A moment with Elizabeth Taylor #6
August 2012
40 posts
Doing Lines: A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)
It should hardly be any effort to watch this scene enough times to memorise the dialogue (transcripted below) since Marlon Brando performs the entire thing in a wife beater and a bad mood:
Outrageous(ly bad) fortune
FORTUNE AND MEN’S EYES
Canada, 1971
Director: Harvey Hart, Jules Schwerin
Stars: Wendell Burton, Michael Greer, Zooey Hall
Tom of Finland meets “Banana Splits” in the completely stupid Fortune and Men’s Eyes.
Doe-eyed hottie Smitty (Wendell Burton) gets six months in the Canadian clink for using pot. Smitty’s prison life initially seems much like a boys boarding school – roughhousing high jinx, buddies, power plays, and the lurking suggestion of male-male sex. He’s shocked to find, then, that gang raping is common, and is only preventable by being another powerful inmate’s exclusive bitch. Smitty reluctantly chooses to marry up with Rocky (Zooey Hall) who expects him to bend over and put out whenever he’s asked, and, when he’s not busy with that, make Rocky’s bed and fetch him hot drinks.
Stand By (Me): River Phoenix returning to the screen
Eighteen years after the death of River Phoenix, Dutch director George Sluizer has announced that he will finish Dark Blood, the 1993 film that Phoenix was shooting when he died of a heart attack outside the Viper Room in Los Angeles on Halloween night, aged 23.
After Phoenix’s death, Sluizer took the Dark Blood footage and kept it hidden, fearing - he says - that it would be destroyed. The director now plans to ask Phoenix’s brother Joaquim to supply voiceovers needed for a final cut of Dark Blood that may be ready for release next year.
“The voices of both brothers are very much alike,” the director, who has stayed in touch with the Phoenix family, told The Hollywood Reporter.
In Dark Blood, Phoenix plays a hermit living in the desert on a nuclear testing site as he waits for the end of the world. When a Hollywood jet-set couple (played by Judy Davis and Jonathan Pryce) arrives to find shelter, he begins a troubled relationship with the wife.
First look at Michael Douglas as Liberace!
Michael Douglas looks fabulous as Liberace in these first photos from the set of Behind The Candelabra, Steven Soderbergh’s HBO movie about the final years of Liberace.
I’m really interested in this movie, since it’s based on Scott Thorson’s memoir Behind the Candelabra: My Life With Liberace, and Scott Thorson is the guy who:
- started going out with Liberace in 1976 when he was aged seventeen
- was treated like a king by Liberace, and incorporated into the Vegas stage shows (see clip below)
- battled addictions and Hepatitis C
- filed a $113 million lawsuit against Liberace in 1982 amid allegations that Liberace “knowingly exposed him to AIDS”
- settled out of court for $95,000, two cars, and two pet dogs
- visited and reconciled with Liberace shortly before the entertainer’s death (at Liberace’s request)
- appeared as a pivotal witness for the prosecution in the quarduple murder trials of the head of the Wonderland Gang
- was put into witness protection
- but was found and shot five times
- told Larry King in 2002 that while living with Liberace he’d undergone a nose job, cheekbone lift and chin implant to look more like Liberace
- but later had the chin implant removed
- pleaded guilty to felony drug and burglary charges in 2008 and was sentenced to four years prison
- was rumoured to have had sex with Michael Jackson
- now lives with his wife in New England.
And this is before we’ve gotten to Liberace himself, much less the watermelon diet.
Plus, Matt Damon looks spunkier than ever, as if it were possible, done up to Dynasty as Thorson:
Happy Birthday Peter O'Toole
Peter O’Toole is 80 today (August 2) and quite frankly, he’s looked that age for about fourty years now. The eight-time Academy Award nominee (zero-time winner) has appeared in over sixteen thousand films and first appeared on stage with Thespis.
In 1979’s Caligula, he played Tiberius, the syphilitic Emperor of Rome and father to the wayward heir of the title. In this scene, Peter O’Toole demonstrates the correct way to greet and to pronounce “Caligula”.
Happy Birthday James Baldwin
James Baldwin was born on this day (August 2) in 1924. He passed away (from liver cancer) in 1987.
The author of Giovanni’s Room and a campaigner against discrimination (race, poverty, homosexuality), James Baldwin’s adventures included this televised roundtable of 1963, which he shared with Marlon Brando, Harry Belafonte, Charlton Heston and Sidney Poitier among others:
July 2012
88 posts
Andy Warhol eats a hamburger
Gore Vidal died today (July 31, 2012). Of Andy Warhol, Vidal said:
“Andy Warhol is the only genius I know with an IQ of 60.”
