Photo illustration by Jared Harrell / BuzzFeed News; Photos: Courtesy IFC Films; Everett Collection (4)
We open on a girl’s face. She stares back at us as she begins to sing — her vocal power gorgeous and staggering. The camera spins around, eventually revealing the young people assembled around her in the woods, of various ages and ethnicities, who join together to form the chorus of “How Shall I See You Through My Tears?” from the obscure 1983 musical The Gospel at Colonus.
While the show might not be familiar to all but the most diehard theater fans, the song has become indelibly linked to the 2003 film Camp, and to Sasha Allen’s stirring rendition.
It’s the first thing viewers of the cult classic musical about kids at theater camp hear, setting the stage for so much of what’s to come: the campers’ raw talent on display, the isolation they experience in their troubled home lives, and the way the fictional Camp Ovation — based on the famous Stagedoor Manor, where the movie was filmed — offers a respite for these outcasts.
It’s the perfect opening, and it’s thematically essential to what follows. But it almost didn’t happen.
“We had no contingencies. We had very little money,” Camp writer-director Todd Graff told BuzzFeed News. The sequence was going to take place outdoors on one of the last nights of filming in September 2002. “Then it started to rain, and I mean like biblical, torrential, piss-down rain.”
The cast retreated to a giant tent, and in order to will the rain away, they huddled together and sang spirituals. “Bless their hearts, they really believed they could make it stop raining if they prayed hard enough and sang loud enough,” Graff said. “And boy, they tried. But it just didn’t happen.”
Sasha Allen sings "How Shall I See You Through My Tears?" in the opening scene of Camp.
Courtesy IFC Films
As night became morning, Graff was forced to face the reality that he was most likely going to have to cut “How Shall I See You Through My Tears?” from the finished film. Then, an idea struck him: If they added a last night on top of the last day of shooting, they could try again. It would mean working 24 hours straight for most of the cast and crew, but miraculously enough, everyone agreed.
“It’s freezing cold and it’s 5 o’clock in the morning and they’re wearing sleeveless whatever, and I’m having them suck ice cubes so that you can’t see their breath when they’re singing,” Graff said. “They’re like hypothermic doing this thing, but they were really doing it for Sasha. They just couldn’t imagine her number not being in the movie. It was after the sun had come up, and everybody just stepped up. And we got it. It was the very last thing we shot.”
It’s a scene that underlines the film’s themes, and its dramatic behind-the-scenes story captures the camaraderie and tight-knit community spirit that made Camp such a success among the people it was made for: the misfits, the losers, the theater geeks.
“Theater people!” Graff exclaimed, reminiscing about the way “How Shall I See You Through My Tears?” came together. “We take care of our own.”
Camp is the kind of movie you’ve either never heard of or can quote verbatim. If you fall into the latter category, there’s a good chance you saw it in theaters back in the summer of 2003. Most likely you were a teenager, or at least close enough to being a teenager to still remember what it felt like to be a high school misfit, loser, and/or theater geek.
Because this was never a movie for the popular kids; it was crafted especially for that latter group — a particularly awkward and, at the time, underrepresented subset of high school outcasts. Camp is about how your love of show tunes could be an asset instead of a mark against you. If you loved the movie, you were different, and chances are, what appealed to you about it was the way it encouraged you to embrace that weirdness, not to run from it.
At the film’s center are Ellen (Joanna Chilcoat), a lovelorn loser forced to take her own brother to the prom, and Michael (Robin de Jesús), a sometimes drag queen beaten up by his fellow students and disowned by his parents over his sexuality. Over the course of the summer, Ellen and Michael fall for the charms of supposed straight boy Vlad (Daniel Letterle), who has no problem commanding the attention he so desperately craves.
Fritzi (Anna Kendrick), Ellen (Joanna Chilcoat), Michael (Robin de Jesús), and Jenna (Tiffany Taylor) have an awkward lunch.
IFC Films / Everett Collection
The campers — who were played by unknown actors chosen more for their ability to belt than for how they looked shirtless — are united by their passion for theater and their inability to fit in with the so-called normal kids they spend most of the year with. For these teenagers, Camp Ovation represents a sort of Mecca: It’s the place they go once a year to escape society’s restrictive limitations. Here, they can be as loud and as queer as they want to be, free from the shame that would otherwise silence them.
