Reports from a darkened theater: Outfest's opening weekend

Outfest, LA’s much anticipated annual film festival, has returned, offering a respite from LA’s hot July weather for some fun in the dark. Judging by the opening weekend’s offerings the 10-day long event will be up to previous year’s standards.

Outfest at the Director's Guild of America building in West Hollywood

The audiences seem to be a little bit smaller than in previous years. Not drastically smaller, but it is noticeable. No doubt the recession is causing film goers to be more guarded about opening their wallets.

And Outfest itself seems to be more cautious with its money as well. The free glossy catalogue of movies isn’t being offered this year. Similarly, at many pre- and post-screening receptions in the DGA atrium, plates of hors d’oeuvres and/or sweets are noticeably absent.

But the liquid refreshments are plentiful thanks to event sponsors. And much to everyone’s delight, Outfest arranged free parking at the DGA building and at CBS Television City (for movies playing at the nearby Fairfax Theatre).

Enthusiasm is in no short supply. Both the filmmakers and the audiences seem excited to be there. The volunteer staff is on top of their game. Screening are going well. And most importantly, many lively post-screening discussions are taking place.

Age seems to be the rage this year. The three best films I’ve seen so far– the features Hannah Free and An Englishman in New York and the documentary On These Shoulders We Stand – have all centered around the struggles of 70+ year-olds.

I was not able to attend the opening night movie, but here is a round up of the six films I have seen thus far:

Hannah Free

An incredible stage-to-screen adaptation that’s so involving you barely even notice that virtually the entire movie takes place indoors. Sharon Gless stars as Hannah, a wheelchair bound septuagenarian living in a nursing home, who longs to spend time with her comatose lover, Rachel, also housed at the same facility but in separate wing. The two are kept apart by Rachel’s disapproving daughter, Marge. Since they are separated, Hannah imagines a young 20-something Rachel coming to visit her. Through this imaginary Rachel, we learn about the depth of their on-again-off-again love affair – Hannah longed to see the world, while Rachel was content to stay home in Michigan.

Shot in 18 days with a budget of $200,000, Hannah Free is achingly beautiful, both in the rich, textured material and fine performances. It’s based on the stage play (first produced in Chicago in 1992) by Claudia Allen, well known for her strong roles for women. In fact, Gless, who has worked with Allen before, said she agreed to play the part without even reading the script; she trusts Allen that much.

Hannah shares the strong-willed determination of Gless’s two best known characters – cop Christine Cagney and PFLAG mother Debbie Novotny. Gless told the audience it was “an honor to play Hannah” and admitted, “I was absolutely comfortable in Hannah’s skin. Make of it what you will. The rumors have been there anyway.”

Audience response was so positive, Gless got two standing ovation afterwards. Even though Gless has attended other screenings, she admitted she was most nervous about this one since LA is her hometown and many of her family members were in attendance.

Eagle-eyed fans may recognize, just barely, the actress playing the cold daughter, Marge. That’s Taylor Miller, best known as tortured heroine Nina Cortlandt on TV’s All My Children, underneath that wig, showcasing acting strengths she never had the opportunity to display on the ABC soap opera.

Kudos also go out to the casting director who found Kelli Strickland to play the 20-something Hannah in flashbacks. Strickland so resembles Gless, that even Gless was floored seeing her for the first time. Kudos also go to director Wendy Jo Carlton for making her feature film debut with such an impressive work. She’s got a very high standard to live up to on her future films.

An Englishman in New York

An actor’s job is to create vivid characters for stage and screen. The job becomes more difficult when they’re portraying real life people. And actor John Hurt has done an amazing job portraying Quinten Crisp in this film, so completely embodying the renowned gay wit that at times it felt like you’re watching archival footage.

Of course, Hurt knows Crisp better than anyone, having previously portrayed him in the 1976 movie based on his best selling autobiography, The Naked Civil Servant.

Following the success of that movie, the effeminate Crisp, who wore always wore make-up and nail polish, became a sensation in Britain with his one-man show where audiences would pose questions and the 70-something would immediately come back with clever comments. He brought that show to New York in 1981, where American audiences fell in love with him and he fell in love with New York.

This film, made last year for British TV, offers greater insights into the man who viewers end up both admiring and pitying. Hurt manages to get every mannerism perfect and mimics Crisp’s voice expertly. But he also lets the Brit’s soul come through. For example, when confronted by a gang of bashers threatening to beat him up, Hurt keeps his head high and stands his ground. And while surrounded by the squalor of the one-room apartment that Crisp refused to tidy up, Hurt manages to still come across as dignified and prideful. By the end, it’s a very satisfying performance and an enlightening film.

