By Johnny Ray Huston

STEP INSIDE THE one-room office of Outsider Enterprises and you'll find Marc Huestis – though the wild array of movie memorabilia and equipment Huestis has crammed into the space makes locating him less easy than you might think. On this particular warm Friday afternoon, Huestis has an image from his hour-long 1982 feature Whatever Happened to Susan Jane? freeze-framed on a screen: one of the film's characters is holding a copy of the San Francisco Chronicle, and the words "REAGAN BIG" blare obnoxiously from the front page.

"The first day of shooting [Susan Jane] was the day Ronald Reagan got elected," Huestis says. "Isn't that fabulous and scary at the same time? Little did we know. Fuckin' Ronald Reagan is looking like Mr. Rogers compared to what we're living with now. I'm just furious."

Huestis has a reason to look back at Susan Jane: this year's San Francisco International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival (an event he cofounded with a one-night show in a community center basement 27 years ago) is celebrating the movie's drinking-age birthday with a screening. Needless to say, he also has reasons to be furious, but he's doing something about it. The next Huestis event at the Castro Theatre, "War Is Over: Create Peace," is a benefit for Artists United. Janeane Garofolo, Jay Rosenblatt, and Mark Eitzel will be taking part, but Huestis is especially excited about one coup: Karen Black will play the role of Laura Bush in a new piece by Tony Kushner that finds the first lady reading to the children of Iraq. "She'll be perfect," Huestis says. "I just have to get her a good wig."

Wigs both good and bad dominate Susan Jane, the story of a reunion between two old high school chums from Virginia, Marcie Clark (the terrific Ann Block) and Susan Jane Smith (Francesca Rosa). "I just can't face another day of dirty linens and pot roasts for three," Marcie declares at the film's beginning, then boards a Delta plane for San Francisco, where she hopes to pleasantly surprise her friend. When Marcie arrives, she finds that Susan Jane, now a frustrated artist, has – proving some aspects of S.F. bohemia never change – taken to calling herself "Sujana."

Susan Jane is peppered with black-and-white flashback sequences depicting the pair's teenage years; those scenes are taken from an 1958 instructional film called "The Outsider," part of a "mental hygiene" series made for exhibition in public schools. Huestis discovered "The Outsider" (which gave Outsider Enterprises its name) in a trash bin at the corner of Haight and Ashbury Streets; the film's circa-1980 and -1981 color sequences were shot on leftover color stock that his father, who worked for NBC, provided when the network switched from film to video.

One of Susan Jane's charms is that it doesn't side with Sujana or mock the culture-shocked Marcie; in fact, Sujana is still Susan Jane, the same outsider from the black-and-white past, and gregarious Marcie once again draws her out of her shell. The influence of John Waters dominates the film, though the whim-driven screenplay (coauthored in three days by Huestis, Andrew Hayes, and Chronicle writer Edward Guthmann, who also plays a reporter) also works in references to Midnight Cowboy, Chinatown, and The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Ultimately, Susan Jane is a San Francisco film, from its gloriously wacky early shot of Marcie's criss-cross descent down Lombard Street to its climactic party sequence, which, like so much S.F. art, loses focus in pursuit of fun.

"It was kind of my first big San Francisco event," Huestis says of Susan Jane's party scene, which, thanks to flyering and no cover charge, drew a crowd of 600 to the warehouse space of Project Artaud. The resulting mix of performance – the Wasp Women giving the B-52's a run for their beehives with "Kill Me" – and chatter (Tommy Pace's "Did he beat you, girl?" routine, the film's comic highlight) is a slightly more anarchic version of Huestis's Castro Theatre events.

Exactly how quintessentially S.F. is Susan Jane? Huestis offers some more freeze-frame proof. The same café segment that boasts the "REAGAN BIG" headline also contains a brief appearance by a little boy whose name has appeared on the front pages of local newspapers this year: Jade Santoro, one of the two steak-carrying victims at the center of the Fajitagate police scandal.

As the interview draws to a close, Huestis's "old, old, old!" friend Lulu drops by and is greeted with an unflattering still from Susan Jane. "Do you still have that outfit?" Huestis asks. "It probably rotted," Lulu replies.

"I was completely wasted here," Lulu continues, once he's recovered from momentary shock. "We were all taking, not quaaludes, gorilla biscuits. Drinking and taking those – that was enough. There was no speed back then, no GMB, no HKABCDE, no alphabet drugs."

That subject brings Lulu and Huestis to their late friend Coco Vega, who was originally supposed to have a large role in the film. "Coco was scaaaary if he was on drugs," Lulu recalls with a mix of admiration and dread. "You'd see him coming on the street, and if he had on dark eyeliner, you thought, 'Uh oh. He's on heroin.' One time I'd peroxided my hair, and I heard this voice yell from across the street, 'Lulu! What did you do to your fucking hair? You look like a lit match!' I'd have to take Coco off the street and bring him home and give him a wig. He'd be completely wasted, but he could do a fabulous hairdo."

According to Huestis, Vega died a week before Susan Jane finished filming. "He wanted to shoot me up that night," Lulu remembers. "He said, 'Lulu, I want to take you where jazz comes from.' I'd just lost my job, and I said, 'How about next Valentine's Day?' He was on downers or something and had done Chinese opera makeup that day – pink and orange. He gave me this Kabuki book, and when I asked him to sign it, he just stuck his face on it and left this death mask right in the book! Two hours after he gave me that book he was dead.

"He went to a house, shot up, ODed, the paramedics came and gave him a jolt that brought him back, he started choking again, and he went out. They tried to give him another jolt, and the battery was dead – so he died of a dead battery!"

Nonetheless, Vega lives on in a few of Susan Jane's scenes, and as Huestis says, "Coco was the spirit of the movie." That spirit is going to be revived at the Castro, where Huestis plans to duplicate many aspects of the film's midnight premiere, which took place in the same theater. The Tom Tom Club's "Genius of Love" will boom from the speakers, bodies with giant papier-mâché heads will dance onstage, and Huestis and some of his stars – including longtime pals Block and Rosa, who marched with him at recent antiwar demonstrations – will be there. The year 1982 will become 2003, and vice versa.