This Is Bananas explores the life and work of Richard Leonard and the community that grew around Bananas, his vintage clothing store in Gloucester, Massachusetts.
Built from contemporary interviews, observational filmmaking, and an archive spanning more than fifty years, the film traces the relationship between Richard's vision and the town that gave it room to take hold.
What begins with one storefront becomes a larger story about creativity, belonging, and the ways people and places shape one another.
Richard Leonard
When he opened a vintage clothing store in 1978, Richard Leonard didn't set out to build a community.
He followed his curiosity, his love of beauty, and his instinct to create and connect. Vintage clothing became both a business and an outlet for glamour, irreverence, and self-expression. Bananas became more than a shop. It was a dressing room, a stage, and a gathering place where people experimented, performed, laughed, and tried on new versions of themselves.
Richard introduced people and helped forge friendships that lasted for decades. What began as fashion shows with friends grew into the Bananarettes and increasingly ambitious performances. The shows moved beyond the store into community spaces, attracting people from across the region. They became social events, creative spectacles, and fundraisers for local causes.
Over time, something larger formed around those acts of creativity and connection. What began as play became a community where people felt recognized, welcomed, and free to become more fully themselves.
Gloucester, MA
Bananas belongs to Gloucester, Massachusetts.
Fishing has shaped Gloucester for centuries, creating a culture rooted in hard work, independence, and tradition. At the same time, the town has sustained a vibrant community of artists, writers, musicians, and makers. Bananas emerged where those traditions met.
Gloucester gave Richard Leonard the freedom to play, and over time Bananas became part of the town’s cultural life. The film explores that relationship: how a place shapes its people, how they shape it in return, and how what they became in Gloucester informed what they went on to create in the wider world.
Why Tell This Story
It's personal. My mother was a Bananarette. Bananas, and Richard Leonard, have been part of my life for more than forty years. Growing up, I experienced this generous, glamorous community from the inside. As an outsider kid coming of age, it showed me there were many ways to move through the world. I've come to understand how formative and empowering that was.
That sense of possibility was at the heart of Bananas. It gave people a place to belong and permission to become more fully themselves.
It's also cultural. Bananas is a specific story, rooted in a particular place and time: a unique business and an exuberant creative community finding a home in a traditional New England fishing town. What grew from that unlikely combination speaks to something universal about the power of community and acceptance. I want to preserve this history while exploring what made it possible, why it mattered, and what it can teach us about making room for one another now.
The Bigger Picture
The documentary is the spine of a larger creative project.
As the archive grows, it will support an immersive experience that brings together film, live performance, fashion, photography, and archival material. There is also potential for publication, public programming, and other opportunities to extend the story to new audiences.
Each piece stands on its own while contributing to a broader effort to preserve, celebrate, and share the legacy of Bananas.
Production
Target Launch: Holiday 2027
October 2026 | Principal Photography
2026 Focus: Capture the stories, relationships, and places that will become the foundation of the documentary and the archive.
