By Andrea Simakis, The Plain Dealer
“I’ve hated my body since puberty,” Chaz Bono announces to the camera.
Moments before, he is shown staring into a mirror, lathering up his cheeks. Then he shaves that famous face. The scene is jarring, particularly for viewers old enough to sing along to “I Got You Babe.”
“Becoming Chaz” is a new documentary about how Chastity Bono — the towheaded darling who used to blow kisses to the audience during “The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour” in the 1970s — “transitions” into Chaz, a Michael Chiklis-shaped dude with back hair and sideburns.
The film, chronicling Chaz’s gender makeover and its aftermath, will premiere on OWN — the Oprah Winfrey Network — at 8 p.m. Tuesday.
Filmmakers Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato met Chaz in the late 1990s, when he was still Chastity, Cher’s famously gay daughter and the media director for GLAAD, the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation.
The team was shooting “The Real Ellen Story,” a behind-the-scenes look at comedian Ellen DeGeneres’ historic coming-out episode on her eponymous sitcom, and interviewed Chastity for the piece.
Years later, they received a phone call from their old friend, who was about to undergo sex-reassignment surgery — the removal of a pair of pendulous breasts — and massive injections of testosterone. More amazingly, longtime girlfriend Jennifer Elia, attracted to Chastity’s “magnetic smile” when the pair first met, had elected to stand by her transgendered man.
“Knowing that it was going to end up being covered by the media, he made the decision that he wanted to document it,” says Barbato by phone from his Los Angeles office. “And he came to us and asked us if we’d be interested, and we said yes — immediately.”
Barbato and Bailey started following Chaz in 2009 and hung around for a year and a half. The filmmakers had carte blanche to record whatever they liked.
“We showed up at his house with a camera, and we pushed the ‘on’ button. We didn’t know what the film was gonna end up being,” Barbato says.
But even the directors were surprised by what they got spending time with Chaz, Jen, the couple’s pride of hairless cats (you won’t be able to take your eyes off an especially obese one) and a Chihuahua named Rocco.
As a character, Jennifer is a much bigger personality than her mate. Before the operation, she asks the doctor if he’s “ever done surgery on breasts this large.”
“They’re nowhere near the record,” he answers. Later, Jennifer quips that her beau has “lost about 61/2 pounds of boob.”
Video: “Good Morning America” interview with Chaz Bono
Post-op, she complains about a new, “overpowering male energy” in the house that has replaced the “nice energy” of her former-gal pal. Chaz is shorter-tempered than Chastity was and more aggressive, too, with the sex drive of Wilt Chamberlain. Although, not having had the “bottom surgery,” he doesn’t have all the boy parts. The procedure is pricey, “almost like buying a car,” Chaz says.
Jennifer likens the change in her lover to “living in Seattle and moving to L.A.”
“His smile was bigger when he was female,” she says.
Barbato noticed it as well. The person he knew before was quiet and reserved. And, truth be told, a little dull.
“Jenny says that I’m not as sweet as I used to be,” Chaz explains in the film. “But I was a lump in the couch who couldn’t deal with life.” Chaz reveals dark days of addictions to painkillers, video games and episodes of “Touched by an Angel.”
Video: “Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour”
Bono 2.0 was “more present,” Barbato says. His personality blossomed. “It was more than seeing him become a man — it was sort of feeling him become a man.”
In an unexpected twist, Chaz’s Republican stepmother and her kids are totally cool with their macho new relation, while his more freewheeling mom — remember the navel-baring, feathered Bob Mackie numbers? — is less sanguine.
In a poignant moment, Cher speaks of the panic she felt when she realized she should have tried to save the sound of her daughter’s voice on an answering machine, because after the male hormone therapy, her child’s familiar, female timbre would be lost forever.
“Chaz and his mom have a lot of similarities — they’re unflappable, they tell it like it is, they are pretty direct,” Barbato says. “They don’t really edit themselves, so when his mom sat down and spoke with us, it was really at a time when she was struggling, and she did not pretend otherwise.”
Early reactions to Cher’s honesty have been frustrating, Barbato says, because “some people’s takeaway is like, ‘Wow, God — you think Cher would understand this.’ ”
“You know what? Cher’s a mom,” he says. “Cher is a mom watching her daughter transition into her son. That is heavy.
“It’s heavy for us — we think, ‘Oh my God, she’s Chastity, blond-haired Chastity. Oh my God, Chastity’s a man!’ Imagine what it’s like for your mom? But Cher’s a big star and a big gay icon, and I think that people expect gay icons to be superhuman.”
Blather haphazard 