Elegance Bratton, whose documentary “Move Ya Body: The Birth of House” had its international premiere this week at Thessaloniki Documentary Festival, speaks to Variety about the relevance of house music’s history in Trump’s America, and his feelings as he prepares to shoot crime thriller “By Any Means,” starring Mark Wahlberg and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II.
Bratton, who first broke through with documentary “Pier Kids” and drama “The Inspection,” and was selected as one of Variety’s 10 Directors to Watch in 2023, has a personal connection to house music because of how it empowered him as a gay teenager. When he was growing up, he was bullied because of his name. “There was all this pressure on me to be less effeminate,” he says. Within his family and community, if he were “naturally flamboyant,” “they attempted to bully or beat it out of me,” he says. Then, on television, he saw clubgoers at New York nightclub Limelight, who were “way more flamboyant than I was at the time,” he recalls. He went to the club himself, and says: “It was wild, because the things that I got bullied for, the effeminacy that people thought made me weak and inferior, in the night-time became a superpower, right? Like you were fierce, you were that girl, and people really gravitated towards you for those things, and the soundtrack to that empowerment was house music.”
It was Oscar-winning filmmaker Roger Ross Williams who proposed that Bratton should direct a documentary about the birth of house music that he was developing with Hillary Clinton’s HiddenLight. “I was like, ‘Wait a minute, Hillary Clinton likes house music?’ I didn’t know that was a thing,” Bratton says. “And apparently, she’s from Chicago, and she loves house music. So, it just made me curious.”
The film, which had its world premiere at Sundance Film Festival, is produced by Chester Algernal Gordon. The production companies are Ross Williams’ A One Story Up, Hidden Light, Los Angeles Media Fund, and Impact Partners.
When Variety exclusively announced that Bratton was attached to the project, it had a different title, “The Night Disco Died,” and a different focus, 1979’s Disco Demolition Night at Comiskey Park, a stadium in Chicago. In the run-up to that day, DJ Steve Dahl had urged fans to bring disco records to the stadium, and these were put in a dumpster and blown to smithereens in an explosion. This led to a riot by white youth, widely seen as racist and homophobic in nature.
“Move Ya Body: The Birth of House”
Courtesy of A One Story Up, Hidden Light
During Bratton’s research for the project, and a key reason behind his decision to take it on, he discovered that one of those working as an usher at Comiskey Park that night was Vince Lawrence, who would go on to record, in 1984, what became to be seen as the first ever house record, “On and On,” performed by Jesse Saunders. Bratton says Lawrence’s story was “inspirational.”
The riot at Comiskey Park was an attempt to denigrate all Black music, Bratton says, not just disco, and “On and On” “would ensure that their desire to kill Black dance music would never succeed. I think that’s really inspirational in the times that we live in right now. When I look at Disco Demolition, I’m reminded of this MAGA maelstrom that we’re in the middle of right now, and, like a lot of people, I have felt powerless in the face of it. You are watching, supposedly, the majority of Americans turn their backs on the idea of equal justice and civil rights and embrace a notion of … I mean, it’s like book burning. It’s like what the Nazis did. They’re banning books, and they’re trying to eliminate words from course syllabuses and trying to tell universities how they can educate their students. They’re literally walking away from free speech just so that people of color and queer people and women cannot ever have the right to protest what’s being done to them.
“And I look at Vince Lawrence’s story, and I say, ‘Wow, this is proof: if you hold on to your dreams like Vince, if you hold on to your values like Vince, there’s a possibility that you can create something that can change the world for the better. And I wanted to spread that message to the cinema community.”
As he developed the documentary, he found out there were multiple other projects on the same subject, so he knew he had to differentiate his film from the others. Also, he knew that the house community “bristle at the notion that Disco Demolition is the reason why house exists,” and state that its roots pre-dated that event, developing in clubs like the Warehouse. “I didn’t want to root my film in white reactionary violence,” he says. “I didn’t want to say that this black joy and this black creativity could only exist in reaction to white hate. It’s much more complicated than that. So initially calling the film ‘The Night Disco Died’ centers the wrong people. I wanted to center the people who created house music, not the people who create hate.”
The film begins with Bratton reassuring Lawrence that the film isn’t about him, in order to calm his nerves, but Lawrence’s story is a central thread running through the film. Bratton says he wanted something “that felt embodied and rooted in a person.” He adds: “I really do believe that every human being is living history, that if you were to sit down and ask a person a story of their life that what they’re going to tell you is going to inherently be connected to the major historical events at the time in which they live.”
