In 2001 John Cameron Mitchell wrote, directed and starred in the big screen adaptation of Hedwig and the Angry Inch. The rock musical comedy-drama is based on Mitchell and Stephen Trask's 1998 stage musical of the same name and tells the story of a gender-queer punk-rock singer from East Berlin named 'Hedwig Robinson' who tours the U.S. with her band, the Angry Inch, as she recounts her life story and follows her former lover/band-mate, 'Tommy Gnosis', who stole her songs and became a rockstar. Hedwig was once a teenage gay boy named 'Hansel Schmidt' who fell in love with an American soldier and was forced to undergo sex reassignment surgery in order to leave Communist East Germany for the West as his wife, unfortunately the surgery went wrong. Abandoned in a Kansas trailer park by her husband on their first anniversary, she creates a new persona for herself with wigs and clothes and returns to her first love of music.
