San Francisco filmmakersRob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedmanfirst witnessed the whirlwind talent ofTaylor Macin its full glory in 2011. It was at the Fort Mason Center for Arts and Culture, where they caught a performance of his epic five-act musical extravaganza“The Lily’s Revenge.”

“I just thought, ‘Who is this creature?’ ” Epstein recalled. “That was an early prototype of his breaking the fourth wall of theater. It was an eight-hour show, and the audience was traveling from room to room.”

They were fans from that point on.

So the Academy Award-winning filmmakers, who spoke to The Chronicle by phone from Massachusetts, where they were at a film festival, were thrilled when they were asked to assemble concert footage from the even more ambitious concert“Taylor Mac’s 24-Decade History of Popular Music”into a documentary, which closes this year’sFramelineLGBTQ film festival at the Castro Theatre on Saturday, June 24.

The premise: Mac, undergoing constant costume changes, spends an hour on each decade starting in 1776. The show revealed facts about songs like “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” which was originally a British song deriding the “effeminate” rebel colonists before the Colonials took the song and made it an anthem.

“Cultural appropriation!” shouts Mac gleefully in the film.

The audience participates as Mac has them re-enact the Civil War and re-create the culturally problematic comic opera “The Mikado” as performed by Martians. It is a history of repression, racism and homophobia through song.

By the time Mac gets to the 2010s, the show is nearly 24 hours old. The “Taylor Mac’s 24-Decade History of Popular Music” film, perhaps thankfully, runs about 103 minutes, utilizing footage from a marathon 24-hour concert in 2016 at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, N.Y., and a subsequent Los Angeles performance that was broken up into several evenings. (The show was also performed in partsat San Francisco’s Curran Theater in 2017.)

The film, which also will be broadcast on HBO and stream on Max beginning Tuesday, June 27, is even more timely than when it was first conceived in 2012. Since the ascension of Donald Trump, homophobic attacks and anti-LGBTQ legislation have been dramaticallyon the rise. For a hot moment, performing the show live in Tennessee would have been illegal after the state’s Legislature passed a bill against drag performances that essentially banned it. (A federal judge overturned the law, ruling it unconstitutional.)

“One of the things I’ve learned is that progress is not linear,” Friedman said. “So far in my lifetime, it’s been two steps forward, one step back, not the other way around. It doesn’t surprise me that we’re having a backlash because every time there’s progress, there’s a reaction.

“Right now, I think it’s really just cheap politics. I think they look for the issue that people are going to get the most worked up about on both sides. Many times before this, it’s been queer people. Now it’s specifically trans people. And, for some reason I can’t fathom, drag queens.”

爱泼斯坦和弗里德曼这些战斗close, documenting queer history and homophobia for close to four decades. Before they became a duo, Epstein won an Oscar for his documentary “The Times of Harvey Milk” (1984). After he and Friedman formed Telling Pictures in San Francisco in 1987, they won an Oscar for“Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt”(1989), about theNames Project AIDS Memorial Quilt.

Other Epstein-Friedman classics include “The Celluloid Closet” (1995), about the treatment of LGBTQ characters in film; and “Paragraph 175” (2000), about the persecution of gay and lesbian people by the Nazis in World War II. They also have made narrative films, including“Howl”(2010), which starred Palo Alto native James Franco as San Francisco poet Allen Ginsberg; and“Lovelace”(2013), which starredAmanda Seyfriedas porn actress Linda Lovelace.

They found Mac, who was raised in Stockton, to be a natural subject.

“Taylor is a humanist at heart,” Epstein said. “I think for anyone who experiences a Taylor Mac performance, and hopefully this film shows that, it’s infectious. It’s a generous, expansive view of humanity, and that transcends everything.

“So many of the themes that he is grappling with in the show are themes that we, as a country, are grappling with as we confront our own problematic past and present. His themes are really epic. And it’s also hugely entertaining because he’s such an incredible performer.”

Both filmmakers and Mac are scheduled to attend the Castro Theatre event in person. Epstein and Friedman said they were disappointed to learn that their beloved Castro will likely have its traditional seat configuration changed after theBoard of Supervisors cleared the wayfor the theater’s operator, Another Planet Entertainment, to make changes. (“Save the seats!” Friedman pleaded.) Nonetheless, the theater and Frameline “are home,” Epstein said, adding that Mac feels the same way.

“He was so thrilled when we told him that this film was going to be at Frameline and playing at the Castro,” Epstein said. “As a kid from Stockton, the Castro, like for many of us, was this great temple. So he’s just over the moon about it.”

Reach G. Allen Johnson:ajohnson@sfchronicle.com;Twitter:@BRFilmsAllen