Believe - The Eddie Izzard Story

I don't know how we didn't know about this earlier, but Eddie Izzard has a movie!  It's a small indie film and as soon as we learned about it we texted our fellow Eddiephile, Marsden, and made a date to see it.  Despite careful planning Marsden accidently went to the wrong theater and I forgot that parking in NYC is awful and Todd got out of work late.  Fortunately it all worked out!  We all met up just in the nick of time.  Todd and Marsden held seats while I fought with the muni-meter and crossed my fingers that the car didn't get ticketed and towed.

I have to say that since I *LOVE* Eddie Izzard I've always wanted to know more about him and we've made a special effort to see any shows he's done in our area.  (Our area being defined so far as a radius around New York as far as Philadelphia and Montreal.)  Seriously, I could listen to him read the back of a cereal box.  Better yet, I could watch him read the back of a cereal box.  All of Eddie Izzard's material is even better if you can actually see him perform, because his pantomime  is brilliant and his facial expressions add an extra level of hilarity—especially when he's made up.

So, back to Believe: The Eddie Izzard Story.  The film attempts to tell the story of Eddie's life and career, including interviews with Eddie, his family, friends, colleagues, and other people from various phases of his life.  We learned a lot about his childhood and his motivations to become a comedian.  Eddie's father has always supported him, but his mother's death when he was 7 really affected him.  It did not influence his taste in clothes and makeup, but it seems like his desire to have the adoration of a crowd was sort of a substitute for his mother's presence.  And he was very driven to achieve success, plodding through nearly a decade of failure before he give even mild critical acclaim. 

I don't know how someone can get up night after night and perform to apathetic crowds.  I guess you have to live for the high when you really connect with your audience.  Although I myself get serious stage fright even when I have to give a presentation at work, I have heard that there is something intoxicating about being up on stage and having everyone cheering and screaming your name.  As of now I wouldn't know.

So the the movie chronologically follows Eddie's life and performances, including his struggles in his early twenties to really get his style and material to a place where an audience could stay with him for a whole show. His style was a little scattered and spastic and audiences didn't know what to make of him and couldn't follow him at first.  Eventually, of course, he finds his rhythm and becomes and overnight success.  But Believe is actually sort of dark.  It focuses on the tough parts of his life, even through his later successful years.  It seems that Eddie did have a tough time, not just because it took time to make his material flow, but because being a transvestite makes the hoops you need to jump through multiply.
But through the worst of it there were some highs, and it ends on an up beat.  Eddie started a club of his own called Raging Bull (I really, *really* want one of their shirts).  Then while he was there he got scouted for an AIDS benefit and at that benefit he did a piece about being raised by wolves that got rave reviews and put Eddie on the global stage.  From there Eddie put together his longer shows and became more and more successful.  But there is always a wrinkle in the plans - after Eddie got two awards for Dress to Kill he became the target of some jerks on the British TV show Watchdog for alleged fraud.  They even filed a suit against him.  There was a misunderstanding with a theater where they put the words "all new" on the poster for his show.  The allegation was that much of his material was similar to his old show.  Eddie explained that his shows were always cyclic, the beginning of one show had lots of the materials from the end of the last show, and by the end of the show the materials were completely different.  But like most of his fans I could watch him do the same show every day and not be upset.  However, some critical idiots got carried away and gave Eddie tons of shit for doing things that way.
I think I've probably exhausted this subject for now.  More after his new show in January...(SO EXCITED!!!)