It’s a pleasant fantasy, and one that Camp’s target audience — the same kinds of outcasts depicted in the film — could not resist. It offered a home away from home where talent was prized above looks, nerdy knowledge was an asset, and heterosexuals were the minority.
And somewhere out there, Camp Ovation was real.
Graff based his script for Camp on Stagedoor Manor, which he attended first as a camper and later as a counselor and musical director. But a lot had changed since he started going in 1975.
“It was a very different kind of place than it is today. Today, it’s still insane, but it’s insane within a kind of structure,” he said. “You don’t fear for the lives of the children. You get the feeling that they actually sleep at night and they get fed meals and whatever, even though they’re rehearsing a million hours a day and it’s craziness.”
Stagedoor Manor did have its issues in the ’70s — Graff remembered a scabies outbreak one year and another when the camp decided to remedy its negligent fire safety measures by having the scene shop build fire escapes…out of wood. “Child services came and they said, ‘You can’t have 150 kids here with wooden fire escapes,’” Graff recalled. “They shut it down.”
But generally, the Stagedoor Manor that Graff remembered is a lot closer to Camp’s Camp Ovation. (And ownership has also since shifted.) The aspects of Stagedoor that most directly inspired the movie — the crazy production schedule and the passion of the campers — lingered with Graff for decades as he searched for a creative outlet through which to filter his experiences.
“I always felt that there was a story in it. I didn’t know if it was a stage musical or a movie or what,” he said. “I went off and had my acting career and my writing career, and then decided I wanted to direct because I was unhappy with the way the movies I was writing were turning out when they were handed to other directors. So I had to figure out what movie that would be for someone to allow me to direct.”
A promotional shot of the cast. From left: Joanna Chilcoat, Alana Allen, Sasha Allen, Daniel Letterle, Robin de Jesús, and Tiffany Taylor.
IFC Films / Everett Collection
The answer was Camp.
What Graff had written was so specific to musical theater as a whole and to his experiences in particular that it wouldn’t make sense to hand it off to another director. He first wrote the screenplay on spec and staged it as a workshop, as if Camp were a stage musical.
But as Graff began to look for funding to make his workshop a film in earnest, he realized he was fighting an uphill battle.
As Graff struggled to find producers, he realized the specificity that made Camp perfect for his directorial debut would be a challenge, as would the film’s subject matter, which was more controversial than he’d intended.
Camp’s queerness is as relentless as it is glorious. This is a movie in which campers of all ages don drag to cheer up their morose friend, in which a gay boy seduces and has sex with his female friend just to prove he can, and in which the objectification of the sole straight guy is presented as the unavoidable consequence of perfect abs.
“Back then, there was no way you were gonna have two boys — one naked, manipulating the other, who’s a drag queen, who gets queer-bashed in the first scene — and they’re about to kiss,” Graff said, referring to the film’s final moments, in which Vlad suggestively confesses his sexual confusion to Michael, whether out of genuine interest or just to get him worked up. “It just was not gonna happen.”
At one point, Graff brought his script to Paramount, where he was asked if he could transform the outcasts of Camp Ovation from queer kids to Trekkies. (There was, after all, cross-promotion at stake for Paramount, which owns Star Trek.)
“They said, ‘Well, you know kids at that age who are very into Star Trek often have a very tough time. They get picked on, they get bullied,’” Graff recalled. “I said, ‘Do you really equate being a Star Trek fan with being a 15-year-old queer-bashed drag queen?’”
He refused to give in. Of course, that meant he had to search even harder for the support necessary to make his film.
“It was clear pretty early on it was not gonna get made [by a major studio]. And so I sold my house and moved to New York,” he said. “I did nothing but try to make this movie for four years, in the way it was written.”
Eventually, he got funding from Killer Films and IFC Films (Camp producer Michael Shamberg is now an adviser to BuzzFeed Motion Pictures), but there were still hurdles to overcome.
Casting, in particular, was not going to be easy.
Graff was looking for raw talent — young people who looked, felt, and acted like the characters he had written. One of the first kids cast was Anna Kendrick: Along with Sasha Allen, she was the only actor to make the transition from Graff’s workshop productions of Camp to the final film. At the time, Kendrick had never made a movie, but she had already made her mark on Broadway in the show High Society, which starred Graff’s sister, Randy.
