Queen of the Deuce
(Greece/Canada, 78 min.)
Dir. Valerie Kontakos
How many families can say their matriarch is the queen of a gay porn dynasty? Queen of the Deuce tells the wild story of Chelly Wilson and her unlikely success with the American Dream. The film recaps how Wilson, a Greek Jew, escaped Europe before war broke out, established a life in New York City, and built a lucrative smut empire. Queen of the Deuce gives Wilson the cradle-to-grave treatment as her family members and peers recall her origin story. Born Rachel Serrero in Thessaloniki, Greece, it seems that Wilson was destined to be immortalised in a documentary.
Director Valerie Kontakos finds great dramatic beats, particularly from Chelly’s daughter, Bondi Wilson Walters, who outlines the sacrifices her mom made for their family. The story goes that Chelly, leaving behind two children from a marriage she openly didn’t want, hopped the last boat to America. An entrepreneur at heart, she sold snacks and sodas, building relationships along the way. The talking heads in Deuce tell how she tried to make a stab at uniting the Greek community by screening movies at a local theatre, but found greater success when someone booked the theatre for a skin flick. True enough, sex sells. Deuce is a story of laughs and heartache, but ultimately one about an only-in-America fable.
Fit for a Queen
Kontakos keeps the doc light and lively while reviewing Chelly’s monopoly on New York’s district known as “The Deuce.” It likens her as queen of the porn scene with a half-dozen theatres screening X-rated fair for patrons of all orientations. It’s really in the film’s characterization of Chelly, though, that sets it apart from other all-in-the-family takes. Kontakos has a great character in Chelly Wilson and she knows it. Wilson, who died in 1994, appears almost exclusively through still photos and archival audio in the film, but the vivid nature with which people speak of her makes it seem as if she’s telling her own story. Queen of the Deuce builds a mythic yet grounded legend as Wilson’s peers consider her unorthodox story.
Queen of the Deuce paints a grand portrait of Wilson as interviewees recall her swanky apartment. Perched above the appropriately-named Adonis Theatre, Chelly’s family remembers ascending stairs to her multi-locked down flat without really knowing what or who was going down in the theatre below. Photos and interviews provide rich details that let audiences enter an energetic home in which Chelly’s plush couch doubled as her office. Interviewees describe bags of cash strewn about the apartment and high-roller poker games with studs of all stripes.
Buttressing the visually rich descriptions of the interviews is a wealth of archival material. Deuce shapes a fully dimensional portrait of Wilson and shows the peculiar style that helped Chelly carve her place in New York mythology. Striking animated sequences by Abhilasha Dewan compensate for the absence of video archival material of Wilson and add to her folkloric nature. Told in an offbeat comic book style, the animated sequences accentuate Chelly’s larger-than-life person, as well as her idiosyncratic business habits—mob ties and the like—that probably weren’t recorded for obvious reasons.
Reflecting Sexual Liberation Onscreen
Wilson’s story is one of the women’s movement and of sexual liberation, too. Talking heads tell how Chelly’s sense of style and comportment that didn’t conform to gender roles in a male-dominated scene. Moreover, they share how she lived with two women while staying married to Mr. Wilson. Her kids acknowledge that America gave her the freedom to choose her own family while building the one she began in Greece. (The kids in Greece eventually made their way to America in one of the doc’s many great stories.) Bondi, for example, remembers a friend turning to her at her mother’s funeral and remarking that she didn’t know Chelly was gay, to which Bondi replied, “Neither did I!”
There’s also a good tale here about the nuts and bolts of early American independent film. Wilson’s family and colleagues tell how she fed an appetite for sexual liberation. The underlying message suggests that Chelly understood a need to see one’s desires reflected onscreen. Moreover, Deuce recaps how Wilson used her business savvy to become a shrewd producer. While interviewees admit that Wilson’s films could play daytime TV nowadays, they credit her for breaking taboos. Meanwhile, Bondi shares the white-knuckle ride of peddling smut as conservative forces pushed back. Facing obscenity charges and a crackdown over the “kinds of places” that made NYC’s core, everyone in Chelly’s empire knew their Deuce was cooked.
As the interviewees fondly flip through the family photo albums, though, Queen of the Deuce credits Wilson for building something to last. Her porn theatres may be gone, or endure as refashioned diners amid gentrification (ew!), but her family continues to grow. By the end of Queen of the Deuce, one sees another generation of Wilson taking a stab at filmmaking. Nobody accuses Chelly of being an artist in Queen of the Deuce. However, this fun film shows that her kids and grandkids certainly got her gene for taking risks.
