Sing along to ‘Fruit Fly,’ homegrown S.F. musical, at the Roxie next week

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Mission filmmaker H.P. Mendoza admits that the 17th anniversary of a film is a weird one to celebrate.

But when he first approached film festivals and theater programmers to see if they would be interested in a 20th anniversary sing-along of his directorial debut, “Fruit Fly,” in a few years, he received an interesting answer: Why couldn’t he do it now?

“I was talking to people like Lex Sloan over at the Roxie, who was saying that things are just so bleak right now,” says Mendoza during a recent interview at the Mission’s 16th Street Diner.

“And [Sloan said] it’s beautiful that there are a lot of filmmakers approaching this bleakness by making films about the struggle and strife and activism behind it, but there isn’t much joy out there.” 

“And someone at Asian CineVision in New York was saying that they love the idea of having huge audiences who already have the songbook in front of them, screaming back at a bunch of queer people of color on screen who are screaming the words, ‘We’re gonna live life undenied!’”

Given the feedback and the April release of “Fruit Fly” on Blu-ray, Mendoza decided to go ahead and make a sing-along edition for this year. In San Francisco, the musical screens Wednesday, July 23, at the Roxie with Mendoza, star L.A. Renigen, and others from the film in attendance.

Joshua Grannell, a.k.a. Peaches Christ, will moderate a post-screening Q&A.

Mendoza first made headlines in 2006 as the scriptwriter, songwriter, and star of Richard Wong’s 2006 debut “Colma: The Musical,” about three recent high-school graduates navigating life and friendship in the San Francisco suburb famous for its cemeteries.

Impressed by the film, the Center for Asian American Media (CAAM) granted Mendoza and Wong $25,000 each to direct their own films. It was a tiny budget, but with true guerrilla spirit, Mendoza stretched it to make his own first feature with “Fruit Fly.”

The film was made around San Francisco, and not always with permission: “All the musical numbers that you see, right at the end of every shot, we’re on the verge of getting caught by security,” Mendoza laughs.

Renigen stars as Bethesda, recently returned from the Philippines and the newest resident in an artists’ commune. An adoptee and a performance artist, she’s looking for her biological mother as she works on a latest show. She spends her evenings with her new community in the city’s gay bars, where she finds herself labeled a “fag hag.”

The narrative is interspersed with bright pop songs, which Mendoza uses to explore racism and misogyny.

“I had one thing stuck in my craw, and that was all the people who saw ‘Colma’ and said, ‘Yeah, a little too gay, a little too brown,” Mendoza says. “And so, ‘Fruit Fly,’ I wrote that sort of as a middle finger. It’s like, ‘Hey, guess what? This one’s even gayer, and even browner.’”

Further fueling Mendoza’s anger was the circumstance under which “Fruit Fly” was written. Proposition 8, the initiative to not only ban gay marriage but enshrine the ban in the state’s constitution, was on the 2008 ballot.

(The initiative passed, but was later overturned by the Ninth District Court of Appeals before the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges rendered pending appeals moot.) 

Now, Mendoza finds himself screening the movie again during an even more fraught, angrier era in which immigrants, women, queer people, trans people, people of color, and others are in the crosshairs of an authoritarian, out-of-control presidential administration.

In “Fruit Fly,” “Colma” and his 2018 dysfunctional family comedy-drama “Bitter Melon,” the filmmaker also transforms San Francisco into a character — one that Mendoza feels reflects reality.

He notes how often Hollywood comes here to make movies and establish films’ locations with shots of the Painted Ladies and cable cars. He has nothing against those cute houses, but that’s not his San Francisco.

“I can actually hold the La Grande water tower of the Excelsior with pride and make a whole film set in the neighborhood I grew up in,” Mendoza says. “You have nothing setting the precedent — I can’t think of any other movies that were shot in Excelsior — so when I’m making ‘Bitter Melon,’ there are no filmmaking ghosts of the Excelsior telling me how to put on the show right there.”

Mendoza’s last film, 2023’s “The Secret Art of Human Flight,” was the first he made where he adapted another writer’s screenplay. But his currently-in-progress work sees him returning to his roots: The project he can talk about is an expansion and reworking of “Folx,” the musical he premiered during a virtual presentation for the closing night of 2021 CAAMFest.

A hybrid of live performance with 8-bit-style animation, with songs created as rewards for those who donated $1,000 to “Bitter Melon’s” Kickstarter, “Folx” followed four friends out for the evening, grappling with the effects of the first year of the pandemic.

The working title of the new film, a live-action feature, is “Super Magic City.” Mendoza is writing new songs for it, but says it still follows “Folx’s” premise: friends out on the town in the wake of a cataclysmic event.

“I feel like we have been, and still are, experiencing multiple cataclysmic events,” he says. “And I’d like to think that by the time this movie comes out — take your pick. I’m leaving it for the event in the movie to be a cipher for whatever you’re going through.

“I’m thinking about where those characters would be today, and I’m just in a different place from where I was when I wrote ‘Folx,’” he adds.

When asked what motivates him, Mendoza likens himself to Mickey Rooney in those Golden Age Hollywood musicals. He is someone determined to put on a show.

“Even though ‘The Secret Art of Human Flight’ had the biggest budget that I had to work with, I was rallying the troops, making sure everybody was Judy Garland to my Mickey Rooney,” he says.

“I feel like you can throw all the money in the world at me, and I will never say, ‘Finally, now I have this budget that matches what I want to do.’ I will always treat everything like some scrappy moment where it’s like, ‘Hey, what can we do at this very moment to put on a big show?’”

He laughs. “Maybe I’m just a try-hard.”

“Fruit Fly: Sing-Along Tour” will be held Wednesday, July 23, at 6:30 p.m. at the Roxie Theater, 3117 16th St. Tickets are $5 to $15.