She Lives on Her Own Terms Now

Get ready for the second phase of Margaret Cho’s resurrection.

The sweetly subversive comedian and social commentator--who peaked with the short-lived sitcom “All American Girl,” plumbed the depths with drugs and alcohol, then rose from the ashes last year with a national tour of her one-woman show--is hitting the big screen with the film version of her show, “I’m the One That I Want,” which opens in Los Angeles today.

And if it’s not enough that she’s putting it all out there on the screen--her drug addiction, her humiliations to contort into some mythical television network “look,” and the moments of self-loathing morphing into new consciousness--she also has produced and is self-distributing the $500,000 concert film, financed from the proceeds from her show.

It’s her fans, she says, who have really financed the film.

“It’s all the people who came to see the show, it’s their money,” says Cho, 31, sipping a Diet Coke at a small wood table in her unpretentious Hollywood hillside house. Her place, lined with books and bric-a-brac, has a college-student, funky feel. “For me, what’s important is the message, not the money.”

That message is self-reliance, served with almost missionary zeal. Cho is trying to hold onto her identity in a homogenizing industry: Asian in a sea of white, a woman, pro-gay to the point of fanaticism (having grown up in San Francisco, where her parents owned a porn shop in a gay neighborhood). She was briefly swallowed up, she admits, but she’s back, and has found her voice and autonomy.

“If you don’t see yourself out there, you have to create your own image, create your own voice,” she says, calling her low-budget film a “vanity production”--but not meaning it as a put-down. “I wanted to control the look and feel and message. It’s easier to capture your vision if you’re working for yourself. It’s real autonomy.”

The 96-minute film is done in real time, shot for shot from the stage show. Absent are the now-cliched audience reaction shots, approving nods and applause, and other cutaways of filmed one-person comedy shows. It’s all Cho, all the time, the camera trained intimately on the performance in close-up and medium shot, with only the occasional longshot.

“I would have had to put other shots in, would have had to have studio discussions about camera angles, and I didn’t want that. I knew what I wanted,” says Cho. And the show would have had to be cut to 60 minutes, for TV, which is why it was shot on film by Cho and partner-manager Karen Taussig for theatrical release rather than as an HBO or Showtime comedy special.

During the show, Cho fiercely holds the stage and galvanizes the audience, in a raw comedy performance reminiscent of vintage Eddie Murphy and Richard Pryor, whose early filmed performances inspired her. “They had such an effect on me. I loved those films,” she recalls, referring to their raw energy and style. Like those films, “I’m the One” has a ‘70s-era gritty feel.

Declares Cho: “The performances [by Murphy and Pryor] were amazing. They endure. It’s like, I would also love my film to be like a midnight cult film for a whole new generation of kids.”

On stage, Cho is outspoken, profane, radical and excruciatingly funny as she catalogs injustices and daily assaults that outsiders like herself endure. But at home, in her small living-dining room, she is demure, low-key and serious as she describes her role as an artist determined to get her message out.

“My audience is so many groups--gays and lesbians, people of color, people who feel like they’re not represented by the media,” she says. “I feel like such an outsider, which brings in so many people. If we all come together, we’d realize that we’re not in the minority, we’re the majority, and that’s a really exciting thought.”

She describes a favorite moment, when after the Seattle premiere, a woman who had never seen her perform before, approached her. “And she told me that my film changed her life. That’s what a performer hopes for.”

Cho urges people to be true to themselves, internally and externally, rather than impersonating messages from the culture. “It’s a revolutionary idea that you could put yourself higher than anyone else’s opinion,” she says.

Last week, as she stood before a special KCRW-FM screening of the film at the Fine Arts theater in Beverly Hills (the film opens at the Nuart Theatre), she was a combination performer-producer-entrepreneur, thanking the audience, fielding questions and mobilizing the troops to get the word out about the movie. The concert film was shot at San Francisco’s Warfield Theater at the tail end of the six-month tour late last year.

‘I Don’t Look Back in Anger,’ She Says

With only one month of pre-production, it was ready by early 2000. “I’m the One That I Want” has already opened in San Francisco and Seattle and continues a national roll-out this week, including New York and Los Angeles. Producer Taussig says the numbers so far are encouraging, especially considering that the national marketing campaign is only now kicking in.

The film is doing well with theater owners and chains: Everyone who has been invited to a screening has booked the film, Cho says. Landmark Theatres’ publicity director, Michael Williams, says he was sold after he saw the film in William Morris’ screening room.

“What put it over the top was seeing the live performance at the Wiltern only two days later,” he says. “The audience just embraced Margaret.”

Cho has just completed her autobiography, which will be released next spring, coinciding with a tour of the new one-person show she is about to start writing.

About the pain of her experience on network TV, she appears to have reached closure.

“I don’t look back in anger,” she says of the days when they expected her to be a size 4 and couldn’t decide whether she was too Asian or not Asian enough, only that she was not OK the way she was.

“But this time, I want it on my own terms,” says Cho, whose self-navigated film experiment does not preclude working with the industry again. “I’m not trying to burn bridges. I do want to eat lunch in this town again.”