GT Column on Family
Current mood: mellow
Category: Movies, TV, Celebrities

Funny that GT should be doing a family-themed issue, because I just finished watching the complete first two seasons of the landmark American television show "Family", an important cultural artifact for anyone interested in the history of homosexuality in pop culture. The hour-long dramatic series, which ran for five seasons starting in 1976, already started with a strong cinematic pedigree: it was produced under the auspices of Mike Nichols, and the pilot episode was shot by famous cult cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs (Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, New York, New York, etc.). The intelligent and literary quality associated with the Nichols imprimatur was maintained throughout the series, as was the visual tone set by Kovaks, which might be described as an after-school special directed by Ingmar Bergman. I watched the show loyally as a teenager when it originally aired on Friday nights; I became addicted to it again as an insomniac punk in the late eighties when a local Toronto station started showing late night, back-to-back reruns of it. Twenty years later, I'm still mesmerized by the show, which depicts the nuclear family as a kind of neurotic, insular breeding ground for sexual dysfunction, spiritual malaise, and what Freud uncomfortably termed "Family Romance".
The show depicts what is supposed to be a typical upper middle class suburban American family, the Lawrences, who hail from sunny Pasadena, California. The father, Doug Lawrence (played by James Broderick, real-life father of Mathew Broderick), is a liberal lawyer; the mother, Kate (the great Sada Thompson), is a slightly remote housewife who dabbles in charities and later goes back to school to get her degree in music. Their three children, Nancy (Meredith Baxter-Birney, later the mother on Family Ties), Willie (Gary Frank), and Buddy (Kristy McNichol) each have a special issue of their own to work out: they are a single-mother divorcee, a high-school drop-out, and a tomboy dyke-in-training, respectively. Each episode revolves around a particular social issue ripped from the headlines – abortion, divorce, infidelity, rape, homosexuality – the family coping as best it can with every minor disaster that rocks the household.
The series was in fact loosely inspired by another show full of family disasters from a few years earlier. Twelve episodes of "An American Family", a controversial documentary and early reality television prototype, aired in 1973, depicting a typical American family from Santa Barbara, California. The Louds, however, proved to be less wholesome than the country might have hoped: Pat, the icy but stylish Jacquie-O mother, ended up divorcing her husband during the show, while eldest son Lance, a hot, square-jawed fairy, escaped to New York to start an early gay punk band called the Mumps, live at the Chelsea Hotel, and hang out with trannies like Warhol Superstar Holly Woodlawn, who appears in one episode. (In the same episode, Lance goes to see a movie called Desperate Characters, a brilliant urban angst film co-starring "Family" Mom Sada Thompson.) In the early seventies, Lance Loud's coming out was the loudest closet door opening imaginable; what's even more shocking is that this landmark series has still not been released on either video or dvd to this day.
While "Family" doesn't boast a gay son (Willie, although sensitive and artistic, strictly dated girls), one of its best episodes called "Rites of Friendship", features the return of Willie's best friend, Zeke, a boy so close to the Lawrence family that they considered him one of their own. A handsome jock type far more butch than Willie, Zeke comes back for a visit from college in San Francisco (where else?), only to get arrested for punching a cop in the face during a raid on a gay bar. All hell breaks loose when Doug Lawrence defends Zeke in court, forcing him to come out to his homophobic father. Every member of the family completely supports Zeke except for Willie, who seems to have some issues of his own about homosexuality. In one poignant scene, Zeke asks fourteen year old buddy if she knows what a homosexual is. She replies, "Sure, it's when a boy likes a boy, or when a girl likes a girl." When he confesses he is one, Buddy says she still loves him. When the mother finds out that Willie isn't supporting or talking to Zeke, she reads him the riot act, telling him that his behaviour is disgraceful. When I watched this episode as a teenager, it really packed quite a wallop. It still does today.
But ultimately, "Family" belongs to Kristy McNichol as Buddy, the tomboy who wears denim overalls, idolizes Donny Osmond, rides a skateboard, and dates teen heartthrobs like Willie Ames and Leif Garrett. Buddy is a rebel, an old soul in a skinny girl's body, wise beyond her years, who hates wearing dresses and always puts the family's problems in perspective for everybody. When Buddy, at thirteen, overhears her mother confess she almost had an abortion when she was pregnant with her, the tough teen steals the family car, vandalizes a warehouse, and ends up in jail. When a local pervert tries to grab Buddy at the local park, she fends him off using her skateboard as a weapon. Buddy was one tough little baby dyke.
After the show was over, Kristy McNichol made only a few good movies (like Little Darlings, with another tough little tomboy (and bisexual), Tatum O'Neal), but mostly became famous for being girlfriends with Ina Liberace, the lesbian niece of the flamboyant pianist himself. Now retired from the screen, McNichol lives quietly in California teaching acting. But there will never be another Buddy Lawrence.

