Rupert Everett's a triple threat as writer/director/star of THE HAPPY PRINCE

The final years of Oscar Wilde, with a few flashbacks to happier times, are shown us in THE HAPPY PRINCE, a new film from Rupert Everett -- who not only wrote and directed but stars in it, too, as Oscar himself. He makes a wonderful Wilde, as good as Robert Morley, Peter Finch and even Stephen Fry, who, up to now, had been TrustMovies' favorite Oscar. Best of all, the movie that surrounds the character is very good indeed -- written and directed with finesse and subtlety, allowing us to see pieces of this man that come together to form quite a whole.

Mr. Everett, above and below, allows us to see not only the dissipated older Wilde (who can still belt out a nifty music hall ditty and/or enjoy pleasuring a much younger man) but also gives us glimpses of the successful playwright and bon vivant whose work set audiences laughing so merrily for so long.

The Happy Prince is both the title of the movie and of a story (first published in 1888) that Wilde wrote for children (he was a master at this, just as he was at theater), and Everett threads this sad, sweet tale throughout his movie, as Wilde is first seen reading it to his own children and later to one of the young boys he has befriended and cared for who loves to hear his stories.

Woven into this are Wilde's friendships with Reggie Turner (Colin Firth, above) and Robbie Ross (a wonderful Edwin Thomas, below, left), both of whom were great and good friends to Wilde, helping him through some of the darkest times.

And of course there is "Bosie," Oscar's most beloved friend and lover, Lord Alfred Douglas (Colin Morgan, below), portrayed here, as usual, as the young twit/twat most responsible for Oscar's downfall. How you'll wish that Wilde had a bit more sense in choosing a soulmate, but, as ever, the heart has its reasons....

Also on hand are an underused Emily Watson (below) as Wilde's wife) and the great Tom Wilkinson as a kindly and delightful priest, called upon toward the end. But it is, first to last, Everett's show, and he imbues our Oscar with such life and vitality, such understanding his own flaws and foibles, that Wilde indeed lives anew.

The film's funniest scenes involves an orgy into which crashes the mother of the main attraction (Antonio Spagnuolo, below, left), certain that her married son is having an affair with another woman. When no other female can be found -- instead just a bevy of near-naked men -- she leaves, abashed and contrite about her unfounded suspicions.

The movie moves from a rainy, bleak Paris to sunny Italy and back. Though quite obviously a labor of love on the part of the filmmaker, Everett has made it with enough intelligence and discipline to pass muster in every respect. The pacing proves near-perfect, while the many small, impressionistic incidents slowly build and combine to offer up a marvelous, productive, sad, beautiful and far-too-short life. I think Wilde himself would have loved this film.

From Sony Pictures Classics and running 105 minutes, The Happy Prince, after opening on both coasts and elsewhere, hits South Florida this coming Friday, October 26. In the Miami areas, look for it at the AMC Aventura 24 and the Regal South Beach 18; in Fort Lauderdale at the Classic Gateway, and in Boca Raton at the Living Room Theaters and the Regal Shadowood 16; and at the Movies of Delray and Lake Worth. Wherever you live around the country, to find a theater near you, click here and then click on GET TICKETS in the task bar.

SEED MONEY: Michael Stabile's doc about gay porn king Chuck Holmes hits DVD and VOD

Quite a trip down memory lane -- well, for those of us, anyway, who remember gay pornography that goes back as far as the 1950s, 60s and 70s and then, via VHS tapes and finally DVDs, into the 1980s and 90s -- SEED MONEY, the new documentary from Michael Stabile, tracks the career of one man, Chuck Holmes, and the company, Falcon Studios, that he and some very young and hunky porn actors created. Written and directed by Mr. Stabile, shown below, the movie is informative, fun, sexy and rather honest in its assessment of Holmes and the industry he helped take from home movie loops into the digital age -- making millions of dollars in the process.

