Cast * Synopsis * Interesting Facts * Tommy O'Haver * Production Photos * Brad Rowe Interview
Cast * Synopsis * Interesting Facts * Tommy O'Haver * Production Photos * Brad Rowe Interview
Here
is an openly gay movie, with a clearly gay sensitivity, that doesn't waste
its energy trying to deliver any big message. Still, because of its unusual
sincerity and universal theme of one-sided love, it is likely to entertain
and challenge those unfamiliar with the gay community -and hit very close
to home for those who are part of it. It makes one feel less alone!
Directed
by: Tommy O'Haver
Written by: Tommy O'Haver
Music by: Alan Ari Lazar
Released on: July 24, 1998
Running Time: 92 minutes
Box-Office: $2.02 million in the U.S.
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Billy... Sean Hayes
Gabriel... Brad Rowe
Perry... Richard Ganoung
Georgiana... Meredith Scott Lynn
Whitey... Matthew Ashford
Fernando... Armando Valdes-Kennedy
Rex Webster... Paul Bartel
Gundy... Carmine Giovinazzo
Holly... Holly Woodlawn
Billy, an unemployed, unlucky-in-love Los Angeles gay photographer,
develops a crush on a delicately handsome, sexually ambiguous waiter-turned-model
named Gabriel, who may or may not be gay.
This film is based
on a 5-minute short film called Catalina from director and writer
Tommy O'Haver.
The film borrows
many story and stylistic elements from 1950s "women's movies," then adds
ironic winks here and there. Brad Rowe's character was inspired from "the
Montgomery Clift character," Tommy O'Haver waxes with adoration, "you're
never quite sure what's going on with him."
"On the page, I
was a little bit scared that Billy might come off as little annoying, because
he is a little self-loathing," O'Haver explains. "But because Sean is so
bright and cheery, but at the same time being a little neurotic and paranoid,
I think it worked perfectly."
When
Billy recounts his youth in a voice-over illustrated with a series of Polaroid
pictures as the film opens, Tommy O'Haver admitted it was "pretty autobiographical."
He grew up in very heterosexual Indiana and says a story Billy tells in
the movie's most unguarded moment -- about being excluded from a friend's
birthday party after saying he liked to look at naked men -- is from his
own childhood. "I remember that was the first time I really said
anything to anybody (about being gay). I must have been about 8 or 9 years
old." After that, the director says, he completely repressed his
feelings. "It wasn't until college when I started to think maybe it's about
time I slept with men," he laughs. He didn't come out to his parents
for years after that, and says "they're still not all the way there. I
was talking to my mom today because it's her birthday, and I was saying
that I was being out in these interviews," he recounts. "And she goes (affecting
a motherly, nasal tone), 'Well that doesn't mean you have to be a spokesperson
for all gay people.'"
To enhance the
connection with the films that inspired him, O'Haver decided to shot "Billy"
in Cinemascope -- extremely unusual for an independent film -- after a
meeting with his cinematographer two years before the movie started filming.
"He had come out to L.A. from North Carolina to pick up this Panavision
camera with these anamorphic lenses. I went over to his house to look at
the camera, and I knew right away that the movie was going to be shot on
that camera. Because I like a good Cinemascope movie. A movie should be
a movie, you know?"
In part because
of these fantasy sequences, this film has also been likened to Jeffrey,
thea 1995 sleeper comedy, about a gay New Yorker abstaining from sex for
fear of AIDS, that features several zany fantasy moments. But O'Haver bristles
a little at the comparison. "Well, Jeffrey
does have a good campy aesthetic to it," he says. "But I hope not everyone
says that." What would O'Haver prefer to compare the film to then?
"I would say it's 'The Heiress' meets 'Beyond the Valley of the Dolls,'"
he says with an implied rimshot.
Though Jennifer
Lopez was a minor star back in 1998, O'Haver was already convinced that
she was poised to become the next femme de jour of the gay community. "She's...the
new Sharon Stone. I'm in love with her after Out of Sight""
Actor, writer,
director and gay icon Paul Bartel (would-be mentor Rex Webster) unfortunately
passed away from liver cancer a couple of years after Screen Kiss.
Spliced throughout
the movie are several numbers by Mr. Dan, a notable drag artist and promoter
from L.A.
Holly Woodlawn
has a cameo as the party hostess -though she is better remembered for Lou
Reed's classic "Take a Walk on the Wild Side" which honored her with the
line: "Holly came from Miami F-L-A"!
The movie grabbed
the attention of critics and was nominated for several Awards:
Writer-director
Tommy O’Haver landed his first job on FREDDIE'S DEAD: THE FINAL NIGHTMARE.
