ENTERTAINMENT

Honorees Jenny Slate and Bowen Yang talk about movies and comedy at Provincetown film fest

PROVINCETOWN — Emcee/comedian Judy Gold immediately put actor/comedian Bowen Yang on the spot Thursday afternoon, asking him to choose between Provincetown and Fire Island.

Yang, best known for his past few years on “Saturday Night Live,” was at the Provincetown International Film Festival in connection with his gay rom-com film titled “Fire Island,” and acknowledged in a Q&A that at least one scene in the movie was based on his personal experience there.

But Wang was diplomatic on his first time in this other well-known LGBTQ-friendly resort town. His answer: “Within minutes, we fell in love with it,” he said of Provincetown. “It’s so, so wonderful.”

Judy Gold introduces Jenny Slate and Bowen Yang on stage on Thursday for the 24th Provincetown International Film Festival. Slate and Yang were co-recipients of the festival's New Wave Award.

Wang, the first Chinese-American and third out gay male on “SNL,” shared the stage at the Crown & Anchor resort with actress/comedian Jenny Slate (TV’s “Parks and Recreation,” “Everything Everywhere All at Once”). They were co-recipients on the first full day of the five-day festival of its New Wave Award, both being honored for being “exciting and distinctive voice(s)" who take artistic risks and have a passionate commitment to independent film.

Slate, a Milton native whose parents were sharing her experiences Thursday, answered questions both at the awards ceremony with Gold and at the morning screening of her “Marcel the Shell With Shoes On” movie. She co-produced, improvised many of the scenes and voiced the title character for the animated/live-action hybrid feature film that expanded on a story that first became a viral sensation through short videos more than a decade ago.

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The movie, she said at a post-screening Q&A, took seven years to make and was based on a voice she first used among a group of friends crammed into a hotel room together to save money on lodging at a wedding.

“I certainly did not imagine when I started doing a little voice drunkenly at a wedding,” she said with a laugh, “that anybody would ever pay me money to do anything but stop.”

The future of filmmaking

The two were the first honorees of the 2022 festival, which will close out Sunday with awards ceremonies for Oscar-nominated director Luca Guadagnino (“Call Me By Your Name”) as the 2022 Filmmaker on the Edge, talking with host/filmmaker John Waters, and longtime character actress Dale Dickey (“Winter’s Gone,” “Hell or High Water”) honored for Excellence in Acting.

Maya Erdelyi, 42, is getting her photo taken with author and filmmaker John Waters at a book signing on Thursday during the Provincetown International Film Festival.

The festival is showing dozens of features and short films at three main locations, with movies on MacMillan Pier added this year, plus lots of parties and gatherings. In its 24th year, the Provincetown event’s schedule features dozens of feature and short films, with more than 50% directed by women and a continued emphasis on LGTBQ+ themes, and filmmakers and work telling stories of various races.

On Thursday, Gold — a veteran of summer Provincetown entertainment — introduced Slate and Wang as hope for future comedy in filmmaking.

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“They’re just so f***ing talented and in a world of mediocrity and dumbness, it makes me feel … that we're passing the torch to these people who are going to really take care of the world and in the arts,” she said.

The Provincetown International Film Festival draws movie-goers to the center of town, along Commercial Street.

In her questions, Gold noted that both Slate's and Yang’s films involve themes of community and family — including chosen family, which she said has been vital for so many LGBTQ people — and the importance of exploring and celebrating both, particularly in today’s world.

Slate’s movie, in wide release in theaters June 24, involves Marcel — literally a shell with one googly eye and a pair of shoes that moves and talks through animation — becoming famous after documentary filmmaker Dean Fleischer-Camp (the movie's co-writer) puts him on YouTube. Marcel misses a family and community that he and his grandmother (voiced by Isabella Rossellini) unexpectedly lost and comments on the difference between an audience and a community.