We get a history of gay porn from the 1950s onwards, and of Mr. Holmes, as well, along with his rise from mere pornographer to porn king, a man who had a very good eye for what the market wanted (and could bear). He also knew how to provide all this via the kind hot young guys who proved more and more available for this sort of work, as the repressive 1950s changed to the open and exploratory 60s and finally to the all-out, anything-goes 70s. Holmes also had an eye for how tastes and fashions in male, gay sex objects were changing and evolving, and he kept up with all this so well that he was able to pretty much corner the market.

If we don't learn all that much that's very personal about Holmes (that's he, above, during his businessman/philanthropist days, and at bottom, relaxing with one his boys), we do get clues into his personality and desires via some of the men (and a couple of women) who knew and worked with/for him. And we see how his empire rose and rose by keeping up with the wants and needs of the ever expanding gay marketplace.

We also see and hear from a few ex-porn stars (like Jeff Stryker) who talk about what life was like on set and off, inter-cut with beaucoup scenes from various Falcon Studio films. For most of its length the film skips merrily and quickly along the surface of things: It's all enjoyable but not particularly revealing.

Then come the 1980s -- and AIDS. And, as one Falconer notes,"When we found out all our actors were dying, that pretty much changed things a lot." Uh, yes: One would imagine something like that. Mr. Holmes evidently had grievous objections to his actors using condoms during this time -- not the man's finest hour, to be sure -- but finally, after so many deaths, those actors simply insisted on sheathing the member.

At some point along the way -- someone suggests that this was Holmes' attempt to keep his memory alive -- the man became a noted philanthropist, hobnobbing with movie stars and the cultural and political elite of the day. Yet mainstream attitudes toward sex (particularly the gay variety) and pornography, money and respectability appears to have made Holmes feel, probably with good reason, that he was never quite "in the loop."

All of this becomes part of the Chuck Holmes story told here which is, overall, a pretty sad one, even given the enormous success of Falcon Studios. Yet it's a tale that this movie never quite penetrates very deeply -- despite all the amply proportioned cocks on display. Still, it's certainly an interesting and relatively enjoyable ride. And San Francisco's attractive GLBT Center, one of Holmes' biggest gifts, stands today as a large and costly memorial to the man.

From Breaking Glass Pictures and running a swift, wont-wear-out-its-welcome 71 minutes, Seed Money (a nicely double entendre title, that!) hits DVD and VOD this Tuesday, October 4 -- for purchase and/or rental.

THE SECRET DISCO REVOLUTION: Jamie Kastner's nostalgic doc with booty & a beat

A very fun, pretty funny, uber-nostaligic documentary that offers up an interesting theory -- political, social, revolutionary -- of the 1970s disco craze (and then politely puts it to rest), THE SECRET DISCO REVOLUTION is shoo-in viewing for gays of a certain age, celebrity addicts or anyone of any sexual persuasion who liked to dance themselves crazy back in the day. It combines everything from talking heads to archival footage, social theory (most noticeably and intelligently from Alice Echols) and -- ah, yes -- those famous disco songs and performers to silly, sweet effect that will probably have you tapping your toes and grinning fairly often throughout.

The brainchild of one Jamie Kastner (shown at left), who wrote and directed, perhaps the oddest and most interesting feature of the doc is his introduction of a trio of "masterminds," as he calls them (shown below and at bottom) -- a black man, a gay man and a woman, supposedly representing the three groups for whom disco accomplished the most "liberation." These three appear regularly throughout the film, though it seems more and more clear as the movie progresses that Kastner sees these masterminds as pseudo: comic material rather than anything remotely real or genuinely important. And for those viewers who might have taken all this seriously, his question to many of the talking heads at the film's close makes it more than clear that the disco revolution may have been fun and different and ground-breaking in certain ways, but it had little to do with revolution or protest.

Instead, it and the film that covers it, are all about beat, drugs, the expending of energy, and selling records (those, junior, are what we had to listen to, back in the day). Reference is made to France under the Nazis, Swing Kids and other historical matters, but what we really want to hear and learn about are all those great songs.

Fortunately, the filmmaker gives them to us, if not full-length, with enough time so we recall why they were such hits. Here come Gloria Gaynor (in the penultimate photo, below), Thelma Houston (at right), Martha Wash and Maxine Nightingale -- to name a few, showing us their style, then and now.

