In 2013, playwright and filmmaker Del Shores served as an honorary grand marshal during Atlanta Pride. While he’s written and directed many times over, people along the parade route kept screaming out quotes from one of his films in particular – lines like, “Shoot her, Wardell, shoot her in the head!”
This is a line from Shores’ 2000 film “Sordid Lives,” an eccentric black comedy about a Texas family coming together in the wake of their matriarch’s death. The film is based in part on Shores’ own life, particularly his experience of coming out as gay to his family, and is celebrating its 25th anniversary with a screening and Q&A at Out Front Theatre on Oct. 9.
All these years later, Shores is always a little surprised at the amount of people who love the film and who can quote lines back at him at the drop of a hat. But watching the film back throughout its 25th anniversary year, what strikes him is how well “Sordid Lives” holds up.
“This humor holds up. People were howling,” he said about his experience attending screenings. “They were still laughing.”
“Sordid Lives” was originally a 1996 play, which in turn stemmed from a short story that Shores wrote called “Nicotine Fit” about a woman named Sissy (played by Beth Grant in the film) who finds out her sister has died while she’s in the middle of trying to quit smoking. Within that story, there were mentions of Sissy’s sister Latrelle (Bonnie Bedelia) and her son Ty (Kirk Geiger).
Ty is gay, something that Shores said is mentioned in passing in the short story. But in writing even loosely about Ty, Shores began to realize that he was using that character to write about his own life.
“This was before I came out. There was talk about Ty, and implications that he was gay,” he said. “I realized through therapy that I was actually writing about myself.”
Around the time he decided to come out, Shores was working on the television show “Ned and Stacey,” and had just separated from his ex-wife. When he started thinking about the prospect of turning his short story into a full blown play, he was struck by a sudden realization. It didn’t feel right to open the play to the public without coming out himself, and in making that choice, he was able to truly step into his own voice.
“All those years before, I had always written with somebody else’s eye in mind – that my mother would be seeing this, that so-and-so would be seeing this,” Shores said. “I decided, I am going to write uncensored for the first time. I am not going to write for anybody else. That was the big revelation for me that sort of unlocked and unleashed another voice in me, that gay voice that I had.”
The play was a hit. It premiered in Los Angeles in May of 1996 and ran for 13 months. Almost immediately, the prospect of turning “Sordid Lives” into a movie was on the table, in part due to actor Beau Bridges.
Bridges knew Shores already, having starred in one of Shores’ earlier play-turned-films “Daddy’s Dyin’ … Who’s Got the Will?” in 1990. In the “Sordid Lives” film, Bridges plays G.W. Nethercott, a local man who plays an … interesting role in the death that brings everyone together, to say the least.
“He was the first one who said, ‘I’ll do it,’” Shores said. “Thus, the journey began.”
In addition to Bridges, Bonnie Bedelia, Delta Burke, and Olivia Newton-John also signed on to appear in the film. But most of the cast from the play reprised their roles, including Beth Grant, Kirk Geiger, Rosemary Alexander, and, of course, Leslie Jordan.
Jordan plays Earl “Brother Boy” Ingram, a member of the core family and a gay man who has been institutionalized in part due to his proclivity for dressing up like country music queens such as Tammy Wynette. The concept of a drag queen is not so foreign to us now, but for a small town in Texas back in the late 1990s, it was easier to make Brother Boy an outcast rather than try to understand him.
For Shores, it’s been a little more difficult to watch the film since both Newton-John and Jordan passed away in 2022. He was particularly close to Jordan, whose death hit him hard.
“Now, I’m able to [watch]. There’s been a little bit of distance,” Shores said. “God, he was brilliant.”
Critics were not kind to “Sordid Lives” at the time, but Shores remembers one critic’s glowing mention of Jordan’s performance: “Leslie Jordan’s performance is so brilliant that he approaches the brim without spilling over.”
The potent mix of eccentricity, humor, and humanity embodied in Jordan’s performance is what makes “Sordid Lives” work. The action might be heightened, but so much of it comes from stories from Shores’ real life. For example, a fight between Latrelle and her sister LaVonda (Ann Walker) about whether or not their mother should wear a mink stole in her coffin stems from a fight his own mother and aunt had about whether his grandfather should wear a cowboy hat on his head during his funeral (they compromised and put the hat on his chest).
“Sordid Lives” opened to negative reviews from critics. For Shores, that was a bit surprising – after all, the play was well-received. Why wouldn’t the film be too? Shores attributed the initial negative reaction to a certain snobbery within serious film communities towards the south, as well as towards comedy. But over the years, the movie has found its audience and turned into a bonafide cult classic. Shores said watching that occur in real time has been humbling.
“We just never expected that it would be this journey,” he said. “You expect a movie to open, it sort of goes away. But this one just keeps going and going.”
25 years after the release of “Sordid Lives,” Shores is focused on trying to give back to the young playwrights and filmmakers following in his footsteps. In 2019, he founded the Del Shores Foundation, which is a non-profit that aims to cultivate queer Southern voices. The organization holds an annual contest looking for unknown talent. This year’s deadline is Oct. 31.
Shores said that he wanted to focus on Southern creatives because he wanted to champion those who, rather than moving to L.A. or New York where it might be easier to work in the entertainment industry, chose to stay in the place that their stories stem from.
“I love that at this stage of my life, that I’m able to give back,” Shores said. “Because I was a young writer, a young storyteller, and so many people helped me early in my career.”
“Sordid Lives,” presented by Out Front Theatre and Out On Film, will play at Out Front on Oct. 9. Tickets are available online.
