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David Poland

By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

Review – Out Rage

Kirby Dick’s latest doc lands in Tribeca today or tomorrow. I didn’t really intend to be writing about it until after sitting down with him in a couple of weeks. But particularly striking was a Brian Brooks “First Look” at the film in indieWIRE that pretty much “outed” every single thing the film has to offer. It’s here… but I really wouldn’t read it if you intend to see the film.
The film is, not unlike Dick’s last film, This Film Is Not Yet Rated, is very well made and serves effectively as a primer to the controversy. But it fails to dig much deeper… which for me, is a shocking thing from Kirby Dick, whose films Sick: The Life & Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist and Twist of Faith dug deep, deeper, and deepest.
The basic set-up starts with Larry Craig and the internet journalist (Michael Rogers) who pushed for the details behind that story which led, in part, to Craig’s resignation. There are a lot of gay Congressmen in the closet… there are a lot of gay staffers in both parties in the closet… he is working on the stories of a number of high profile names who he will eventually out…
So what do you expect from this film? A bunch of surprising names being outed… or a few… or a single one.
And you don’t get any.
Now, is that what the film needed to be… and outing fest? Of course not. A film like this has many roads it can take and the filmmaker makes that call. But what we get is basically a dozen public figures who have already been outed, most of whom are either still in office and out of the closet or have given up their public lives. By the film’s end, there are two public figures in focus who have been pretty much outed, but who are still firmly maintaining their place in the closet.
Great. But a little ho-hum.
And it didn’t help that the distributor made a big deal out of not showing the film earlier because it was soooo controversial. BZZT! It’s controversial if you have never read The Village Voice. I mean, even Fox News addressed the question of whether Charlie Crist is a closet case.
My personal take was that what this 90 minute film is could and should have been done in 60 minutes. As I wrote, it is very well made, the interviews are good and the cinematography/visual direction in this film is as beautiful as you’ll see in any talking heads doc. But to make this a 90 minute film, either the tone had to be much tougher – many of the interview subjects walk away without answering the toughest questions and other interviews, even given the fact that many people would never agree to be interviewed for this and I am not demanding that Kirby go all Michael Moore on them, just weren’t there as follow-ups to some of the questions posed by the film – OR there needed to be some new blood in the water OR there needed to be some of the long history of outing and how that gossip sheet history became so much more political. The film does do a nice job of explaining the idea of why political figures in the closet can be so much worse than, say, celebrities. But I would argue that the kind of outing that some of the people in this film were doing as the AIDS crisis grew, from actors to guys like David Geffen, who was still publicly straight in the early 80s, became more and more serious and less frivolous and that it would not lessen the political argument to have that included in this film.
Nonetheless… as a history of the outing and non-outing of closeted politicians in the last 20 years, the film delivers. Like I said, I might have liked a slightly broader historical perspective or a shorter film, but still, in this way it is effective. But it is not a game changer or a next step in any way. The film even pulls its punches a bit when it doesn’t acknowledge that a major factor in Charlie Crist not getting the Republican VP nod was that his outing was close enough to confirm that his White House ambitions, no matter what the film says, are dead.
And if there is one thing that I found truly shocking in the film and was truly disappointed in the filmmakers for not pursuing more aggressively, it was a segment of Larry King Live, with guest Bill Maher, which the film shows was edited from the live broadcast to the reruns to remove his outing of a Republican whose homosexuality is, as Maher explains beforehand, an open secret in Washington. They interview Maher… but don’t discuss the edit. There is no indication that CNN refused an interview about it. There is… nothing more.
Now, Maher, in that interview segment, seems to have explained the situation, and perhaps, something about Outrage. He says that he doesn’t want to be the first person to publicly out someone because of all the legal issues that raises. I’m sure CNN felt the same way. And I guess that Kirby and Magnolia Pictures also felt that way because there isn’t anything here for anyone to potentially sue over…. at least nothing I can see.
Good movie… not explosive.
Finally… on a more personal note… I found myself reflecting quite a bit during the first 30 minutes or so of the film, as the discussion of the politics of outing were discussed by a wide variety of people. It was much the same discussion I have about the idea of writing about the work of other journalists. Like closeted politicians, journalists work behind a veil of a certain kind of invulnerabilty… journalists don’t want to “out” people and journalists don’t really want to be seen “outing” bad work by other journalists. In the gay situation, the question is, “What is the news value of exposing someone’s personal life.” In journalism, it’s more like Fight Club… you just don’t talk about other members of the club to the public. But I have always felt there was a major hypocrisy in doing a job in which one publicly analyzes and often attacks the jobs that others are doing while being free from public scrutiny of the way in which you are doing that analysis. And as gay politicians in the closet do bad things to keep from being scrutinized, so do journalists whose standards are below the journalistic high bar.
I have made many enemies, known and unknown, by “outing” bad journalism. And most of the time, the public attacks in response have not been factual, but personal or wild in response… which I see as an affirmation of the work that I did to cause that response. There is no question that the closeted politicians who have worked against gay causes have literally been responsible for the death of thousands or hundreds of thousands, if not millions of gay men… both by maintaining the closet and by their actual votes in Congress and efforts within other institutions. Bad journalism or gossip posing as journalists will not literally kill anyone. But I do believe that the ongoing lowering and readjustment of standards, while not directly responsible for a changing media landscape, changes the map that will eventual settle into being the standard as things shake out. In other words, an AP (as an example) entertainment story may be limited to 500 words, but those 500 words don’t have to be shallow or gossipy or inaccurate because another 500 words will turn up in a few hours.
Standards matter. Truth or the very best effort to find truth is the first standard. This is how things get better… whatever medium you work in… however serious or silly your profession is.

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One Response to “Review – Out Rage”

  1. Jeffrey Boam's Doctor says:

    I agree DP. When I read about Dick’s film the advance material hinted that the film would ‘out’ people. It’s a tease that may backfire on them, thinking we’ll get them in with the hook and they’ll leave admiring the film anyway. That’s like the hot girl who says she loves swallowing hotdogs and would you like to see her etchings.. and then proceeds to show you bad art.
    More importantly, who will be the first hotblogger outed.

The Hot Blog

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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