And while reference is made to other big names ("To get from Aretha Franklin to Lil' Kim, you can't understand this without disco!"), we pretty much keep with the disco beat.

The funniest section, in fact, may be that involving The Village People (above) trying to convince us that their songwriters/
composers had no ability to handle double entendres. We always suspected these guys were on the dumb side, but, please!

We also learn that, for maybe the first time in modern music history, songs found themselves listed on the Billboard magazine chart due to their being played not on radio but in the clubs that were forming around the country. After that, of course, radio DJs joined in the celebration. When, as ever, the music industry -- just like the movie industry regarding any popular new idea -- tried to jump on the disco bandwagon, the music grew shoddier and shoddier. And when the nation's, maybe the world's, most famous disco club, Studio 54, came on the scene (with its paean to celebrity, drugs, and shutting "ordinary" people out) one day, nearly overnight it seemed, disco disappeared.

The movie finally evokes all of this -- plus a nod to Ecclesiastes ("There is a time to expand and a time to contract") -- as it combines history, sleaze, music, energy, dance and drugs. It's a lot of fun, a crock of shit, and above all a great nostalgia trip, and it opens this Friday, June 28, in eleven cities across the country.

Here in New York City, it plays at the Quad Cinema and in Los Angeles at Laemmle's NoHo 7. Look for it, as well, in San Francisco at the Landmark Opera Plaza Cinema, in Berkeley atthe Landmark Shattuck Cinemas, in Minneapolis at the Landmark Lagoon Cinema, in Seattle at the Landmark Varsity Theater, in Miami at the O Cinema, in Fort Lauderdale at the Cinema Paradiso. in  Palm Springs at the Camelot Theater, in Portland at the Clinton Street Theater and in Columbus at the Gateway Film Center.

Just in time for Gay Pride week, Joseph Mantegna's PTOWN DIARIES comes to DVD

For those who already know and love Provincetown, Massachusetts -- that tiny community on the tip of Cape Cod, unlike any other that TrustMovies is aware of -- this odd documentary will probably be a must-see. For those who want to learn something about one of America's earliest outposts for Native Americans, fisher-men, Portuguese immigrants, artists and finally the GLBT community, this film is probably as good a place an any to begin. It's chock full of past history, along with more-or-less present day activities (the release date on the DVD says 2009, but the film looks somewhat older than that), and filled with talking heads, most of them relatively interesting.

Narrated by Alan Cumming but as often as not using author and Ptown resident Michael Cunningham (The Hours, A Home at the End of the World) as our guide, with occasional remarks from the late Norman Mailer (a longtime Ptown resident and booster), the film was written and directed by Joseph Mantegna (not to be confused with actor Joe Mantegna) and seems to delight in being all over the place, almost all of the time. It hops from early history to present residents and back again, gets into the fights over the use of the area's very limited land resources between "land developers" and Ptown's villagers and artists, then goes back for more history, interspersed with scenes of artists at work and more often the GLBT community at play.

The film seems to have a divided purpose -- part serious documentary and part a commercial for GLBT tourism. We see and hear from a whole lot of residents and people of interest, including a bartender (the attractive, funny and seemingly intelligent blond, above) and a cute twinkie (below, left) who has come to the town to seek his fame and fortune. We follow the latter now and again, quite haphazardly, but he never manages to sustain much interest (from either the director or us in the audience).

Ptown has long been known for its art and artists, and some of the more fascinating observations include mention of the amazing light and clear, true colors that Provincetown offers artists. One of these, Anne Packard, below, has some very interesting things to say on the subject of practicing her art.

A section on the town as a refuge for families with gay parents is well done, and then we get an overlong lesbian strip-tease; the interplay and AIDS and politics in the community is worth our while, and then we watch gay men disco dancing for what seems like an unconscionable length of time. As I say, this is part tourism booster, so bear with us, folk!

