Frameline: Project Runway's Jay and the perils of PRBy Jason Shamai
Part of what makes Project Runway so good is that it loves its clever queers. By no means is the show light on standard-issue drama, but one thing its producers and editors don't abide is bullshit fabulousness comedy routines. They love their bitchy overcompensators (Christian) and their angelic peacekeepers (Danny V.) and their hyperbaric chambermaids (Austin Scarlett, and Malan Breton from Taiwan) and their everything-but-the-sodomy queens (Vincent Libretti), but they would not put up with a Carson Kressley. Or at least they wouldn't give him much face time.
The producers and editors, of course, are the master tailors behind all the sartorial pageantry. Their jobs seem pretty similar to the trials imposed upon the designers:
Production team, your challenge was to take the painfully young, dumb, and talented Christian Siriano and craft his insecurities into a compelling dramatic arc. You perhaps overplayed your hand in the beginning by setting him up as Machiavelli's pet rat, but the disarming late-arrival accents of warmth and anxiety brought the whole together boldly if not seamlessly.
And so on.
You sense they are really sweating the final product, resenting the challenges that are comparable to designing ice-skating outfits or fitting teenagers for prom dresses and reveling in the opportunity to make top-notch originals with quality materials.
If the judges aren't voting solely on craft (and if you think they are, I have a Saturn Astra to sell you at bluefly.com), they don't just handicap for drama queens—the dry editorialists are always given high consideration. When Chris March and Steven Rosengard were on the chopping block last season, my loins voted for Steven to stay but the rest of me knew Chris was the wiser choice. The show needed his class more than it needed Steven's lips. It knew he was that season's color bearer of wry, thoughtful faggotry. And in Season Two, Santino's Tim Gunn impersonations were an inspired collaboration with the editors. His Red Lobster bit, generously featured as it was, instantly made the world a better place.
Jay McCarroll and hot air balloons in Eleven Minutes
Jay McCarroll was just such an object of appreciation on Season One, and possibly the most worthy of the series. More power to him, then, that he's got himself a proper documentary, which is showing this Wednesday as part of Frameline. Eleven Minutes, directed by Michael Selditch and Rob Tate, follows McCarroll as he prepares to show at New York's Fashion Week—his first not under the auspices of Project Runway. In the film, McCarroll worries that any success he might have as a designer will always be thanks to an alloy of aptitude and personality. He's well aware that the cameras continue to roll because he entertained us way back when on Bravo and he's ambivalent about it at best.
I am similarly ambivalent about the stuff Project Runway flings from its orbit into the greater entertainment universe, though I'm sure my reasons have more to do with concern about the integrity of the show than McCarroll's do. As much as I love Tim Gunn, the key to his appeal is very narrowly that he's a good educator, so to watch him try to lather up generic star quality in his side projects gives off that weird disconnected feeling of spotting your elementary school teacher at the grocery store.
But whenever Jay McCarroll hitches more freight to the "PR" engine—no matter how ambivalently, that's what he's doing—the threat of devaluation doesn't loom so large. Whatever it might be this time, I have more faith in its prospective quality and the justifiability of its existence than he himself seems to.
Eleven Minutes vindicates that faith. The documentary—which should be seen as an unofficial sequel to Bravo's follow-up report, Project Jay, where we left McCarroll with neither a new collection nor a congealed next step in his career—finds him somewhat farther along but still scrambling. Selditch and Tate have constructed a brisk and coherent fashion-industry procedural that expertly switches out the cultivated tension of Project Runway for its real-world counterpart. The film is an equally adept portrait of a designer who gracefully channels his fear of squandered momentum into the dry charm the filmmakers were probably banking on.
Jay McCarroll and a model in Eleven Minutes
It's valid for McCarroll to worry about the composition of his budding success, but he shouldn't overdo it. If he were a shitty designer, that would be a different story. If he were a shitty entertainer—a panderer—that would also be a different story. But he's neither. In any case, the outcome of the film—which was either a qualified victory or a qualified defeat, I couldn't tell—should certainly reassure him that his persona will only take him so far. There are lots of us out there who would like McCarroll to do well for the right reasons, but that shouldn't stop us from wanting to watch while it happens.
ELEVEN MINUTES
Castro Theatre
429 Castro, SF
Wed/25, 10 p.m.
www.frameline.org
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