Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
Presented by the UCLA Film & Television Archive.
Part of the UCLA Film & Television Archive screening series Disclosure: A Trans Re-reading of American Cinema. Learn more at cinema.ucla.edu.
In-person: Tre’vell Anderson, author of We See Each Other: A Black Trans Journey Through TV and Film.
Mary of Ill Fame (2020)
From the mind of writer-director and Black trans woman Tourmaline comes Mary of Ill Fame, a fictional story inspired by a newspaper clipping from the 1830s about a trans woman named Mary Jones who was arrested for stealing a man’s wallet. The film is set in Seneca Village, an autonomous settlement of free Blacks and Irish immigrants located on what is known today as Central Park where Jones, a gifted conjurer who can see visions of future events and alter reality with her well crafted spells, fends off the white city officials who want to take control of the land she and her community call home. Here, Tourmaline answers the call of “critical fabulation” theorized by the influential historian Saidiya Hartman, inventing the narrative that doesn’t exist in the historical archive for Jones.
16mm, color, 17 min. Director/Screenwriter: Tourmaline. With: Rowin Amone, Christopher Murray, Eva Reign.
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1997)
In the film adaptation of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, Chablis Deveau enters the story as a potential source for John Kelso (John Cusack), a magazine writer from New York City who comes to the aid of an antiques dealer Jim Williams (Kevin Spacey) when he is accused of murder. The Lady Chablis, a real-life cabaret performer and local celebrity in Savannah, Georgia, plays a version of herself with Deveau. Director Clint Eastwood reportedly believed she was the only person who could convincingly embody the character. Chablis quickly assumes a larger-than-life presence in the film, holding her own as a scene partner against Cusack right up until the last frame. She particularly stands out in the dramatic courtroom scene at the center of the film where she turns the transphobia of the judge and onlookers on its head: “Them folks think they’re using The Doll, but The Doll is using them right back. I’m gonna use that courtroom as my coming out party.” It’s a rare on-screen portrayal of a Black trans woman in the 1990s that “evades the life-ending trauma and violence that often comes to Black trans folks in popular culture,” writes cultural critic Tre’vell Anderson, who appears in the documentary Disclosure.
35mm, color, 155 min. Director: Clint Eastwood. Screenwriter: John Lee Hancock, based on a book by John Berendt. With: The Lady Chablis, John Cusack, Kevin Spacey, Jude Law, Irma P. Hall.
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