Alcohol and over-imbibing have long gone hand in hand in Ptown, and one of the film's sharpest lines is told us by Mr Cumming, as he lists the many great writers the town has hosted over the decades, particularly back to the time of playwrights Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams and writers and journalists like Mailer and John Reed. As we see photographs now 60 to 80 years old of a famous old tavern in the town, our narrator observes, "Every one of those bar stools has had one of these famous men fall off it."

One of the most entertaining of the talking heads belongs to comic Lea DeLaria, above, whose few words are among the movie's funniest. Oddly, after all the partying and "fun" we've witnessed, the movie ends with a stern warning for young people to behave themselves and indulge in safe sex, please. Well, of course!

The film -- from Cinema Libre Studio and 89 minutes long -- is available now on DVD for sale, and perhaps, eventually, for rental or streaming. (I note that Netflix seems not to have it available. But maybe, with some prodding, they will.... )

The photos above are all from the movie itself, 

with the exception of the shot of Joseph Mantegna, 

which is by Andy Kropa, courtesy of Getty Images.

Tim Wolff's drag dress-up fest THE SONS OF TENNESSEE WILLIAMS opens in NY & LA

Watching the extremely retro documentary THE SONS OF TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, directed, edited, written and produced by Tim Wolff, it's hard not to wonder at the rather shockingly old-fashioned attitudes, interests, and behavior of the gay denizens of New Orleans and its environs, as they reminisce and ready themselves for a relatively recent Mardi Gras ball.

Granted, this is all about Mardi Gras, a time when letting loose and having fun is evidently paramount. (TrustMovies has never been to Mardi Gras or to carnival in Rio, so he can't claim to understand what all the fuss is about.) Still, Mr. Wolff's (the filmmaker is shown at left) concentration on dressing up in drag as the be-all and end-all of gay liberation seems a bit much. While the press materials hails this as a history of the earliest civil right movement for gays in the U.S.A. -- and time-wise this indeed appears to be true -- the interests of the men shown here seem to begin and end with dressing up in drag and getting away with it. This is certainly a part of gay liberation, for some, but making a whole movie around it is a tad circumscribed, no?

Still, within this framework, there is some interesting history and a little fun to be found. The older generation viewing the movie will learn once again (and the younger crowd perhaps for the first time) how closeted and fearful the lives of homosexuals were during the mid-20th Century. The movie keeps moving back and forth between then and now, and some of the archival footage is worth seeing.

We learn of one, Fernando Rios, murdered by a trio of gay bashers in 1959 -- who got off scot-free. (Those were the days! When something similar happened here in Jackson Heights in the 1990s, prison for at least one of the killers was in the cards.) In the early period of these state-chartered, public "drag balls" (begun a decade before the Stonewall uprising), the application of make-up for royalty (the king and queen, I mean) was done by a fellow who ran the local funeral parlor.  It wasn't the best make-up job, one fellow recalls, perhaps because the guy doing it wasn't used to having live people -- who actually moved now and then -- as his subjects.

Even the movie's title seems a bit of a stretch. Unless I missed it, there is no reference to playwright Williams in the film, though there is a mention toward the conclusion of Blanche DuBois. Other than a smattering of info about the police raids on gays, the coming of AIDS and its destruction, and a bit about Hurricane Katrina's effect on the balls, almost all of the talk and anecdotes center around the costumes (indeed, some of these are original and amazing. My personal favorite: The New York Cheese Cake!) and make-up -- though one fellow does reminisce about New Orleans D.A. and politician Harry Connick, who he explains was the first to actively court the gay vote (and actually made good on his promises to the gay community).

In all, the movie should appeal most to gays whose interests tend toward drag (and its history in the southern U.S.). The Sons of Tennessee Williams, from First Run Features, opens today, October 7, in New York City at the Quad Cinema and next Friday, October 14, in Los Angeles at Laemmle's Sunset 5.

