A Note To Hollywood

If there was ever a book that deserved to be turned into a documentary, it is Christopher Bram's unputdownable Eminent Outlaws, a nonfiction book profiling such gay literary luminaries as Christopher Isherwood, Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, James Baldwin, and Gore Vidal. Such a film would be a perfect companion to another documentary, The Celluloid Closet, which was based on film scholar Vito Russo's classic (and equally unputdownable) gay film history book of the same name. Many of the writers discussed in Eminent Outlaws had a connection to Tinseltown (either as screenwriters or because a book or play of theirs was made into a movie). So Hollywood, please take note.

A Film Producer's Change Of Mind

Letters
Entertainment Weekly
1675 Broadway
New York, NY 10019
August 10, 1994

Dear Editor:

Could the real reason Forrest Gump producer Steve Starkey took out the scene involving Gump and Martin Luther King ("News & Notes, EW #233, July 29) be that he feared a negative reaction from the African-American community over the computer-manipulated image of King in a Hollywood film?

Sincerely yours,
Charles Michael Smith

The above letter was sent but not published.

A Movie Deferred

If all goes well, Arthur Mitchell and the Dance Theatre of Harlem will be coming to a theatre near you--a movie theatre, that is.

It should be interesting to see what Hollywood does with a dramatic version of Mitchell's life story which producer Francine LeFrak, who bought the screen rights, has been trying to bring to the silver screen for years.

Ms. LeFrak, the daughter of New York real estate developer Sam LeFrak, recently hit pay dirt when she struck a deal with Jon Peters and Peter Guber to make the film in association with their production company, the Guber-Peters Entertainment Company. (Some of Guber-Peters's past films include Batman, The Color Purple, and Gorillas in the Mist.) During the shooting of the as-yet-untitled movie, Guber and Peters plan to be remotely involved.

The creative team, which includes Guber-Peters Executive Vice President Stacy Snider, sees the film project using one of two storylines: the rise of Arthur Mitchell at the New York City Ballet to become its first black principal dancer who would later create the Dance Theatre of Harlem (after Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination) or a look at Mitchell in the 1990s and how he has influenced a new generation of dancers. The second approach would have multiple stories interspersed with numerous dance numbers a la the movie Fame.

The primary choice to play Mitchell is Denzel Washington, one of the hottest young black actors in Hollywood, who is presently appearing before the cameras as Malcolm X in Spike Lee's movie about the controversial black leader. According to Ms. Snider, Washington is interested in participating in the project, set to begin production sometime next year. The movie, which will be shot in New York and abroad, will take ten to fourteen weeks to shoot. Concludes Ms. Snider, with enthusiasm: "I'm sure we'll all be thrilled with the finished movie."

This unpublished article was written in November 1991.

( Note: The Dance Theatre of Harlem movie was never made.)

Naming Gay Names In Hollywood

The late film historian Vito Russo, in his marvelous book, The Celluloid Closet, had this to say about the mindset of film executives: "The movies await permission from the world-famous general public before they will portray gays as a fact of life. And the self-hatred of gays in the film industry is as much at fault as the ignorance of the general public."

With that in mind, a book proposal by Martin Strong (a pseudonym) is circulating through the New York book publishing world, looking for a home. This proposal, if and when it is expanded into a book-length work, will really shake up Hollywood, from top to bottom. No pun intended. It'll undoubtedly be a runaway best-seller.

It purports to name names. In a word, to out gay writers, directors, producers, and actors. The Scandal of Homosexual Hollywood, as the proposal is called, will also have "a list of straight production crew types and publicists," says the New York Daily News, "who find it hard to get work because of, among other things, their sexual persuasion."

Strong, a former TV director, has been gathering information about Hollywood's closeted gays for ten years.

This unpublished Mediawatch article was written in November 1991.

(A search on Google and Amazon.com did not list this title. Apparently the book was never published.)

An Overlooked Gay Movie Couple

In Celluloid Activist, Michael Schiavi's biography of gay film scholar Vito Russo, he points out that "Orson Welles's latest movie The Stranger opened the weekend of Vito's birth [in July 1946]."

This film about a Nazi war criminal (Welles) hiding out in a small Connecticut town has a scene mid-film in which two young men briefly appear. Edward G. Robinson, the FBI agent hunting for Welles's character, enters Mr. Potter's store. As Robinson seats himself at the lunch counter, these two men (obviously gay) leave the counter and exit the scene. Each man has a lustful smile on his face. Their exit happens so quickly, the censors back then probably missed it.

More importantly, Russo doesn't mention this scene in The Celluloid Closet. Maybe he missed it like I did the first few times I saw it on television.

