The closest she came was with an adaptation of Ingrid Jungermann’s web series F to 7th, a Curb Your Enthusiasm-style lesbian comedy that “talks about queer culture from the inside and makes fun of it.” Showtime ordered a script, but she says the project never moved forward. “I’m getting the top meetings with the head of Showtime, the head of Netflix, the head of HBO,” she says. “I love Transparent and that’s a great show with queer characters, for sure, but there should be 10 of them now,” she says.īabbit has tried to get three different queer-oriented series off the ground over the past five years.
“We couldn’t even get the money to go through preproduction,” he says.Īnd though TV generally has a reputation for being riskier and more creator-friendly than film, Babbit-who helmed episodes of The L Word and Looking, among a lengthy list of shows-believes television is also going backwards. Hittman understands their response to some extent-it’s “their job protect their clients”-but she also believes “there’s still a lot of taboos around male nudity and male sexuality that exist in film.”Īs a trans Native American woman, Sydney Freeland was told that her 2014 feature Drunktown’s Finest was a “niche of a niche.” She loosely based the concept on her own experience living on a Navajo reservation in New Mexico, but many financiers claimed “there isn’t a market for this, people don’t want to see this, people aren’t interested in this, and so on and so forth.” Ahn, one of the most lauded breakouts of 2016’s Sundance Film Festival, faced similar remarks, which sent him to Kickstarter for his directorial debut about a closeted man in a small Korean-American community. But I think people are a lot more protective of young talent, and I think that there are still stigmas around what kind of roles people should and shouldn’t play.” British actor Harris Dickinson, who stars in Beach Rats, had to ask his representation to back down when they “pushed back very hard against the nudity and the content” of the story. “It was a little concerning that that was what people were reacting to,” she says, “because I thought the film had a lot more depth than that.
Companies would say, “We just did a gay film last year and it didn’t do well.” He recalls thinking, “Would someone say we did a straight film last year and it didn’t do well?” Justin Kelly had a “heinous realization” to that effect during the first financing meetings for his 2015 film I Am Michael, starring James Franco as a gay man who becomes an anti-gay Christian pastor. LGBT movies are still too often pigeonholed as “niche” entertainment. are still intimidated by the bottom line and worried that people don’t want to watch queer stories when that lesson has been, I thought, learned time and time again.” “It’s sad that the Hollywood corporate machine, which is very much queer as far GLBT working in the industry. Jamie Babbit, who put herself on the map in 1999 with But I’m a Cheerleader, thought the industry would change when Brokeback Mountain came out in 2005-but she too still runs into the same roadblocks that persisted in the 90s. It’s a reminder that it’s not impossible, that I’m wrong to some extent.” “I need the visibility as much as anyone who’s starting or beginning, and as much as the audience.
“I’m encouraged by anyone who manages to make a film with LGBTQ content that furthers the visibility,” he says of movies like Moonlight and this year’s Call Me by Your Name, which is already generating awards buzz. Yet that space comes with its own complications, as Moonlight director Barry Jenkins has discussed at length.įor someone like Love Is Strange director Ira Sachs, who’s been in the business for more than 25 years, it can feel “next to impossible” to make LGBTQ films. It’s what made it possible for Moonlight-a film about a queer person of color-to win best picture at the Oscars. The indie realm has become our primary source for more diversity on screen. GLAAD’s fifth annual Hollywood report card confirms that the gay community is still dramatically underrepresented in mainstream movies: just 23 of the 125 films released by studios in 2016 featured LGBTQ characters, and 10 of the 23 gave them less than a minute of screen time. “I watched Alien: Covenant and there’s a gay couple in it, and I had no idea,” Spa Night director Andrew Ahn tells Vanity Fair, laughing. Unfortunately, their “coming out” scenes have mostly been lost in translation. Recent films like Beauty and the Beast and Power Rangers have “broken ground” or “made history”-according to these headlines, anyway-as major Hollywood releases featuring openly queer characters.
Hollywood is having an “exclusively gay moment”-a phrase inadvertently coined by director Bill Condon this winter and overblown by media attention.