The Crayton Robey/Mart Crowley MAKING THE BOYS surprises us in so many ways

Who'd have thought that a documentary about the origins and history of what is generally considered to be the grand-daddy, the "original" of all gay plays -- The Boys in the Band -- could and would stand-in for a (latter half of the 20th Century) history of gay America. And yet, somehow, against all odds, it does. Damn well, too. This is even odder, considering that the point is made during this fine documentary, by no less than Paul Rudnick, that no work of art should have to represent the Gay (or Black or Jewish, etc.) experience. Yet Mart Crowley's famously transgressive boulevard tragi-comedy has borne the burden of doing exactly that -- It's brilliant!" "It's trash!" "It's so negative!" "It's so real!" -- for the several decades since its debut.

Crayton Robey (shown at right), the gifted director of the new documentary MAKING THE BOYS, while telling well the story of how this play came to be in an era when homosexuality was just beginning to emerge from its love-that-dare-not-speak-its-name status, also tells a tale of gay life -- from then till now. By the end of this treasure of a film, you'll have lived through something much bigger than the play and its creation, fascinating though this is. If you're a senior citizen in particular, you'll have lived again gay life when the closet was pretty much the only option/venue of choice, then Stonewall and the emergent 60s, through the 70s (when the love that dare not speak its name seemed unable to close its mouth), the coming of AIDS and the ensuing huge losses, and the continuing, consistently up-and-down drive toward genuine equality.


Of course Crowley and his play are central here, and that's fine. The playwright's a great raconteur, and he leads us through the Hollywood period when times were a-changin', taking us to a private club where sexual preference did not seem to matter so much (except to certain people -- and Crowley names names). As someone who saw the original production of "Boys" while the play was in previews prior to its opening at Theatre Four, I was fascinated to learn the inside dope from the prime insider. And what a load of pungent memories Crowley -- shown holding up the wall at Manhattan's late Loew's Tower East, above, in his earlier years, and below, in  front of Stonewall in his latter days -- has to offer.

Over the years -- from its birth, in fact -- The Boys in the Band (that's the entire original cast shown in the photos that follow) has proven a kind of touchstone for attitudes by and about gays. One of the important services (and certainly the most interesting aspect) the movie provides, is the interviews about these attitudes that Robey conducts with literary figures (Edward Albee, Tony Kushner, Terrence McNally and the like), politicians and activists (Ed Koch and Larry Kramer), media figures (Michael Musto, Dan Savage), and even -- how I wish there were more of them! -- the younger set (Carson Kressley and Christian Siriano). Americans are generally dreadful so far as history is concerned (their own and that of others) and gay Americans seem no different.  Still, the twatty, self-involved and uncaring attitude toward gay history exhibited by Mr. Siriano may make you want to smack the kid. Mr. Albee's attitude, on the other hand, is something else entirely.

 

No fan of the play since before it was produced (it was Albee's own producer Richard Barr who first championed the "Boys"), this noted playwright appears to feel that we need to silence visions and versions of the gay experience that can be seen as negative. This is tantamount to censorship so far as I am concerned. Real equality means showing all our variations. I agree with Albee when he says we must be ever vigilant (something of which Siriano might take notice, just as German Jews of the 1930s might also have done). Youth imagines that what it knows is "normal"and "constant" because this is all it has ever known. The older you grow, the more history begins to impact, and the liberties we gays now enjoy were fought for hard and long and may still be lost -- more easily and quickly than some of us seem to think.

 

In any case, the film will have you arguing with whomever you're watching it with (maybe even with yourself), as the speakers and their attitudes entertain and provoke. Along the way you 'll lean what part the late restaurateur Elaine played in the filmed version of the play (as well as how director William Friedkin ended up directing it); why casting the roles proved so difficult (agents wouldn't submit their clients for gay roles); how the set design was created; and perhaps most moving of all, what happened to those original cast members (out of nine, two remain alive and one is missing-in-action). For those of a certain age and persuasion, the film is simply unmissable, though I would hope that younger, perhaps ever straighter film fans might give it a whirl. To call the film an "education" is to put it mildly.    

 

Making the Boys, from 4th Row Films and First Run Features, opens this Friday, March 11, in New York City at the Quad Cinema -- with many more playdates to follow. Click here to see where the film has been and where it will be subsequently playing.