“To me, Anna was ‘Anna Banana,’ Randy’s little friend from her show, for years,” he said. “When we shot Camp, she was 16, so I’d known her for several years before we ever made the movie, and I just always knew this kid was amazing. She was a very precocious kid, but she was cool. She was not obnoxious. She was a kid you liked hanging out with.”
Kendrick as Fritzi.
Courtesy IFC Films
Kendrick’s Fritzi — an ambitious and possibly homicidal young camper — was a scene-stealer, but Camp largely came down to the relationships between Michael, Vlad, and Ellen.
Graff held auditions at Stagedoor Manor, among other places, and he also enlisted the help of Broadway casting director Bernie Telsey, who — because he’d helped cast Hairspray and Rent — had a database of talented young performers to choose from.
“They would go all over the country looking for people for all of the companies of those shows,” Graff said. “And they would always have kids who were too young, and so all those kids we could draw from. Having said that, it was a long process. It was a real thing. It was Bernie putting up flyers at schools. … We saw a ton of kids in order to finally end up with the ones that we got.”
Graff also went to a former college classmate who had become a dance teacher. Among the teacher’s students was Chilcoat’s younger sister, and when the teacher asked if Graff needed singers too, she was at the top of the list. At that point, Chilcoat was still living in Baltimore, where she had been performing in dinner theater from the age of 9. And she was immediately drawn to the character breakdown for Ellen.
“The character description [was], ‘Ellen is undergoing an unfortunate adolescent collision of smart mind, loud voice, and chunky body,’” Chilcoat recalled. “And I remember being like, I’m not that chunky, but yeah, that’s pretty much me.”
For Michael, Graff cast Robin de Jesús, who had heard about an open call through a teacher at his school and arrived to audition with, as Graff remembers it, “a zillion others.” De Jesús grew up poor in the projects of Connecticut and had never been to a Broadway show. His only experience with musical theater had been listening to original cast albums he checked out from the library, and that innocence added to the authenticity that Graff was looking for.
Also authentic: de Jesús’s less-than-perfect skin, which ended up being one of Michael’s character traits. “He came in looking like that,” Graff said. “I have to say that if he had insisted on covering his zits, I would have let him rather than expose him that way, but he was the one who from the beginning said, ‘I think this is Michael.’” (De Jesús did not respond to BuzzFeed News’ request for an interview.)
Jill (Alana Allen) makes a move on Vlad (Letterle).
AF Archive / Alamy
The part of Vlad had been cast, but Graff ultimately deemed Daniel Letterle a better fit for the role when a theater agent submitted him after he got back from doing West Side Story in Germany. As with Chilcoat, Letterle was distinctly drawn to the character’s connection to his own real-life experiences.
“The whole reason I think I wanted to be an actor is because I wanted to be liked. I totally identified with that. It wasn’t a stretch,” Letterle told BuzzFeed News in an interview over Skype. “You’re around theater people all the time and you’re always sort of competing for attention and always trying to be cute and funny and hip and everything. And that’s what Vlad was.”
The rest of the cast included Alana Allen as mean girl Jill, Vince Rimoldi and Steven Cutts as gay campers Spitzer and Shaun (respectively), Tiffany Taylor as jaw-wired-shut Jenna, and musician and music producer Don Dixon as alcoholic composer Bert Hanley. DeQuina Moore, who went on to join the original Broadway cast of Legally Blonde and the 2003 revival of Little Shop of Horrors, had a smaller role as a camper also named DeQuina.
Cutts was the last person to join the cast. He was called in to audition at Graff’s home, where the rest of the cast was gathered for a rehearsal. “[Graff] was like, ‘Do you feel comfortable doing this in front of everybody?’ I was like, ‘Yeah, kind of,’” Cutts recalled to BuzzFeed News in an interview over Skype. “He had everybody turn around.”
Once the entire cast had been assembled, they bonded quickly. During the rehearsal period, the teenagers lived near each other and explored New York City together while learning their parts. “Nobody can really understand the kind of family that grew up around that film,” said Chilcoat, who was, at 16, one of the youngest actors in the film. “It was such a unique experience.”
