“We have a huge focus on design - from the set to the costumes - and really the majority of our cast - and definitely all of our main cast - they’re all queer people, so we are really trying to generate community not only within our cast but within the entire film.” West, who wrote and directed the film, said that they are “examining this bar - which we have reimagined and rebuilt out here in Devens - not through patrons, but through the lens of servers, bartenders, drag queens … people who would have occupied and been stewards of the space throughout the majority of their lives.” West, a native of Monument, Colo., moved to Boston to attend Emerson College, where she received a master’s degree in visual media arts and subsequently taught cinematography. It really highlights a lost queer subculture in Boston and I think it reflects a national trend of what is being lost when we’re closing or not supporting these brick and mortar spaces and what happens when nefarious government intervention displaces a marginalized group of people,” they said in a phone interview from the film set. “I started research on this film a couple of years ago. In those days being covered with tattoos was seen as unsavory indeed.
This is a story that needs to be told, they maintained. In about 1982 I touched the arm of a man with a tattoo sleeve for the first time in a disreputable gay bar in the Combat Zone in Boston, the area where the city let porn shops and gay bars and other unsavory businesses be concentrated and pretty much left alone.
#Playland gay bar boston movie#
West, 28, recently wrapped up filming “Playland” at a movie studio in Fort Devens. Now, more than 20 years after the Essex Street establishment’s closing, artist, writer, and director Georden West is bringing the story of this iconic establishment to life on the big screen.
For more than 50 years, Playland Café was Boston’s go-to gay bar in what was once the gritty Combat Zone area.