"The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert": Sand, Sequins and Song

The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert was and remains one of the most optimistic, quotable, touching and giddily entertaining gay-themed films ever made. Thirteen years after its debut, an "Extra Frills" (if you've already seen the movie, you'll get the joke) special edition DVD hits shelves today, boasting director commentary from Stephan Elliott, deleted scenes, bloopers, a making-of featurette, trailers, teasers and more.

In August 1994, a fresh-faced Bill Clinton was in the White House and getting things done, the country was still reeling from the Nicole Brown Simpson murder, and the stages were being built for the ill-fated Woodstock 25th anniversary concert. The Lion King's roar was still echoing over the box office, and as usual, the studios were using August as a dumping ground for their less promising titles.

The United Nations had named 1994 the "Year of the International Family," and such words were never truer for many of us than when a dilapidated bus christened Priscilla and topped with a giant high-heeled shoe wheeled onto our late-summer cinema screens.

So what was this strange little foreign film that took the country by storm, racked up over $11 million at the U.S. box office in its initial run, won a prize at Cannes and an Oscar (for costume design), and launched the Hollywood careers of two of its stars?

Priscilla was the brainchild of writer-director Stephan Elliott, a native of Sydney, Australia, with one feature film (1993's Frauds, which starred Priscilla's Hugo Weaving and Phil Collins) under his belt. He reportedly churned out the story of two drag queens and a transsexual crossing the desert for a gig in Alice Springs in a single week — and although he set out to make something wild and purely for entertainment, Elliott was surprised to find that the film had such an emotional impact, noting at the time:

"I couldn't make a completely sympathetic drag movie and so I chose to write a film where in the first half you laugh at the characters, and in the second you laugh with them. I wrote the film as a comedy, it was simply to entertain. It's turned out to be slightly less funny, but much more human. I wanted people to be very amused but they are actually very touched. That's thrown me."

A self-described lover of old Hollywood and its clichés, Elliott wanted to make a film that celebrated the romanticized movies of the Golden Age in a different way, noting, "Drag queens are the great Hollywood musicals. The style, the glitz, the glamour, the pain, has gone. The film was a great reason to bring back the musical."

Indeed, the story lends itself to flights of fancy, melodrama and lots and lots of glamour.

In a nutshell, drag queen Anthony Belrose (stage name Mitzi Del Bra), played by Australian actor Hugo Weaving, books a job at a casino in Alice Springs and sets off in a dilapidated bus with fellow drag queen Adam (aka Felicia Jollygoodfellow), played by Guy Pearce, and recently widowed transsexual stage legend Bernadette (legendary actor Terence Stamp, in a career-reviving role — remember him as evil General Zod in Superman II?).

Along the way they meet up with aboriginal peoples, homophobes and true love, pulling through the rough spots by depending on each other and a limitless supply of ABBA tracks. But the biggest surprise awaits them in Alice Springs: It turns out Anthony has a wife and a son — a son to whom he's never come out. This third-act revelation and ensuing family drama do exactly what Elliott described: turn a frothy movie about drag queens into something unexpectedly moving.