Note: TrustMovies had the longest and probably the most enjoyable interview he's yet spent with a filmmaker and his subject when he met with Robey and Crowley earlier this week. Once he's had time to transcribe and edit, he'll post it.  (TM finally managed this -- in time for the DVD issue.  The "interview" post can be found here.)

Davis/Heilbroner's STONEWALL UPRISING tracks a seminal event in gay history

The Stonewall story stands tall in gay history (American gay history, at least). At times it almost seems like our own Nativity tale, or maybe a combination of our Crucifixion/
Resurrection. And that's just for Christian mythology addicts. What Muslim gays might make of it, I have no idea. And Jewish gays? Well, it certainly ain't Masada. In STONEWALL UPRISING, the somewhat circuitous new documentary by Kate Davis and David Heilbroner, this event gets the best presentation of how and why Stonewall happened that TrustMovies has yet seen.

Based on David Carter's book Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution, the film merges talking-head interviews with archival footage, news clips with what I believe may be re-enactments, and even adds a helpful graphic depiction of how a horde of community protesters were able to outmaneuver the police on that fateful night.  If you've ever wanted to know more about Stonewall, here's your guide.  (The filmmakers tell us in a preface note that very few photographs were taken during this fateful night, hence their use of just about everything else to bring their story together visually.)

Other documentaries over the years have covered this event, but not, I think, in the depth or detail we see here.  And if other portions of the documentary are a bit flabby, this singular achievement makes up for that.  Some of the interviews here are quite good, but others seem repetitive, particularly after other documentaries -- Before Stonewall, for instance -- that we've previously seen.   There is also a circularity to the construction (making it occasionally seem as if we've been there/done that) plus a rather odd timeline (in its history of gays in America, the film does not introduce The Mattachine Society until halfway through.)

But if the overall impression sometimes runs to the "gray and same," the individual details are often quite something. The masquerading law that made it a crime to "dress up" (see photo at right), a pharmaco-
logical example of "waterboarding" used on gays during their enforced hospital stays of the 1950s, and the fact that, back in those days, there was no "coming out" because, as one interviewee tells us, literally everyone was "in" that very large closet.  Back then, at best homosex-
uality was a sickness, at worst a crime.  And just why were those police radios cut off on the night of the raid? (The film's real coup is getting the NY cop who led the actual raid to talk about it now).

Davis (shown above, right) and Heilbroner (above left), who last year gave us Waiting for Armageddon, do a good job of showing us how the patrons of the Stonewall Inn -- a gay bar owned by the Mafia who evidently paid off the police to allow it to remain open (the Mafia appears to be the only organization back then with the balls, savvy and Capitalistic entrepreneurship to know how to fully take advantage of a downtrodden minority) -- instead of peacefully submitting to arrest and detainment, rose up on the night of June 28, 1969, when the police instituted yet another raid on the bar.  Suddenly, an anger that would pre-date Network's "I'm mad as hell and I'm not gonna take it anymore" took hold, and once word of the standoff against the police reached the surrounding neighbor-
hood, hundreds of people appeared to join in the fray, making history -- as well as a lot of noise and partying -- in the process.

What the documentary duo make clear in their film is how the community, as much as the bar patrons, helped this sudden, small event turn into the beginning of a monumental change in attitude -- of gays themselves, and of American toward them.  (Not that there isn't still a long way to go.) It also insists on the use of the term "uprising," rather than "riot," to describe what happened that night.  The filmmakers' point -- a good one, I believe -- is that Stonewall was more about the striving for social justice and equality than for anything else.

After playing at a couple of recent festivals, Stonewall Uprising, from First Run Features, makes its theatrical debut Wednesday, June 16, at Film Forum in New York City, after which it will wend its way nationwide.  To see the currently scheduled dates, cities and theaters, simply click here.  The filmmakers themselves, along with author David Carter, NYC's own Christine Quinn, and some of the subjects from the film will all appear in person at Film Forum at various times during the run.  To learn who and when, click here and scroll down.