Outfest: Ricki Lake back on big screen...as a lesbian!

Ricki Lake, who has had plenty of gay fans ever since she burst onto the scene as the lead in the original film version of "Hairspray," was at the Showcase Theater Monday night with the rest of the cast of her new movie "Park," her first big screen effort in ages.

In this uneven ensemble comedy about 10 random Angelinos whose lives collide during their lunch hour in a section of Griffith Park, Ricki and Cheri Oteri of SNL fame share a long make-out scene inside a car. Ricki has tailed her husband (William Baldwin in a wacko performance) to the park and catches him cheating with another woman. After she and Oteri trap him in his car then vandalize it, Oteri throws out the idea of becoming lesbians. They go for it right there. Post-kiss, Oteri is appalled. Lake comes out of the kiss a lesbian. By film's end, she is headed to a bar on Santa Monica Boulevard.

After the screening, I asked Ricki how it felt to be back in the movies.

"It's really, really fun and I'm really proud of this film," she said. "I had to fight for this part."

Writer-director Kurt Voelker joked that he made Lake and Oteri "kiss many, many times, over and over again for different angles. Finally Cheri said to Ricki, 'Get off of me!'"

Among those in the near-capacity audience were members of the talented cast, many who looked sorta familiar and have appeared scores of television shows and films including Trent Ford, Maulik Pancholy, Anne Pudek, Melanie Lynskey and Anthony "Treach" Criss. All are mega-talented but the real standout was Dagney Kerr who was hilarious as a hysterical suicidal woman who keeps getting foiled in her attempts to do herself in. Whenever Kerr is on screen, the movie works.

The film, which took 21 days to shoot, does not yet have a distributor.