My home is being tented for termites today… I’m not looking forward to it… but the glory of wi-fi will allow the party to keep going….
Have you read David Thomson on the gay subtext of some very macho movies?
“On Rebel Without a Cause, I can actually point to several key figures on that film who had had some gay experience…”
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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?
So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.
And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.
There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.
I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.
So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.
But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”
My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher
“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.
~ David Simon
Thomson has been obsessing over this for years. Back when he wrote “Suspects,” his 1985 collection of interconnected stories about what happened to famous movie characters after their movies ended, Thomson had Rick and Louis of “Casablanca” living together as… well, longtime companions. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, you understand.
some of these guys think theres gays and gay subtext in every film. from spongebob to ben hur to xxx ro anything that starred james dean. u always see them taking the real good actors. the deans, the brandos, the cruises, the pitts. u never see them say “jack black is in gay themed movies”. “phillip seymour hoffman is gay in everything.”
It is a really tired subject that Thompson has been harping on for years. I don’t think anyone but hard core homosexuals care that much.
I can’t email you my “guess” about the King of Jerusalem but maybe it will establish once and for all that I am too legit too quit when I TELL you that it is Ed Norton. Technically- King Baldwin.
Anything else you need to know, I know it.
I am Spam Dooley and I feed my people.
You know come to think of it I think that Nathan Lane, Robin Williams, and Hank Anzaria’s characters in Bird Cage might have been gay. There were some very subtle clues as I recall.
I read that piece and thought not only was it a stretch, but more importantly. What the hell’s the point?
Spam, it’s not really that much of a mystery. Edward Norton is listed in the credits of KINGDOM OF HEAVEN at IMDB.com and other sites.
Too bad the Spammer can’t read. How’s it feel Mr Know it All?
Shouldn’t we be surprised that Top Gun wasn’t mentioned?
I read through it, and like pretty much everyone else here I was like, “So?”
It seems a bit of a stretch to include The Godfather and Raging Bull…
The first “Fisting your mother” comment on the Hot
Blog. Wow. It looks like, our little blog, has
grown up into a foul mouth asshole! Shenanigans
upon you Dooley! SHENANIGANS!
so the godfather is gay because its about loyalty and love and family? pretty big stretch there. a nice huge leap
this seams like a serious stretch. U Americans newer stops amazing me. why are you commenting on this crap ? Ignore this kind of written garbage Dave. it’s the only way. from a Dane by the way
Not to burst your Euro bubble, jesper, but the article is a British one. Old Europe. How the mighty have fallen.
Wow. So bringing up gay subtext means old world has
fallen off? Oy vey.
i wish some people would actually read the article and stuff before they go america bashing
I wouldn’t have guessed that Thomson has written about this before, since the tone of the piece is not only fantastically naive (especially coming from someone who’s written about film for so long), it also has a rather tentative, pondering aspect, as if he’s thinking out loud about something for the first time, isn’t sure what it is yet, and so is grasping wildly at the first random straws that pop into his view (citing “Raging Bull” and “The Godfather” is so absurd that it merely reinforces the piece’s stream-of-consciousness quality). Armond White is commonly guilty of this kind of thing too, although his obsessions are race and class, which somehow enables him to ennoble the most preposterous tripe, while in turn denigrate movies whose intentions are miles away from what he chooses to read into them (his unforgivably spoiler-ridden review of “Unbreakable” is a prime example of this, and one senses it had little more to do with a vivid loathing he holds for Samuel L. Jackson, an actor White praised before he became successful; the attacks seem so personal that I think Jackson must have snubbed him at a party or something, Spike Lee comes in for much the same treatment for what are known to be similar reasons). Even when White likes a movie that’s actually worthy, it’s usually for incomprehensible reasons (if Steven Spielberg has read any of White’s oddball paeans to his work, the director is probably gobsmacked by how little White actually understands it).
If Thomson is really serious about this, or had really thought about it in any depth, it seems to me that there’s much more available subtext for his already dubious thesis in any of Michael Cimino’s movies, particularly “Thunderbolt and Lightfoot” (the rumor a few years ago that Cimino had undergone surgery to become a woman was amusing on numerous levels, not least of them being that I don’t know if there’s been a more overtly, indeed gleefully, misogynistic mainstream director in the history of American film).