Film Love Screening at the High: The American Music Show is Resurrected in Atlanta, Featuring a Young RuPaul and Other Local Characters
Catch the last screening in the Film Love retrospective at the High.
By Andy Ditzler, Film Love Founder and Curator
Film Love at the High: The American Music Show| Thursday, May 9
7 p.m. | Hill Auditorium, High Museum of Art
$14.50 admission | FREE for High Museum members
Film Love concludes its 2019 High Museum retrospective with one of our most popular programs, a tribute to the legendary Atlanta cable TV treasure The American Music Show.
A charming 1983 video tour of gay cruising sites in Piedmont Park, a be-mohawked RuPaul crashing a civil rights march in character as Starrbooty, the “singing Peek sisters” caterwauling gospel songs while arguing onstage, all with videotaped endorsements from the likes of Jimmy Carter, George Bush Sr., James Brown, and Barbara Mandrell and partly presided over by an Atlanta City Council member, who also happened to be Julian Bond’s brother — there is nothing quite like The American Music Show.
This community access cable television program was produced in various Atlanta basements and living rooms and broadcast weekly from 1981 to 2005. It was a mix of shambolic talk show, drag queens from exotic-sounding Georgia locales, homegrown music videos, camcorder reports from ’80s club culture, long-running characters performed by a devoted and gifted cast, and now-poignant segments taped on the streets of an Atlanta almost unrecognizable today. In addition to all this, the show attracted a young RuPaul — then a denizen of Atlanta’s underground scene, now an international entertainment icon — who made dozens of early appearances on the show in many guises.
Hosted for a quarter-century by the unflappable Dick Richards and Potsy Duncan — along with James Bond, brother of black civil rights activist Julian Bond and a sitting member of Atlanta’s City Council — The American Music Show was delivered to the cable company each week on VHS tapes for broadcast. With its one-take aesthetic, elaborate set designs, and mix of anarchic humor and dark satire, the show is a classic of do-it-yourself media and was a beacon for Atlanta’s underground, LGBT, and musical communities. A unique conjunction of Southern culture, queer performance, black civil rights history, and cable television as art medium, The American Music Show remains outrageous, visionary, and above all, an entertainment experience of “always low standards.”
Working with over seven hundred of the original broadcast tapes held by Emory University, Film Love founder Andy Ditzler has curated a program of classic clips and little-known gems, some rarely seen since their original broadcast.
