Jimmie Michaels

Picking up the story first presented in I Don’t Know (1970), Hats Off to Hollywood (1972) brazenly and brilliantly mixes documentary reality with fully staged recreations/reimaginings of episodes in the lives of Jennifer and Dana, a loving, bickering couple who challenge the notion of homonormativity. Drugs, poverty, disease, bigotry and prostitution all figure into this disarmingly candid and often hilarious film, a remarkable work that is the apotheosis of director Spheeris’ early work, and a luminous signpost leading directly to The Decline of Western Civilization (1979-1997). Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2012.

The humorous narrator explains the sex habits of the twelve signs of the zodiac as the ancient Roman festival of Venus presided by the goddess herself begins.

A hard-core pop musical camp exposé of a young country boy led adrift by Sweet Lady Mary in Hollywood.

A truly major work, I Don’t Know observes the relationship between a lesbian and a transgender person who prefers to be identified somewhere in between male and female, in an expression of personal ambiguity suggested by the film’s title. This nonfiction film – an unusual, partly staged work of semi-verité – is the first of Spheeris’s films to fully embrace what would become her characteristic documentary style: probing, intimate, uncompromising. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2014.

Three guys have their car broken down the road. Lucky for them there is a house of ill repute nearby...

A collection of short films by Pat Rocco.

Directed by pioneering gay documentary and erotica filmmaker Pat Rocco, Changes is a profile of Jennifer Michaels, a trans person living in Los Angeles.

A couple hire a detective to locate their missing daughter. He finds her in a "house of ill-repute."