An Englishman also features an amazing supporting cast including Swoosie Kurtz as his agent, Cynthia Nixon as his stage partner, Penny Arcade, and rising star Jonathan Tucker as the artist Crisp took under his wing.

On These Shoulders We Stand

A fascinating and lush examination of the early gay rights efforts in Los Angeles, this documentary puts a human face on the effort by interviewing 11 people about their personal struggles.

Documenting gay history is so important since so many of the early crusaders have passed away either from old ages or AIDS. While numerous papers survive, getting their first-person stories down on tape is so vital for future generations to understand and personalize their history. n fact, the interviews in this documentary were originally intended as vignettes that would be posted on You Tube. But once director Glenne McElhinney (pictured right) got in the editing room, she realized she had something much bigger than mere vignettes. So she and her team assembled the work into a full length film in a mere 5 months time, finishing a week before the July 11 world premier.

As McElhinney explained, being in the film capital of the world, these early crusaders understood what they were doing would be seen by the rest of the world. But the LA efforts have often been overshadowed by what was happening at the same time in New York and San Francisco. Thus the importance of making this film to show what LA’s contribution was.

There’s the story of Nancy Valverde, a Latina woman who was repeatedly arrested for wearing pants in public at a time when Los Angeles had an ordinance requiring citizens to wear sex specific clothing. There’s Ivy Bottini, head of the local chapter of the National Organization of Women, who was voted out of office when she came out as a lesbian. There’s Kevin Thomas, a longtime movie critic for the Los Angeles Times, who struggled to get more balanced coverage of gay issues in the macho world of reporters. And there’s actor Dale Reynolds who was active in rallies, but feared doing so might jeopardize his employment opportunities.

Following the near capacity screening, the audience gave a standing ovation to moving film. After a brief Q&A with McElhinney and the film’s participants (some pictured right with McElhinney in center), they received another thunderous round of applause. Given this reaction, On These Shoulders stands a good chance of winning Outfest’s Audience Award for Best Documentary.

One recurring figure in the film is former LA Police Department Chief Ed Parker, who allowed his officers to routinely harass gays and led a crusade to throw monkey wrenches in to any public gay rights demonstrations. After the screening, Sgt. Lisa Phillips, an openly gay member of the LAPD, stood up and personally apologized to the audience for the harassment gays had suffered under Parker’s reign, emphasizing that the LAPD no longer is like that.

American Primitive

Just when it seemed there every angle for examining a gay family was exhausted, director/screenwriter Gwen Wynne finds a fresh approach by telling such a story through the eyes of a teenage girl. Set in the 1973 Cape Cod, this drama follows 16-year-old Madeline as she accidently discovers that her father (played by Tate Donovan, pictured below with Adam Pascal) is gay and that his business partner is also his romantic partner.

Filmed in an astonishing 21 days in April 2007, American Primitive is stunning both for the layered performances achieved and for the number of amazing complex shots they crew pulled off.

Wynne based the screenplay on her own experiences of growing up with a gay father in the 1980s. However, by moving the setting to 1973 (the same year the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its list of mental disorders), she emphasizes how alienating such a discovery can be for a young girl. Trying to make sense of this strange discovery, Madeline finds few books available on the subject. When she reluctantly confides in a friend, the gossip immediately spreads around town, adding to her humiliation.

American Primitive plays all the emotions of the family dynamics – confusion, fear, loathing, distrust and isolation, but also love and loyalty. The film is earnest in its dedication to the address the situation fully, but in the process comes across as a bit too eager. After the screening, several audience members commented that it had a movie-of-the-week feel about it. That’s an inherent problem with any film dealing with a special issue. Inevitably, the narrative structure of film demands some type of resolution by movie’s end, when in real life things don’t get wrapped up so nicely, so quickly.

As Wynne (pictured right) pointed out during the Q&A, the concept of a gay family was so new in 1973, the language wasn’t even there for discussing the subject. It’s easy to forget how far things have come in 35 years, but it’s also a reminder how far society has to go since gay families are still viewed as controversial. And just to give a nice bit of cultural contrast, the film shows a black female reporter publically flirting with the father and no one bats an eye.