That seems as good a time as any to revisit this scene from Jørgen Leth’s 66 Scenes From America:
John Calendo's "Pornville"
This is an excerpt from John Calendo’s essay “Pornville”, a kaleidoscopic carousel centred around his experiences as editor of gay porn magazine In Touch, an essay which ends in tears.
Fresh off the bus from Nowheresville where they had always been told by passing men in slow-moving cars that they were the hottest thing since toast, finding themselves not in a red-carpeted Glamorland but in the harder than hard Hollywood of hustler allery, a lucky few were scooped up by the pioneers of movie-porn, the out-of-work cameramen and lighting guys who knew their way around the heavy equipment (this was before the digital camera) and were living on the cheap in Van Nuys or in a gritty bungalow in Silverlake with a sideline in boy-on-boy mail-order.
Together they created reels and reels of not-quite make-believe where all the tops looked like Tom Selleck in plaid shirt, mustache and bushy- bushy hair; and all the bottoms resembled the twink legend Kip Noll who with his curly mess of blond locks looked like an angel that had fallen off the top of a Christmas tree in Surf City.
Unchartered territory
I didn’t really enjoy reading David Mitchell’s lauded Cloud Atlas, and I absolutely hated The Matrix movies too, so I’m not particularly excited about the upcoming movie of Cloud Atlas, co-directed by the co-director of The Matrix movies.
Something that I do find quite interesting though is that said co-director is Lana Wachowski, who was known as Larry Wachowski during her Matrix days and who is the first person to helm a major Hollywood production that has come out as transgender.
In the clip below, Lana with her brother Andy and Tom Twyker (the three have co-directed the film, Twyker is known as the director of Run Lola Run) introduce the trailer to Cloud Atlas.
Querelle Art
OMG! That’s Warhol visiting the set of Querelle in 1982, standing right next to my shirtless boyfriend Brad Davis and assorted other cast members. Below, the director - who died of a cocaine-induced heart attack several months before the film’s release - joins Brad and Andy.
This seems as good a time as any to retrospect on the honey-bronze art of Fassbinder’s imperfect final film:
Surfin' AUS
NEWCASTLE
Australia, 2008
Director: Dan Castle
Stars: Lachlan Buchanan, Xavier Samuel, Reshad Strik
The final installment of the (accidental) gay surfer trilogy that started with in 2006 the execrable Tan Lines and continued with 2007’s sweet Shelter, Newcastle bobs aimlessly between sets of dreamily but not really competently rendered surf montage sequences and loosely scripted, wandering coming-of-age scenes and the film is disconnected, disjointed - a disappointment.
Jesse (Lachlan Buchanan) lives in the shadow of his older half-brother Victor (Reshad Strik) who is swarthier, more dangerous and in his day - before he got a local girl knocked up and settled into a life in the steel mills of Newcastle to pay his ad-hoc family’s bills - a vibrant and idolised surfing champ. Jesse aims to grab a spot in the big surfing championship to snatch back some hierarchical agency and also, secure a direction in life. Meanwhile, emo youngest brother Fergus (Xavier Samuel) lusts after one of Jesse’s continuously-shirtless surfing mates.
If only Newcastle had stuck to this tight three-way set up and followed the stories of the three quite different men as they navigate their ways through one particularly crucial summer, the movie might have worked quite well. It would have been sensible to use the city that the movie is named after as a powerfully symbolic backdrop, too, rather than keep it more or less totally out of shot as cameras point out to sea, or scenes are framed inside generic gen-Y bedrooms. (Newcastle is a steel town blessed with some of Australia’s most beautiful beaches but cursed with being the last bastion of white, working class Australia, a cultural template the rest of the country gleefully left behind in the late 1950s and which it now looks back on with scorn and detachment. Also, since the main mega-corporation running the steel works pulled its operation out of Newcastle in the 1990s, the city has slid irrevocably into destitution and irrelevance. Only in recent years, as the Sydney metropolitan area located two hours drive south has edged towards conurbation has Newcastle looked to capture new ground as a sunkissed northern suburb and retreat for stressed out commuters.)
One Sheet: Salo (1975)
Pasolini’s shitful flick from 1975 was banned for a generation in Australia. It’s a movie I enjoy more in the abstract than in the actual, and so these various posters for Salo conveniently lift the best of the film’s sexy weirdnesses and leave the rather unenjoyable film behind.
A moment with Elizabeth Taylor #5
Catherine Holly awaits her injection of sodium pentothal so she can speak the unspeakable in the final scene of Suddenly, Last Summer.
Music Theatre: Queen "These Are The Days Of Our Lives" (1991)
These Are The Days Of Our Lives was Queen’s last single and music video. The eighth track from their album Innuendo it was released on Freddie Mercury’s 45th birthday (September 5, 1991 - a High Holy Day you should have marked in your diary); Mercury died less than three months later (on November 24). A lovely song, similar to Queen’s 1975 Love Of My Life, it won the 1992 BRIT Award for “Best Single”.