"They really liked me because I was so fresh from the Midwest, and I showed
up in a suit for my interview," he recalls. Unhappy with the crazy production
schedule and the need to be constantly behind the wheel of his car, he
got a job in the mailroom at New Line, and got into the film program at
USC.
While there he wrote and directed a number of shorts which proved very popular on the festival circuit. "When I started at USC I didn't believe in 'Write what you know,'" says O'Haver. "The first couple of super-8s I did were very comic and exaggerated, and then I did a little coming-out film which really cut very deep and exposed a lot of things. It felt so good and everybody loved it so much that I thought, 'Maybe I should explore this a little more,' actually turning inside and pulling that stuff out rather than hiding myself behind comic conceits."
The most striking of those early shorts was HEDI AND I..., a black-and-white Warholian single take of O'Haver and a lover he had recently re-connected with after a long absence sitting listlessly in a room. "I was really scared when I first showed it -- I couldn't believe I was letting people know all this stuff!"
CATALINA, the short that became BILLY'S HOLLYWOOD SCREEN KISS, was also based on the filmmaker's experience. "That short happened one night when I was at Catalina," says O'Haver. "I had another idea for a film that I wanted to do for my school project, but I said, 'I want to see what happens tonight -- maybe I can make a short of it.' Of course in the short I created a little bit of a fantasy and built it up to be bigger than it was, but it was something that happened that night."
Shot in black-and-white without synch sound, the 5-minute film was shown at the 1994 New York Film Festival. "After CATALINA I pulled back a little," O'Haver explains, "still staying true to myself and drawing from experience, but also adding a lot more to make it more of a fantasy."
The result was TWO, a highly-stylized 20-minute color film that starts
with three friends talking around a pool table and ends with an orgy. The
film is constructed as a series of long single takes, and the climax, which
incorporates a musical dream sequence, is a montage of quick shots. When
TWO was shown at the Sundance Film Festival, festival programmer John Cooper
sent a tape to David Moseley, who would eventually produce BILLY'S HOLLYWOOD
SCREEN KISS. This feature is the stylistic synthesis of all the shorts
that preceded it, was shown at Sundance in 1998, O'Haver quickly found
himself a hot property in Hollywood.
By Tommy O'Haver!
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Our first day of shooting was on the beach.
We doubled Leo Carrilo State Beach for Catalina - it would have been too expensive to send everybody across the sea to the small island. |
| First A.C. Mark Connelly loads a filter into our Super PSR camera.
People said we were crazy for shooting an independent film on this giant old thing - and they were probably right. |
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Niles Jensen aka "Faberge" aka "Dierdre" sure managed to turn a few heads on the beach that first day. |
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We used the exterior of the Spanish Kitchen Studios in downtown L.A. for our part loft. Luckily, they didn't have any neighbors, so we could shoot long into the night. |
| Inside the studio, our production designer Franco Giacomo-Carbone and his crew created a wild environment from scratch. Here are stars Sean P. Hayes (Billy) and Brad Rowe (Gabriel) acting against one of my favorite backdrops... |
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...afterwards, we painted the walls back to white and slapped up a few flats to make an art gallery. |
| Paul Bartel and Matthew Ashford, posing as "Rex Webster" and houseboy "Whitey". They did a great job of creating a funny but somewhat real relationship between the two characters. |
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Like any production, there was a lot of waiting around on the set.
And some of us had to do it in our underwear.
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| The performance artists strike a pose. I had worked with Kif Scholl and Shanti Reinhardt before at NOTE, a local theater company. So when I asked them to come up with some performance art, I knew they'd create something appropriately outrageous. |
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SPLICEDwire interviewed Brad Rowe on July 16,
1998 at the Prescott Hotel in San Francisco
It's
late afternoon, but Brad Rowe is still a little beat from a late night
on San Francisco's gay nightclub circuit.
One of the stars of "Billy's Hollywood Screen Kiss," a mock melodrama about a shy, gay photographer's frustrating crush on a sexually ambiguous friend, Rowe spent last night club hopping with the movie's writer-director Tommy O'Haver.
"We went to some dumb straight clubs," a groggy O'Haver says as he nurses a high-octane latte, "then we dragged him to Esta Noche, because I wanted to look at the boys at Esta Noche."
Smoothly handsome (he looks a bit like another hunky actor named Brad), and extremely straight, Rowe has gotten used to the gay scene since taking the part as the is-he-or-isn't-he object of Billy's affection in this comedy that harks of a Doris Day romance, with a gay guy in the Day role.
Sitting in a board room at the Prescott Hotel on Post Street, kicking his feet up in a deep leather chair like it was lawn furniture, Rowe says their night out was pretty slow.
Did anyone hit on him?