The 1970s setting is expertly reproduced via the clothes and the hairstyles – Adam Pascal as the lover is forced to wear bushy sideburns which were trendy at the time, but look hideously ugly by today’s standards. And a groovy pop soundtrack nicely transports viewers back to that era. Especially stunning, and appropriate given the topic, is a climatic scene is set to the psychedelic tune “Hocus Pocus” by the group Focus. That scene is cut so precisely with so much happening that you immediately want to rewind it to take everything in. Unfortunately, you can’t do that in a movie theater, but once the DVD is released, no doubt many people will be doing exactly that.

Straightlaced

Director Debra Chasnoff has made a career out of doing documentaries intended for use in the schools, many of which have centered around LGBT issues. Her 1995 It’s Elementary: Talking about Gay Issues in Schools is still considered a landmark and still widely used today. And its follow-up, It’s Still Elementary played to raves at last year’s Outfest.

With her latest, Straightlaced: How Gender’s Got us all Tied Up, Chasnoff tackles the issue of how our society perceives males and females should behave. She talked to over 3 dozens high schoolers and young adults about gender expectations.

One androgynous girl talked about how people assumed she was a male. A boy talked about how he must wear loose, baggy clothes, otherwise people assume he’s gay. Another boy talked about how his friends treated him as bizarre because he admitting to crying after his girlfriend broke up with him. As far as our society as come with gender roles, the film demonstrates how far we’ve still got to go. And this film will go a long way to advancing the discussion.

Chasnoff (pictured right) joked that she made the film because her oldest son wouldn’t talk to her, so she went out and talked to a lot of other teenagers instead. And did she ever get students to talk. When screening potential participants, she’d go into classrooms and ask if anyone had ideas they wanted to share about being male or female. Inevitably, more than half of the students raised their hands.

The theater was dead silent throughout the screening. Similarly, Chasnoff reports that classrooms are drop dead quiet while the film runs. There’s a thirst for understanding what it means to be male or female and where those ideas come from.

The film is fascinating because it touches on so much – everything from clothing and mannerisms to love and sexuality. However it does reach a point of information overload. By the end, it’s too overwhelming to take everything in. Clocking in at 66 minutes, the film is probably 25 minutes too long. And that one hour length makes it too long to be shown in a single class period at most schools.

College Boys Live

The business of voyeurism is a full-time job as viewers learn in this documentary. College Boys Live is a notorious web-cam house filled with college-age twinks who live there rent-free in return for allowing subscribers watch them 24/7 on their computers. Camera crews went inside the house for 3 months to capture the inner workings of this hot internet site and learn more about the participants.

While the documentary may sound exploitative, it’s not. It’s a fascinating look at a business and the people involved. Critics of reality shows say the mere presence of the cameras alters the goings on, but in this case, that doesn’t seem to be true. The house was already filled with 36 cameras mounted in every room, including the bathroom. So, the film crew’s cameras just blended into the background for the boys. And for the webcam viewers too.

Director George O’Donnell (picutred right) got the idea for doing this film after reading an article in the Advocate about protests from neighbors living in the Orlando cul de sac. As luck would have it, his three months there coincided with some dramatic happenings – the neighbors filing a lawsuit, the College Boys Live house relocating to a new subdivision and one of the twinks having a melt-down. The personalities involved include troublemaker JC, heartbreaker Tim, newly-out-of-the-closet Chuck, and house owner Zac, plus bizarre Charlie, an obsessed subscriber who moves to Orlando to be closer to the boys and soon becomes a frequent visitor in the house.

If all this sounds like a grand soap opera, it is. That’s part of what makes the film so fascinating. But it’s not for everyone. Several dozen people walked out during the screening, loudly shouting that it was “disgusting” and “perverted” as they stormed out.

During the Q&A, several audience members referred to College Boys Live as a cheap version of Frat Pad (another web-cam house), with poor white trash. O’Donnell merely responded, “I’m like [film director] John Waters. I’m an insane white trash lover.”

O’Donnell masterfully balances footage he shot with footage of what webcam viewers saw. And he adds some of the comments subscribers posted on the site to offer greater insights into how the audience responds. The result is an enlightening documentary.

Those looking for naked boys will be disappointed. The boys were expected to appear nude for the webcams at least 30 minutes each day, but none of that nudity is seen in this documentary.


All photos by James F. Mills, with the exceptions of the Debra Chasnoff portrait, the Straightlaced movie poster and the promotional photos from American Primitive and An Englishman in New York.