Entertainment, Weakly just had a moderately interesting article about Brokeback Mountain: namely, that the movie made a bundle despite Hollywood’s fears that it was a gay romance; and that despite Brokeback’s success, we still haven’t seen a revolution of filmmaking where the number of gay characters exceed minor background noise.
To sum up the major points in the article: television, which has 22 hours to fill each season, handles gay characters at least better, if not well. Television also has a multitude of demographics to target, across multiple channels, on a stable schedule, with a variety of shows. Film, which has 2 hours to capture its audience, sacrifices nuance for plot; and film targets demographics very broadly, across a narrower variety of genres, and so is more inclined to change a main character from gay to straight if having a gay character means risking $50 million in ticket sales.
Studios aren’t producing movies with gay characters (unless the movie is about gayness, like Philidelphia or In and Out or The Birdcage, or, ugh, I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry). Studios say this is because writers aren’t giving them quality scripts.
Writers say they aren’t writing scripts like these, because studios won’t make them: Catch-22. As one quoted writer said, “My favorite genre of movies is movies that get made.”
But Brokeback Mountain proved it could be done. So the trick is to come up with a mainstream movie that also has a gay main character or two — preferably as something more substantial than the comedy-relief hairdresser! — which straight audiences will shell out money for.
Well… we’re the Straight Dope. How hard could it be to come up with a script idea like that?
Haven’t read the article, but I’m glad it got written, and someone’s paying attention. After Brokeback came out there were predictions that it was some sort of mainstream door opener and we’d see a deluge of high quality, profitable, gay-themed movies. I said “fat chance.”
Unfortunately, I was right. We did get 300 though.
Willie Garson is going to be in the film version of “Sex and the City” as is Mario Cantone (who I think was the wedding planner.)
It seems to me that there is a detective series where the main character is gay. Why not a standard mystery?
There are a number of LGB (not sure about T, but probably) series out there. One that’s been adapted onto film is the Donald Strachey series, by the gay netwrk here!. There have been two films in the series to date (starring openly gay Chad Allen as Strachey) and a third (and I think perhaps a fourth) is in the works.
I’d like to see more mainstream films that simply include LGBT characters as a matter of course, of course (heh) but the reasons we aren’t have already been laid out pretty clearly and it comes down to money. A studio isn’t going to endanger an enormous investment by including material that might provoke a backlash when they can shuttle that sort of thing down to their indie imprint and get the benefit of both the layer of insulation and the credit for making the picture at all. BBM wasn’t a “mainstream” film anyway. Its main producer and US distributor was Focus, the art house imprint of Universal.
Willem Defoe plays a gay FBI agent in Boondock Saints. The character’s quite the freak, but he’s incredibly good at his job, and intimidates the hell out of the NYPD detectives assigned to work with him. Not at all a stereotypical gay character, despite the drag scene at the end of the film.
One movie that tends to get overlooked is Dog Day Afternoon. Sonny (Robert DeNiro), the main character is definitely gay, with a possibly transgender-oriented (still male, but desiring a sex-change) lover. Their homosexuality is a side topic to the main story - the bank robbery - and not the primary focus of the film. The story could easily have been altered to downplay Sonny’s sexuality and still have essentially the same movie. (Kudos to Sydney Lumet for not hiding the sexuality of his protagonist.)
Honestly, I don’t watch it often. It’s on the digital cable which we only have a box for in the living room and since I’m on the computer in the bedroom most of the time, that’s the TV I usually watch.
I’ve heard a lot of good things about Noah’s Ark though.
There are two in the US, Logo (the sucky one) and here! (the slightly less sucky one).
Logo has more resources because it’s a Viacom property although from what I hear from people involved with various productions the budgets are pretty miniscule. They used to play a lot of repeats of cancelled CBS series like Some of my Best Friends but those have been more or less phased out. Logo edits for commercials and for content, which makes them suck by definition. And they’re oddly inconsistent about how they edit. For instance, they mute the word “shit” in the feature films they show but they don’t mute it from Queer as Folk repeats. I think about canceling it every time I pay my cable bill, but they pop just enough original programming of interest (The Big Gay Sketch Show and Rick and Steve, The Happiest Gay Couple in All the World for instance) to keep me reeled in. They’re supposedly developing a reality series around Lance Bass, so that ought to be good for any number of laughs.
here! relies on its distribution network partners for much of its content so there are a lot of foreign films. The channel is available either by subscription or VOD depending on the provider (mine is VOD). I get mine VOD, so I get about four new films per week (although the library is fairly small and the rotation is swift). here! also has a number of original series, including the great gothic-soap-opera-with-bunches-of-nudity Dante’s Cove, and original films for the American market including the aforementioned Donald Strachey series.
