On March 21, Queerly and the Woodstock Film Festival will present a special screening of Velvet Vision: The Story of James Bidgood and the Making of Pink Narcissus at Tinker Street Cinema, followed by a conversation with director Bart Everly. The documentary explores the life and legacy of one of underground cinema’s most enigmatic figures, James Bidgood—the visionary behind the cult classic Pink Narcissus.
Long before digital effects or DIY filmmaking became commonplace, Bidgood built an entire cinematic world inside a small New York apartment. Working largely alone in the 1960s, he designed elaborate sets, hand-sewed costumes, and staged surreal tableaux bathed in saturated color. The resulting film, Pink Narcissus, is a dreamlike fantasia of mythic male nudes, classical references, and erotic reverie—a work that helped define the aesthetics of queer underground cinema.
Yet for decades the film circulated without his name attached.
Following a dispute with the producers who financed the project’s completion, Bidgood removed his credit, and Pink Narcissus was released anonymously in 1971. For years viewers speculated about its authorship, assuming that such an intricate, stylized film must have been created by a studio or collective. The truth—that it had been painstakingly assembled by a single artist in a cramped apartment—only added to the film’s mythology once Bidgood’s role became widely known decades later.
For Everly, encountering the film as a young filmmaker was electrifying.
“I was just kind of amazed by what somebody could do,” he recalls. At the time, Pink Narcissus was still credited to “Anonymous,” and Everly found himself wondering who could possibly have made something so visually sophisticated. The discovery that Bidgood was a real person—and that he was still alive—eventually led Everly to seek him out.
Originally, Everly envisioned a broader documentary about queer outsider artists. But during early interviews, Bidgood mentioned that he was planning to return to photography after a 40-year hiatus, funded in part by designer Christian Louboutin. For Everly, that revelation reshaped the project. “I like things where something current is happening rather than just going down memory lane,” he says. “When he said he was going to shoot again after 40 years, I thought—that’s the movie.”
What began as a planned two-year project stretched into an eighteen-year journey. The delays stemmed partly from Bidgood’s mercurial personality. A perfectionist with an uncompromising artistic vision, he struggled to complete projects and frequently clashed with collaborators. The film ultimately became not just a portrait of an artist, but a study of the creative temperament itself. “Like a lot of geniuses, he was difficult,” Everly says with a mixture of affection and resignation. “Visionaries don’t always want to compromise.”
Still, Everly remained captivated by Bidgood’s singular eye. The director argues that the artist’s influence on later visual culture is unmistakable. Photographers and image-makers such as David LaChapelle and the French duo Pierre et Gilles have drawn on the same hyper-saturated palette and theatrical staging that Bidgood pioneered decades earlier. “If you look at their work, it’s obvious,” Everly says. “The color schemes, the camp sensibility—that’s all embedded in gay culture now.”
At the heart of Velvet Vision is the paradox of Bidgood himself: an artist of extraordinary visual gifts whose uncompromising nature often sabotaged his own opportunities. Everly describes watching Bidgood struggle to realize new photographic projects despite interest and support from patrons.
In documenting that process, Everly says he came away with a lesson about artistic survival. While Bidgood embodied a fiercely independent creative spirit, the realities of filmmaking and photography require collaboration. “In this country, if you’re working in a creative field, you almost always need partners or funding,” Everly says. “You have to learn how to work with people and compromise.”
Despite the tensions and frustrations that marked the long production, Everly retains deep admiration for his subject. When audiences encounter the film today, he says, they often react with amazement—not just at Bidgood’s imagery but at the scale of the world he conjured within the confines of a modest apartment. “It’s like looking behind the curtain,” Everly says. “People can’t believe that all of this was built in these tiny rooms.”
The documentary has begun making the rounds on the festival circuit, screening at events ranging from the DC Independent Film Festival to the Riga ArtDocFest. Audiences encountering Bidgood’s story for the first time are often struck by its universality.
Though rooted in queer history, Everly sees the film as something broader: a portrait of artistic obsession and perseverance. “It’s not just a gay film,” he says. “Every artist goes through the things Jim went through. The question is how you handle it.”
For viewers attending the Woodstock screening, the evening offers a chance to revisit a foundational chapter of queer cinematic history while also encountering the complicated figure behind it. Bidgood’s luminous fantasies—once hidden in the shadows of underground film culture—continue to cast a long and colorful glow.
And as Everly suggests, once a work of art enters the world, its meaning belongs to the audience. “When you put something out there,” he says, “it’s not yours anymore. It becomes its own thing.”
Woodstock Film Festival presents a screening of Velvet Vision at Tinker Street Cinema on Saturday, March 21 at 7pm. The showing will be followed by a conversation with Bart Everly. Tickets are $15.
