Steve Yeager appears caught off-guard when asked if he set out to earn a reputation as a filmmaker focusing on Baltimore's marginalized. The thought, it seems, has never really occurred to him.
And yet, it's an obvious question. His first narrative film, 1990's On the Block, the story of a stripper struggling to go legit, was set and filmed in Baltimore's notorious red-light district. His biggest success, 1998's award-winning documentary Divine Trash, chronicled Baltimore's merriest bunch of misfits, the cast and crew of John Waters' reprobate 1972 masterpiece, Pink Flamingos. And his latest movie, Crystal Fog, which gets its world premiere Wednesday at the Charles Theatre, focuses on a love triangle with a drag queen at its center.
"I find those characters and those lifestyles much more interesting, dramatically, to portray," the 61-year-old Baltimore native says over lunch at Donna's in Charles Village. "They're not mainstream characters, and that's what I'm looking for, it's what I'm attracted to."
FOR THE RECORD - An article in the Sunday A&E section incorrectly identified an award that filmmaker Steve Yeager won at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival. Yeager won a Filmmakers Trophy for his documentary Divine Trash.
The Baltimore Sun regrets the error.
Yeager has come to know that world pretty well over the years. He was able to make On the Block, Yeager recalls with a grin, only because he went to school with one of the cooler beat cops patrolling that section of East Baltimore Street; the cop vouched for him among the club owners.
His connection with Waters goes way back. Yeager was there during the filming of Pink Flamingos, movie- and still-cameras in hand, documenting what all those weirdos were doing on the streets of Baltimore and in the woods of Baltimore County. That footage became the basis of Divine Trash, named best documentary at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival.
"He's always been in the film community, even when there wasn't one at all," Waters says from his summer home in Provincetown, Mass. "I don't remember when I met Steve. But when I made Mondo Trasho [1969], he made a parody movie, called Petite Trasho. That's when we became friends."
Yeager's connection to Crystal Fog is even more personal.
In the movie, Tommi, a drag performer using the stage name Crystal Fog (Jordan Siebert) falls in love with Darren (Steve Polites) a young straight guy loved by Warren (Frank Moorman), an older gay man. The unwelcome triangle is based on an incident from the life of Yeager's younger brother, Tommi, a drag performer in several Baltimore gay clubs - including The Hippo, seen in Crystal Fog as the title character's performing base, The Eclipse.
