Billy Eichner

“I wasn’t planning on picking this one, but I’m just going to choose the movies I really love and Tootsie, motherfucking Tootsie. It doesn’t get better. Has music ever contributed as much to a movie? It would be great without the music, but that score—I still listen to it. I listen to… there’s a song on the soundtrack which is, like, ♪ Go, Tootsie, go ♪ and she’s marching through the streets of Manhattan. It’s this very ’80s shot of Dustin Hoffman in drag marching, and I will listen to that as I walk around Manhattan thinking about, “Maybe I’m Tootsie.””

“Moonstruck. Boy, this is a movie that made me fall in love with movies. This is a movie that made me say, “I want to make magical, romantic, uplifting, funny, human things.” And God damn it, why isn’t Cher acting? That really pisses me off.”

“The Fisher King. If you had asked me what the best movie ever made was when I was 13, I would have said The Fisher King. I used to analyze all the Best Actor and Best Actress nominees. I wrote a long analysis as a child about, even though I knew Anthony Hopkins was going to win, that if I were voting, I would have voted for Robin Williams in The Fisher King. I thought it was the greatest performance I’d ever seen. It’s very of its time, but I loved revisiting this movie.”

“I am going to probably be… Well, I don’t know this for a fact, but I don’t know how many people have walked into the Criterion Closet and chosen Barbra Streisand’s The Prince of Tides. Barbra has always been like a North Star for me, and I think for anyone at all unconventional trying to make it in show business, because she was the epitome of unconventional when she started and she succeeded in every way. And the more she tried to branch out, when she went from a singer to actress and then director, screenwriter, producer, and star, like in this movie, the more flak she got. And yet she did it. She stayed true to the courage of her convictions. I went to see The Prince of Tides with my parents, and I would… at the Continental 3 movie theater in Forest Hills, and I remember that the weekend it came out, we couldn’t wait to see– Everyone else was like, “Oh, The Silence of the Lambs.” There was a countdown in my house until The Prince of Tides came out. This movie had a lot of feeling and a lot of romance, and it doesn’t end with a big, tidy bow and a happy ending, but it makes you feel something. It stays with you. And I think today we’re a little bit afraid of leaning into that old type of sweeping, glamorous, tortured Hollywood romance, right? And I miss that and I love it, so proud to recommend The Prince of Tides.”

“This is a movie that means a lot to me: My Beautiful Laundrette. This stars a young Daniel Day-Lewis, before he was a really big star, and it’s about him having a gay relationship, a gay romance, with a younger, closeted Pakistani man in London. I am eight years old at that point and my aunt said, “You should watch My Beautiful Laundrette,” because we had read about it. It had gotten good reviews. Stephen Frears directed it, the great Stephen Frears. I do believe it ends up getting nominated for Best Original Screenplay at the Oscars. So it wasn’t an obscure film, but it was definitely an art-house film and a rare gay film to get as much attention as it did at the time. And my parents, Jay and Debbie Eichner, they went along with everything I wanted to do. They let me watch very adult things, and I don’t mean pornographic, obviously, I mean sophisticated things that were about adults that weren’t intended for kids necessarily. And I said to my dad, one Saturday afternoon in 1986, I said, “I want to watch My Beautiful Laundrette,” and we went to our local video store, Video Joe, up the block, in Queens, and we rented My Beautiful Laundrette on VHS, around the same time as we were celebrating the 1986 New York Mets winning the World Series, because they played near our apartment, and we watched this gay film and we loved it. And my dad treated it like any other film. There was no special conversation about it. There was no discomfort around it at all. And not to make a shameless plug for my book, but it’s really… I wrote my book because it’s a tribute to my parents, because they always, always, always, going way back, let me be me, and that gave me as a gay kid, coming of age, a real confidence and a self respect that I wish all gay kids had, and part of that was exposing me to movies like this and, like I said, treating it like any other movie. And I’m so happy it’s here because it had a real impact on my life.”

“Metropolitan. I grew up in New York City. This came out when I was a teenager and really getting into movies, and I wasn’t ready for Metropolitan when I was a kid because it’s a bit muted, you know? It’s really sophisticated and chic, but on a different level. Now I love it. And the movie that Whit Stillman made, which I saw – I saw all of these in the theater – that I finally said, “Okay, I get this,” because I had gotten a little older, was Last Days of Disco. They have it. They have it. It’s a whole Whit Stillman box set. These are really wonderful movies to revisit. Not that Whit Stillman needs to hear that from me.”