The accompanying video was filmed in black and white at Mercury’s request to hide the full extent of his illness. Even though the second clip (below) shows that in colour Mercury looked even deathlier, the muted greys of the video do little to distract from the visibility of the disease.
Hotty of the Day: Joey Stefano
Dead and buried nearly twenty years before the dreaded Dawson and his dreary contemporaries dragged themselves onto the stage thinking they’d reinvented the wheel was the legendary, and legendarily beautiful Joey Stefano.
The Marlon Brando of gay porn, Joey (born Nicholas Anthony Iacona, Jr. in Philadelphia on the first day of 1968) could have easily had a successful career as a commercial model but chose instead to become the first superstar bottom of the HIV age, taking it from all comers like a titanic champ and installing the bottom as the star of the scene - somewhat of a turning point in the evolution of gay porn.
Frightening
WAKE IN FRIGHT
Australia, 1971
Director: Ted Kotcheff
Stars: Donald Pleasence, Chips Rafferty, Gary Bond, Jack Thompson
Download the original novel for kindle here
Convicts were sent to Australia for the term of their natural life and there was real truth in sentencing in those days. The journey to the ‘land beyond the seas’ took eight months and if they survived that, they could help build a colony - that they would have no citizenship of - under the blistering sun or escape into an endless desert filled with deadly spiders and snakes.
Little has changed in the 200 years since, with 99% of Australians crammed into the fertile coastal slivers on the east and west of the continent, while many British backpackers and the occasional baby never return from ill-fated journeys into the mysterious, vast interior.
Mysteriously acclaimed
MYSTERIOUS SKIN
USA, 2005
Director: Gregg Araki
Stars: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Brady Corbet, Elisabeth Shue
Neil (Chase Ellison, later Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is a precocious 8 year old who has a crush on his baseball coach (Bill Sage). Coincidentally, Coach is into young boys, and conveniently for them both, Neil’s single mother (Elisabeth Shue) is happy to let them hang out in private together as it frees her up to drink the local dive dry. Meanwhile, across town, introverted Brian (George Webster, later Brady Corbet) believes he’s been abducted by aliens, and has regular nosebleeds. It isn’t long until video games and chocolate treats are converted into kisses and blowjobs, and Neil grows up into a tearaway street hooker who moves to New York where he gets ripped off and beaten up.
A new film from Gregg Araki, the director of the dreaded The Living End, Mysterious Skin is marketed as a daring film that probes a “taboo subject”, but this is rather misleading advertising.
Happy Birthday Arnold Schwarzenegger
Arnold Schwarzenegger is 65 today (July 30). What better way to celebrate than to revisit the classic chariot chase scene from his first fiction film, Hercules in New York?
Quentin Crisp - "The Art of Celibacy"
The incomparable Quentin Crisp (1908-1999) shared a birthday with Jesus and was played by John Hurt in 1975’s The Naked Civil Servant, adapted from Crisp’s memoir of the same name.
Here, in an article that originally appeared at Nerve in 1997, Mr. Crisp reflects on celibacy.
The Art of Celibacy - Quentin Crisp
Celibacy is a word most often used in connection with the priesthood. Mr. Webster, in his famous dictionary, gives its meaning as the state of being unmarried, but we have all become much more outspoken and nastier than we were in Mr. Webster’s day. We know that the state of being unmarried does not necessarily involve chastity — a more exalted state.
In a film entitled Priest, one prelate was having a shameless affair with his housekeeper and the other, newly arrived, made himself comfortable in the vicarage, took off his turned-around collar and made straight for the nearest notorious gay bar. The film was, of course, absurd. If one arrived in a small town to work for McDonald’s, one would not be as indiscreet as that — let alone if one had arrived to work for you-know-who.
Why is God so against all forms of self-gratification? There seems to be no reasonable answer, but we all accept that he is. I would think that if a man were physically satisfied, he could concentrate his attention on “higher” things, whereas if he were not, he would think about nothing but his continual battle with the flesh.
When Mr. Clinton appointed Dr. Joycelyn Elders to the post of surgeon general, she recognized that preoccupation with sex is a particularly onerous problem in the schools. The goodly doctor also said that it wouldn’t hurt for adolescents to be taught about masturbation in the classroom. Mr. Clinton was shocked. His surgeon general was sacked.
Upper school was certainly where it all started for me. I spent most of those four miserable years slaving over knowledge that would prove useless, and (like the other boys) indulging in the solitary pastime of masturbation. It was such a dark subject, so surrounded by shame and mystery. We were all terrified of the consequences. How much was too much? Would one go mad? Could other people tell if one indulged? And so on.
