The Celluloid Closet

Cast

Jay Presson Allen

A top Hollywood screenwriter (Deathtrap, Funny Lady, and Hitchcock’s Marnie), Ms. Allen talks about working under the notorious Production Code (no couples sharing a bed, no lustful kisses, no "sexual perversion") and how the breakdown of the Code allowed her to include an openly homosexual relationship in the screenplay for Cabaret.

Susie Bright

Author, lecturer and sexual provacateur, Bright (aka "Susie Sexpert") describes the thrills and frustrations of watching same-sex relationships in the movies.

Quentin Crisp

The grande dame of queer cultural criticism and author of The Naked Civil Servant, Crisp recalls going to see the earliest known explicitly gay movie in 1919. The German Different From the Others tells a story of blackmail and suicide, and pleads for the repeal of Germany’s anti-sodomy law Paragraph 175.

Mart Crowley

When Crowley’s landmark gay play The Boys In The Band was filmed by William Friedkin in 1970, it provoked protests by street activists for its portrayals of self-loathing queers. It is was later reassessed as an accurate and compassionate portrayal of pre-Stonewall gay life.

Tony Curtis

The Hollywood legend describes two very different movies in which he wore skirts: Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot and Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus. In the latter he played Laurence Olivier’s body servant ("Body servant! What’s that?!")

Richard Dyer

The British film historian and author deconstructs early silent film images that began to define gender for the masses.

Antonio Fargas

A character actor who has appeared in over 40 films, including two in which he created two memorable, rich, and very different gay characters in the 1970’s (Car Wash, and Next Stop, Greenwich Village). He discusses why he feels it was easier for filmmakers to present black homosexual characters than white ones.

Harvey Fierstein

Author and star of the Tony Award-winning play and 1985 movie Torch Song Trilogy, Fierstein defends the popular stereotype of the Sissy: "I’d rather have negative images than none."

Whoopi Goldberg

Goldberg (The Color Purple) discusses the different ways audiences react to male-male and female-female sexual relationships onscreen.

Farley Granger

A favorite beautiful leading man of Alfred Hitchcock (Strangers on a Train) and Luchino Visconti (Senso), Granger recalls playing a homosexual killer in Hitchcock's Rope.

Harry Hamlin

Seventies stud Harry Hamlin (Clash of the Titans; later, L.A. Law on TV) describes filming the first romantic sex scene between two men in a major Hollywood movie (Making Love, 1982), and the eternal question: tongues or no tongues?

Arthur Laurents

A veteran screenwriter and playwright (Gypsy, West Side Story), Laurents describes how he and Alfred Hitchcock skirted the Production Code by presenting an obviously gay (not to mention homicidal) couple in Rope.

Shirley MacLaine

The Hollywood legend recalls with astonishment that on the set of Lillian Hellman’s The Children's Hour, in which she played a tortured closeted lesbian in love with fellow schoolteacher Audrey Hepburn, the word lesbian was not uttered once.

Armistead Maupin

The author of Tales of the City describes the irony of the plot device in Pillow Talk, in which his gay friend Rock Hudson would drop hints that he was "that way" in order to seduce Doris Day. (Maupin also wrote the narration for The Celluloid Closet.)

Daniel Melnick

The former head of production at MGM and president of Columbia Pictures, Melnick recalls screening the rough-cut of Making Love, which he produced. The owner of the studio declared, "You made a god-damn faggot movie!"

Ron Nyswaner

The screenwriter of Philadelphia describes being physically assaulted and called "faggot" by a couple of young men who had just seen William Friedkin’s gay S&M psycho-killer movie Cruising.

Jan Oxenberg

An independent filmmaker and screenwriter (Thank You and Goodnight ) Oxenberg declares that gay people are so "pathetically starved" for images of their lives on the screen that they are willing to forgive such unattractive character traits as vampirism.

Paul Rudnick

Screenwriter Rudnick (Jeffrey , In and Out, Addams Family Values) points to some very obvious (and hilarious) homoerotic subtexts in such 1950s sex comedies as Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Lover Come Back -- despite the Production Code. "You can’t keep homosexuality out of the movies," he declares, "any more than you can keep it out of life."

Barry Sandler

The screenwriter of Making Love -- the first major Hollywood movie with positive portayals of gay men – makes the point that unlike racial epithets, which are uttered in movies only by characters who are obvious bigots, words like "faggot" and "queer" are routinely and casually tossed around by the characters the audience is meant to identify with.

Susan Sarandon

Sarandon considers why it is easier to show sex between women on screen than between men. She fondly recalls the steamy sex scene she filmed with Catherine Deneuve in the stylish vampire movie The Hunger, and explains her decision to add a passionate kiss with Geena Davis before driving off the cliff in Thelma and Louise.

John Schlesinger

The director of Midnight Cowboy and Marathon Man compares the responses of American and European audiences to sexuality on screen, and discusses his decision not to cut to a long-shot for the memorable kiss between Peter Finch and Murray Head in Sunday, Bloody Sunday (1971).

Stewart Stern

Stern analyzes the homosexual undercurrents between the Sal Mineo and James Dean characters in his screenplay for Rebel Without a Cause (1955)..

Lily Tomlin

Actor, comedian, monologist, performance artist (Nashville, All of Me, Flirting with Disaster, Tea with Mussolini, The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe), Lily Tomlin narrates The Celluloid Closet, and was instrumental in bringing the film to the screen.

Gore Vidal

Author, essayist, cultural critic and screenwriter Gore Vidal recounts his battles with the censors over his screen adaptation of Tennessee Williams' Suddenly, Last Summer. Vidal also talks about working on William Wyler's Ben-Hur, and how he contrived to add a subtext of homoerotic longing between the Charlton Heston and Stephen Boyd characters -- unbeknownst to Heston.