The Missing Sondheim TV Interview

Stephen Sondheim is one of the four gay Jewish men who created the Broadway musical West Side Story. And he is the only surviving member of that creative team. (The others were composer/conductor Leonard Bernstein, choreographer Jerome Robbins, and librettist Arthur Laurents.) You would have thought that his comments would have been sought when a local New York TV news show did a report commemorating the 50th anniversary of the movie version of the musical. Only two cast members from the movie George Chakiris and Russ Tamblyn appeared on-camera. ( As a tie-in,the report mentioned that the investigation of fellow cast member Natalie Woods's 1981 drowning was being re-opened that week by the authorities.) For me, a fan of Sondheim 's music, I was greatly disappointed that his voice was missing from the report.

The Million-Dollar Porn Flick

Most porn films are (by Hollywood standards) cheap and cheesy. That's why it's too bad that porn star-turned-magazine publisher Gloria Leonard and famed novelist Norman Mailer weren't able to collaborate on the first million-dollar Triple X-rated film. Their prior commitment to other projects nixed it. The backers, Midwestern magnates, Leonard tells Lili Anolik of The L Magazine ("Normy Makes a Porny," Feb. 2, 2011) wanted "the Gone With the Wind of fuck films." There's no doubt that with Mailer's involvement, the film would have been classy, historic, and very controversial. Would it have made money? Who knows? Maybe another literary genius will tackle such a project.

Remembering James Dean 55 Years Later

September 30 marks the 55th anniversary of actor James Dean's death. Dean would have been 79 years old this year. To commemorate the date of his death, I have posted a shortened version of a review I wrote on a biography of him.


Paul Alexander's Boulevard of Broken Dreams (Viking) is a real page-turner that focuses much attention on James Dean's life as a sexually-active, but closeted, homosexual man.

Although for years it was rumored that Dean, who hated effeminate men, was either gay or bisexual, despite studio-generated publicity about his many romances with young, beautiful actresses, Alexander leaves no doubt about Dean's true sexual identity. An early tip-off was the fact that despite his good looks, "throughout his pre-high school and high school years, Jimmy never had a steady girlfriend, unlike most of the other Fairmount [Indiana] boys." It was during this time that Dean "lost his virginity" to a local minister, James DeWeerd, who became sort of a surrogate father to him.

Dean would be invited to candlelit dinners at DeWeerd's house, where they would read, listen to music, and talk. "With DeWeerd," writes Alexander, "he could enjoy the company of a man and experiment with his sexuality at the same time."

DeWeerd was only one of a long string of men with whom Dean would have sex. Some of these men, who were part of a homosexual clique, were the movers and shakers in Hollywood.

Much of Boulevard of Broken Dreams reads like a novel. The dialogue-- taken from books, magazine articles, journal entries, and taped interviews-- gives the reader the feeling of being in the same room as the participants. Alexander's description of what took place on the day the 24-year-old Dean was killed in a car crash is well-written.

The book, however, is not flawless. Alexander sometimes repeats himself. Twice he compares Valentino's adulation by fans to Dean's. There are factual errors such as the one that has World War II the "war to end all wars,: instead of World War I. And too much space is devoted to the Deaners, those who idolize Dean and come to Fairmount each year to celebrate his deathday.

Otherwise, Boulevard of Broken Dreams is a must-read for those who admire Dean's acting ability and who are not reluctant to read about his sexual proclivities which were kept hush-hush for many decades.

This review was originally published in the Lambda Book Report, July/August 1994.

Helter-Swelter

http://fb.me/BOnT3abgA perfect movie to watch during this heatwave is Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing (1989), set during a sweltering summer day in Brooklyn, New York.
Like the newspaper headlines featured in the movie, the Amsterdam News, a weekly African-American newspaper based in Harlem, made the current heatwave that has gripped the Northeast Topic A with a banner headline that screamed "SWELTERING!"

On the Movies

"Whether we realize it or not, movies often tell us what we think about ourselves. There's a contradiction in the way that we, as an audience, approach movies. They're made primarily for fantasy and yet we look to them to reflect our reality. They become a sort of wish fulfillment, a representation of a life that doesn't necessarily exist but one which we've been taught to want. On the one hand, you can always say 'It's only a movie.' On the other hand, it's a barometer of what we, as a people, think and believe about the ways in which we live."-- Film historian Vito Russo (1946-1990), from The Celluloid Closet (documentary, 1995).

John Wayne Was Full of Crap!

I recently watched an American Masters special on PBS about director John Ford and John Wayne. While watching the program I kept thinking about the radio infomercial that I've heard many times. The infomercial selling a colon health product stated that when John Wayne died, his autopsy revealed that he was carrying 25 pounds of impacted fecal matter. In other words, Wayne was full of crap, literally.