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The film opens
in a sunny Hollywood office as articulate producer Jeffery
(Campbell Scott) counsels screenwriter Robert (Peter Sarsgaard) about
his scripts, particularly “The Dying Gaul,” a symbolic title literally based
on an Italian sculpture, and metaphorical for dying with AIDS. They toss
around some famous movies: Tootsie (mentioned in my DADT
book in conjunction with the William and Mary “tribunals”) in which Jeffrey
claims that the protagonist pretended to be a woman in order to discover his
manhood – so that was all right; and Philadelphia, where gay male
AIDS victims are shown as hated. Jeffrey asks Robert whom he would like as a
director, and Robert suggests Gus Van Sant. Spike Lee also gets
mentioned as a director who figured out how to get the market to recognize
his ideas. Jeffrey says that audiences will not go to movies that present gay
men sympathetically. So he asks Robert to change the AIDS victim to a
woman—after all, AIDS is increasing rapidly with heterosexual
transmission—and offers a million dollars. After some visual wrangling.
Robert agrees.
Now at
this point the content of the embedded screenplay matters. Apparently it is
basically autobiographical, and much of it deals with Robert’s loss of his
own love Malcolm to AIDS. There are flashbacks, and the possibility that the
script is self-incriminating; Robert may have given him a dose of potassium
chloride (used in executions by injection) to perform a mercy killing, after
graphic brain surgery for CNS mycobacterial infection.
Then the
fun in this Hitchcockian daylight film noir begins.
It seems as thought there are plenty of hidden motives to go around
in the all-way love triangle that naturally follows. Jeffrey is bisexual, and
needs Robert (who remained negative) for diversion. There are some short
scenes of mansex with hairy chested men. But then
Jeffrey’s wife Elaine (Patricia Clarkson) gets into the act. Oh, yes, they
have kids. She inveigles Robert into chatrooms and teases him with
blurbs that apparently come from his screenplay. Here is a case, then, of
layering, in which a story that someone has written is used against the
person, as it starts to come true.
Now, in my
own work, I could never “change” a homosexual character to heterosexual just
to please an investor. Instead, I like the idea of framing a homosexual’s
story by showing the effect of a homosexual character on heterosexuals in his
life, and then show the heterosexuals’ own genuine relationships.
Sunset
Boulevard (1950,
Paramount, dir. Billy Wilder, wr. Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder) is
the quintessential movie about screenwriting (until “The Dying Gaul” in
2005). The plot sounds corny by today’s standards. A failing screenwriter Joe
Gillis (William Holden) is running from car repo men when he winds up in the
mansion of former star Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson), who first wants her
pet monkey buried. She contracts him to write a screenplay (Salome, and then
some) to get her career going again. He moves in, with this typewriter. Today
people can circulate scripts on the Internet, but this story starts with the
presumption that screenwriting is a profession. She winds up possessing him,
and he winds up dead face down in a pool, telling his story as a narrator and
a ghost. In delicious black and white. William Holden looks very manly in
this film at 32, and is allowed to display a very hairy chest.
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