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Both Wang and Gold commented on the profound nature of that observation, especially for performers. To Marcel, Slate said, community means “a group of individuals that will help him to self-actualize and feel safe. When he’s exposed to the internet, and finds out what it is, he understands there’s a difference between an audience and a community, and that’s just something I also confront as a person. There’s a really jarring difference.”

Wang said he appreciated Marcel’s “moral clarity” and certainty about the reasons why he’s doing something, and Slate described at various points how telling Marcel’s story over the years helped her work out some of her own outlooks on life.

A movie-goer at the Provincetown International Film Festival gets his ticket scanned on Thursday at Waters Edge Cinema.

Marcel introduces himself as partly a shell, “and then he goes on to say ‘I like that about myself and I like myself and I have a lot of other great qualities as well,'” Slate pointed out. After feeling like she didn’t fit in with many people growing up, “I think that I was at a point in my life where I actually would like to be clear that I don’t feel ashamed of what I’m like. … So maybe I'm not that cool, but most people actually are very interesting. One thing that's nice about Marcel is that he feels divested of that urgency of proving it.”

Representation and responsibility

“Fire Island,” available to watch on Hulu, sets a story based on Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” among a group of gay men in a remote summer resort. Yang plays a shy man looking for love, and eventually clashing with his best friend, played by the film’s writer, Joel Kim Booster.

T.J. Baker, left, Derron Palmer, middle, and Steve Pompeo, right, are dressed up as pink flamingos on Thursday at the Provincetown International Film Festival. A 50th anniversary screening of "Pink Flamingos," directed by John Waters, was a feature of the festival.

Emotions are heightened in the film that Yang says is “about what queer people do when there are no straight people around. … and when you don't have straight people, then you are kind of just internally battling something about yourself. And when it comes to the queer community (in the movie), I think all of these fun class dynamics start to play out, and social dynamics.”

Thursday's wide-ranging discussion between Yang, Slate and Gold, with questions from the audience, included why Slater left social media, their creative influences and upcoming projects, how they take care of themselves in busy lives, and why Wang’s Instagram handle is the name of actress Faye Dunaway (and her reaction to that).

The three also talked about the big difference between the immediate gratification of getting a laugh in standup comedy or on “Saturday Night Live,” which Slate was also part of for one season, compared to making a movie and waiting months or years for audience reaction.

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“I would go home every day (after filming ‘Fire Island’) and be like ‘I don’t think I’m doing this well,’" Wang said. “I was so used to the ‘SNL’ way where you're reading off a cue card pitching to the rafters — it doesn't work like that anywhere else. … I just felt like I was a dilettante and just starting from zero. But it ended up being so gratifying once I did see the product.”

Nancy and Ron Slate attend the 24th Provincetown International Film Festival on Thursday in support of their daughter, Jenny Slate. Slate, an actress and comedian, was one of two recipients the five-day festival's New Wave Award.

Both Slate and Gold are Jewish and Gold asked the two award winners about their thoughts on recent concerns about anti-Semitism and Asian hate, and their feelings of responsibility for their cultures as public figures.

Wang talked about feeling emotionally vulnerable after being included in an “SNL” skit following the 2021 Atlanta spa shootings that targeted Asian women, and two weeks later writing “The Iceberg that Sank the Titanic” skit that brought him a lot of attention on the show.

“I needed to just be funny for the sake of being funny,” he said of writing that skit. “I just needed to balance out” being funny and being representative of either the Asian or gay culture.

Slate said she wrestles with the responsibility aspect of her art and work, too.

“I think it's important for all artists to constantly be looking into their culture and understanding what they have to use and how to use it to still say, ‘Hey, this is where we're all putting up walls that shouldn’t be walls’ and ‘Hey, this is a type of language that's being co-opted by a group and they're using it just for hate. Is there any use for this language anymore? Should we just stop it?’”

The festival’s movies and events continue through Sunday evening. More information: https://www.provincetownfilm.org/.