He adds that rather than focus more broadly on the history of house, “I wanted to focus in on one Black life and show the audience that this person understands that they matter, regardless of what the MAGA movement has to say about it, because I think that that is inherently more empowering. There’s way more agency in that.”
It helps of course that Lawrence was connected to key moments in that history, and, in fact, Lawrence calls himself “the Forrest Gump of house,” Bratton says.
Another key character in the film is house music artist Rachael Cain, also known as Screamin’ Rachael. She married impresario Larry Sherman, who had set up Trax Records. The house music label allegedly failed to fairly compensate the Black artists whose music it produced. On divorcing Sherman, Cain acquired the rights to many of the pioneering house tracks.
Bratton underscores that it is Sherman who is the “villain” of the film, not Cain. “I love Rachael Cain,” he says. She is a “larger than life figure,” who tells her story in the film, claiming to be the “queen of house.” Bratton says one of his favorite filmmakers is John Waters, and compares Cain’s role in the film to Divine in Waters’ movies. “I just found her to be charismatic and interesting, and she has a certain kind of star quality about her,” he says.
She serves to illustrate a broader narrative in the film. “As much as I’m focused on the joy, the black joy, of the creation of house, I wanted to speak about the systemic realities that make it possible for the pioneers of house to be dispossessed of their contribution,” he says. “Rachael is the beneficiary of that systemic racism.”
He adds: “Chicago was so segregated that if you’re a Black child growing up in the South Side or the West Side of the city, and you have any sort of aspiration of living a middle-class life, you absolutely require some form of white collaboration, and the Black child knows it, and the white community knows it as well, so that Vince and his generation were always ready to be victimized in this way. There was no avoiding it, if you want your music to crossover then you have to cross across those racial lines. And there is a toll that has to be paid, and unfortunately for the pioneers of house the toll that was paid was them losing the rights to their music.”
Another element of the film is that it recognizes the contribution of the Black queer community in the development of house music. Bratton says that “in these culture wars that we’re in, the fanatical Nazi religious right,” on the one hand, tries to dismiss gay culture as “disposable” and “frivolous.” He says it is seen as “just a bunch of irresponsible men dancing and having a good time and doing drugs and having sex, and that’s just so unimportant.” On the other hand, the right-wing fear that “white folks are losing their power” because black and gay people “are able to have a culture in the first place.” He adds: “I grew up in this kind of gas lighty middle zone where on one end, I’m completely dismissed, and on the other end, I am the sole focus of animosity and fear.”
He adds: “It was important for me to show that partying is political, that when you choose to dance next to someone who is different from you, you are actually participating in countering a culture that would seek to keep us separated. I wanted to assert for a new generation the importance of going out together, that we shouldn’t allow systems of segregation and racism, and sexism and homophobia to make us silent individuals, because the people divided can never be united.”
Next up for Bratton is the production of “By Any Means,” based on a story that he says is “really close to my heart.” “In the 1960s, a man by the name of Vernon Dahmer was paying poll taxes so that Black folks in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, could vote the Ku Klux Klan out of power. And, of course, the Klan found out about it, and they burned down his house with his family in it, and unfortunately, he succumbed to the wounds,” he says. “And my movie is about – this is all a true story, by the way – the moment when the FBI hired a Mafia hitman by the name of Greg Scarpa to bring in those killers, dead or alive. And our film, ‘By Any Means,’ is about the Black FBI agent who partners with that hitman to solve the crime. I’ve got Mark Wahlberg playing Greg, and I’ve got Yahya Abdul-Mateen II playing the FBI agent.”
He adds: “I get exhausted by a Hollywood that only depicts a very specific lane of Black life and of Black struggle and Black triumph, right? And I understand that people are fatiguing of stories that are not rooted in joy. But to me, any joy that is not won through struggle is a delusion. It’s not real joy. It’s what you tell yourself to get through it, but it’s not what you do to triumph.
“ ‘By Any Means’ is a thriller. It’s a cross-pollination between a Civil Rights movie and a Mafia film. I’ve got so many surprises in this movie, and I’m excited for people to see it, but at the end of the day, it’s important that we show that you don’t have to sit around and wait for someone to save you. You don’t have to wait for your Democrat leaders to figure out how to get their foot out of their mouths and say what matters for your freedom. You can go and take your freedom for yourself. And if you do that, you force systems to catch up to you. And I think these are the types of lessons that young people need to have, and I’m excited I get to do it in a movie that is as entertaining and exciting as this. This is not your mama’s Civil Rights film, that’s for sure.”
