zeitgeist,” said Baker. “It was literally, ‘We want to make a movie about Santa Monica and Highland.’ We had no plot. No script. We didn’t know enough about this world to do that.”
Baker lives around the corner from Donut Time and, having made films about other disenfranchised groups — Chinese immigrant food delivery men in “Take Out,” Manhattan street hustlers in “Prince of Broadway” and down-and-out porn actors in “Starlet” — he was curious about his own neighborhood.
He and co-writer Chris Burgoch went looking for area ambassadors and found Taylor and her transgender friend Kitana Kiki Rodriguez.
“Mya opened the doors to us in many ways,” said Baker. “We were looking for as much input as possible because we’re two cisgender white guys outside this world. We wanted to immerse ourselves and get as much accurate information as possible.”
Rodriguez and Taylor, who at one time had been sex workers, introduced the filmmakers
to their friends in the area and helped inspire the plot from their own life stories.
“Straight from the jump I said this has to be real,” Taylor said. “Totally honest. No fabrication. And very funny. I knew that the story is very dark. So why just have it dark through the whole movie? You have to have some humor to play it off.”
The film screened at the Sundance Film Festival in January just as audiences woke up to transgender issues with the Emmy-award winning Amazon series “Transparent,” transgender actor Laverne Cox’s historic Emmy nomination for her role on Netflix’s “Orange Is the New Black” and President Obama’s historic use of “transgender” in his State of the Union address.
By the time Magnolia Pictures released the film in July, Caitlyn Jenner was taking a summer-long victory lap.
Executive producers Mark and Jay Duplass are supporting the film’s awards campaign, and, so far, it has earned Taylor and Rodriguez nominations as “breakthrough” actors from the Gotham Independent Film Awards.
Though Rodriguez has stopped doing press for the awards campaign, Taylor is making the most of this moment. She has already starred in two short films and is now pitching her own TV show, based on her “very, very, very dramatic life.” This month, she plans to attend the Champions of Change event at the White House. She said she can hardly walk through airports anymore without getting stopped by fans.
“I’m just going along with the ride. It’s truly a blessing,” Taylor said.
As Baker described the prototype anamorphic
adapters his crew used to get a widescreen “true scope” look from an iPhone, a young woman with slightly disheveled red hair wandered up to the booth.
“I’m sorry,” she said, interrupting, her hands trembling slightly. “I came here from Texas, and I came here because I saw ‘Tangerine’ with my mom. We loved it so much.”
Without missing a beat, Taylor asked, “Did you recognize me when you came in here to look at the doughnuts?”
Baker didn’t bother introducing himself as the film’s director. Instead, he stood to take a photo of Taylor with her exuberant super-fan. The instant he snapped the picture, the sound of a rumbling motorcycle engine filled Donut Time with noise, just like a Hollywood ending.