"No, not really. There were only about 15 people there. We were just hanging out talking. No news to report," he winks.
Rowe came into acting by way of a mail room job at United Talent Agency, a job he got after returning from two years in Spain, and playing Gabriel in "Billy's Hollywood Screen Kiss" is his first major movie role (he's been in two other films).
The Milwaukee native, looking conspicuously stylish for a straight guy, in a silk avocado shirt and chinos, says he's been mistaken for gay quite a bit over the years.
"I went through the whole sort of getting over being freaked out by that while waiting tables at school and then working with the Republican Party in Washington. There were a lot of those kinds of characters there."
What kinds of characters?
"Guys who would hit on me," he says without a hint of irony.
Republicans? You got all the closeted people coming after you, was that it?
"Exactly. While they're writing policy to persecute homosexuals."
Rowe acknowledged in our conversation, however, that playing Gabriel
in this film has made him a little cautious again since the movie is getting
a lot of exposure.
SPLICED: With the movie coming out, do you have any new worries about guys coming on to you or women thinking you're gay?
Rowe: I have to admit that I did have some reservations about going out dancing a couple weeks ago. My roommates and a couple of girlfriends were gonna go out dancing in West Hollywood at a gay club, and I decided "Guys, I can't do it." Because my poster is going to be plastered all over the bar, and I just...no way. I didn't go.
So it did actually prevent me from doing something I would have done otherwise. But for the most part I'm cool with it.
SPLICED: Have you ever found yourself in a position like Gabriel, in awkward friendship with somebody who has a crush on you, but you don't return the feelings?
Rowe: I had a very "Billy"-esque experience when I was living in Spain the first time. It was the second semester I was studying over there and I had this guy who had this total crush on me. Everywhere we went -- I had a girlfriend while I was over there -- he would come with us. He always wanted to be there, and we so many of these conversations like Billy and Gabriel. He hadn't outed himself, but he was definitely interested in guys. I hope he did (come out) eventually.
SPLICED: You ever been on the other side of it? Unrequitedly in love?
Rowe: Yeah, yeah. There was this girl in college, at the University of Wisconsin. We were friends, I walked her home from parties all the time, and we would hang out, but she never even so much as invited me up to the door when I would walk her home. It was just the most bizarre thing. I had a revelation rather recently that perhaps she wasn't interested in guys.
(Director Tommy O'Haver, who has been sitting by sipping his latte, can't let this go by without comment and pipes up.)
O'Haver: Oh, come on!
Rowe: I'm serious!
O'Haver: What if she just didn't want to have sex with you? What if you were the one guy she wasn't attracted to?
Rowe: That's probably the case, too. (Laughing.)
O'Haver: What if she hated dishwater blondes?
Rowe: That's could be. Maybe she just didn't like the fact that I'm just a dork.
O'Haver: ...just a stud.
SPLICED: Or maybe you're like me and you just couldn't take a hint.
(Both laugh at this, but O'Haver laughs harder.)
SPLICED: Did you do any sort of research for the role? I mean, I don't know what it would have been, but...
Rowe: No I didn't, and the reason I didn't was because I didn't want the character to play like he was gay in any way. He had to be straight so the end of the film would still be in question. His ambiguity is the driving force that keeps the character of Billy pushing to try and figure out this enigma through the whole films.
SPLICED: When did you become an actor? You said you had traveled in Spain and all that.
Rowe: I moved to L.A. about three and a half years ago, and I was working at United Talent Agency, working in the script library and in the mail room, and they helped me out. I was taking acting classes and they started sending me out on auditions, which I was absolutely miserable at, at first. But eventually I got the hang of it.
SPLICED: What was your first paid acting job?
Rowe: Oh, God. I did an Internet sci-fi adventure show called "Eon 4." I played a galaxy-jumping cultural anthropologist...with an edge. (Laughs.)
SPLICED: I'm sure you get comparisons to Brad Pitt all the time. Do you get tired of that?
Rowe: (Deadpan.) Actually, it's usually Tom Arnold. Yeah, I get that quite often. It's cool. He's a great actor and I'd like to follow in his footsteps of success.
SPLICED: Have you ever thought about going to the post office and filing a change of address form for him, so all his scripts start coming to your house?
Rowe: Oh, yeah. I'll take his projects. Nine million? Yeah, all right.
SPLICED: Who would you kill to work with?
(O'Haver, who is readying a big screen version of the "Archie" comics, jumps in again.)
O'Haver: Say me.
Rowe: Tommy O'Haver! Again.
SPLICED: You could play Archie. Color your hair.
Rowe: I would love to play Archie. And have Jennifer Lopez play Veronica. And Pamela Anderson could play Betty!
(That settles it. He's definitely straight.)
