Chris Carter’s time-travel comedy Queens for a Day is reaching audiences through limited theatrical screenings and filmmaker Q&As, rather than a standard streaming launch or wide release. The run begins at the Laemmle Royal in Los Angeles, where screenings on Oct. 16th, 17th, and 22nd will be followed by Q&As with Carter. More venues are expected to use the same format. Updates are available on Instagram at @queensforadaymovie.
The film follows a controversial, hard-edged modern television talk-show host who is transported to the 1950s after an accident and finds herself in her mother’s body. Trapped in the cramped life of mid-century America, she must raise her younger self, a child she doesn’t even like. The official description calls the comedy “a biting satire on blind nostalgia and the classic warning of being careful what you wish for.”
Erin Boyes stars. Her credits include the Lifetime TV movie Death in the Cul-De-Sac, Sawtooth Mountain, Longlegs, and The Social Reckoning. Carter directs from a screenplay by his wife, Dori Carter, whose screenwriting career dates back to the 1980s. Her work includes the 1988 Bette Midler and Lily Tomlin film Big Business and several TV movies from that era. Grace Gilroy produces; her credits include The X-Files, Alien vs. Predator, Grease: The Rise of the Pink Ladies, and Bride of Chucky.
The film’s unusual release format suits a filmmaker whose earlier work took a less straightforward route through time travel. Across 218 episodes and 11 seasons, The X-Files explored the subject in several ways. “Synchrony” follows an elderly time traveler who returns to the 1990s to stop his younger self from inventing time travel. In “Monday,” Mulder and Scully are trapped in a repeating day as they try to prevent a bank bombing. And in “Redrum,” a man accused of killing his wife experiences several days in reverse.
One standout is season six’s “Triangle.” Mulder gets lost in the Bermuda Triangle and ends up aboard the SS Queen Anne, a British luxury liner that vanished there during World War II. In 1939, as Nazis board the ship, he encounters people who resemble figures from his own time: the Cigarette Smoking Man, played by William B. Davis, appears as a German officer, while Scully is a U.S. spy. Back in the present, Scully and the Lone Gunmen, played by Bruce Harwood, Tom Braidwood, and Dean Haglund, search for Mulder at sea. They find the Queen Anne drifting as an empty ghost ship and board it. The episode cuts between the ship’s past and present, showing two versions of the same vessel.
Carter wrote and directed “Triangle,” an inventive take on time travel. In Queens for a Day, the premise shifts from a missing ship and overlapping timelines to a talk-show host trapped in her mother’s life. The film’s announced screenings include Q&As with Carter after each Los Angeles show.
