Billy Tipton Latest Celebrity News & Gossip

Matt Donnelly Senior Film Writer“Framing Agnes,” a hybrid narrative and documentary feature film that explores trans lives and history, has sold North American distribution rights to Kino Lorber.Directed by Chase Joynt, the film closely and accurately depicts the journey of trans people past and present through reenactments of transcripts from a notable 1960s UCLA gender study. Based on a short by Joynt which premiered and nabbed awards at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival, the project features a cast of trans performers and academics that includes Jules Gill-Peterson, Angelica Ross, Jen Richards, Zackary Drucker, Max Wolf Valerio, Silas Howard and Stephen Ira.The film will make its New York premiere at NewFest on June 5, followed by a theatrical release from Kino Lorber in December. Joynt and Morgan M.

“Masc: Trans Men, Butch Dykes and Gender-nonconforming Heroes in Cinema” spotlights a tapestry of films that explore the courageous lives of trans men, butch lesbians, and gender outlaws.

EXCLUSIVE: Framing Agnes filmmaker Chase Joynt, his producing partner Samantha Curley and their production company, Level Ground Productions, have signed with WME for representation, on the heels of the  documentary’s world premiere at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival.

EXCLUSIVE: Oscilloscope Laboratories has acquired U.S. rights to the genre-bending look at the life of musician and trans culture icon Billy Tipton in the documentary No Ordinary Man directed by Aisling Chin-Yee and Chase Joynt. The film production and distribution company founded by the late, great Adam Yauch of Beastie Boys also acquired the U.S. rights to Jeanne Leblanc’s suspense-drama Les Nôrtes (Our Own).

A Latino love story that spans decades; a documentary about Billy Tipton, the influential jazz musician who was revealed after his death to have been transgender; and the groundbreaking directorial debut from one of the pioneers of the New Queer Cinema are among the seven LGBTQ films that will be featured at the AFI Festival 2020.

Until his death in 1989 at the age of 74, not even his wife or adoptive children knew that jazz pianist Billy Tipton had been anything other than a cisgender man. According to No Ordinary Man — a new documentary about Tipton’s legacy as a transmasculine icon — the musician became fodder for daytime talk shows and supermarket tabloids shortly after his death, with Oprah Winfrey and her also-rans prying into the marriage between Tipton and his common-law widow Kitty Kelly.

Andreas Wiseman International EditorEXCLUSIVE: Mimi Steinbauer’s LA-based outfit Radiant Films has boarded U.S.