Currently watching : Little Darlings Release date: 1996-06-11

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Blast from the Past, Poland Edition
Current mood: bitchy
Category: News and Politics

Since Georgia is being invaded by the Soviet... I mean Russia, and Poland could be next, I thought I'd revisit my trip to Poland a few years back. Enjoy. x blab

Although it aspired to the status of debacle, my recent Polish excursion turned out to be far too absurd to be categorized as merely disastrous. There were early indications even before I got there that Poland may be one of those lands that time forgot, and that an international gay Polish conference might be its own punch line. Even simple travel arrangements became inordinately complex, resulting in too many long distance phone calls and extraneous trips to the Lufthansa office. More suspiciously, I couldn't seem to get a straight answer about exactly why I was being flown to Warsaw, or what would be expected of me once I got there. But as I am in no position to be turning down free trips to Europe, I was compelled to accept this strange invitation.
The first gaffe of many happens the moment I land at the Warsaw airport. The stern customs official informs me gravely that I cannot be allowed into the country without a visa, something which neither the travel agent who made all the arrangements for the conference nor the organizers deigned to enlighten me about. As I'd already been to both the Czech Republic and Slovenia without a visa, I didn't see why I would need one for Poland. Nevertheless, the customs official signals me with a severe flick of his head to follow him to what turns out to be a series of austere, sparely furnished waiting rooms.
"Tear down that barren bitch of a wall and put a window where a window ought to be!" think I, as I wait patiently in a drab room for the official to return. After a long while, his poker-faced superior, who looks like a leftover apartchik from the previous regime, marches in to interrogate me. After he consults with a couple of tough women in tight grey skirts with guns in their holsters, he informs me that I will be issued a visa for 57 Zlotys, or roughly fourteen bucks. A snub-nosed, peroxided woman takes her sour time completing the forms, and when I'm finally released, the guy who seems to be in charge informs me cryptically that it is "the first and last time" that I will be extended such a courtesy, whatever that may mean.
Fortunately, Marek, the Polish conference organizer, is still waiting for me after my hour and a half detention. He's an intense, business-like fellow in a grey suit under a big head. As he drives me towards my hotel, careening at break-neck speed through the boxy, elegant and simple Stalinist architecture of the city, he fills me in on the conference. It seems that the whole deal is being bankrolled by some straight porn company which has a gay division headed up by his "husband", as he refers to him. And here I though it was an academic conference. This is going to be more fun than I thought. Or so I think.
As Marek gives me a running commentary on the gay state of things in Poland - in this 95% Catholic country, homosexuality is still far from accepted; his husband's company has just completed the first ever gay Polish porn movie (punch line of the Polish joke based on this information: it consists exclusively of men fucking women) - my mind wanders back to the book I'd devoured on the plane on the way over: "The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture" by Daniel Harris. I'd been meaning to read it forever, because I knew it would clarify some major issues for me, like why I dislike homosexuals. As it turns out, they're weak-willed, anti-intellectual conformists who've sacrificed the camp sensibility and artistic and aesthetic expression in order to gain acceptance through co-option and economic exploitation from the dominant heterosexual culture. Just as I thought. It's going to be depressing to be in a country where homosexual culture is just emerging, knowing that the machinery is already in place to dilute and diminish any rebellious, idiosyncratic expression in favour of the global gay capitulation to consumerism. But I'll try to have a good time anyway.
Besides, I have other, more quotidian problems to worry about, as I discover when I'm dropped off at my hotel. The severe, Stalinist building in question seems to be run by a staff with a similar demeanour to the customs officials I had the chance to get to know earlier. The woman at the desk eyes me up and down with thinly veiled contempt as she signs me in, and I'm obliged to lug my own luggage up to the third story room. I discover, much to my chagrin, that said suite, although fairly large and tastefully furnished, has no bathroom to call its own. Instead, Marek informs me, I will be expected to use the public facility down the hall. I will soon learn that Poland has somewhat of a bathroom shortage, not to mention toilet paper, witness the hordes of people running into the bushes to pee on their way to and from Auschwitz. But I'm getting ahead of myself. When I begin to protest to Marek that I couldn't possibly survive a week in a room without a shower and toilet - I can barely function in Europe without a bidet - he tut tuts me for my petty, petit-bourgeois concerns and tells me that they are a poor conference in a poor country, and then he adds something in Polish, probably "don't bust my balls." Later I find out that I've got it relatively good - they tried to stick the Dutch theatre troupe in a youth hostel.
Fortunately there is a sink in my suite, because I'll be peeing in it for the rest of the week. The towels that have been generously supplied for no extra charge for that treacherous walk down the hall to the communal shower could only be described, at least in the New World, as tea towels. I decide to forgo bathing for now, and instead push the two beds in my room together, take a pain-killer to trick the jet-lag, put on my sleep mask, and have a nap.
I'm awakened by a loud Polish voice. I forgot to turn off the TV, and my earplugs have fallen out. In Poland, every television show and movie is dubbed by the same, monotone male Polish voice, with the English just audible enough in the background to garble both languages. Deciding to brave the hall to check out the shower situation, I drape my meager tea towel around my waist, which barely covers my ass, and tiptoe toward the toilets. As it turns out, the shower in question is a hose lying in a dirty bathtub sans curtain in a small room with a sink. I hold the nozzle above me as the luke warm water trickles down my back.
Maybe things will pick up at the party I'm being driven to by three enthusiastic yet oddly dour youths who volunteer for the Gay and Lesbian Association. It's a reception for the conference, held at the Association's headquarters, a cramped attic office which would have made Anne Frank's digs seem positively spacious - and festive - by comparison. The fete is comprised of various badly dressed international gay delegates from such far-flung regions as Canada, the Netherlands, and Scandinavia, and grim locals who seem to be slightly miffed by the presence of foreigners. Everyone proceeds to get drunk on cheap sangria, although even the alcohol doesn't seem to act as much of a social lubricant. It seems that the Polish either aren't used to or don't have much of a taste for the art of hosting, so I'm pretty much left to myself in a corner flipping through some indigenous pornography. At first I think it's because no one speaks English, but after a week of stand-offishness, I'm not so sure.
A few nights of strange events and performances ensue, including some drag queen's from Bellaruse so old school I'm not sure recorded history extends back that far. There's some awful Swedish lesbian chamber music, and a bizarre gay Norwegian rock singer with a fondness for vintage heavy metal that I'd rather not be forced to recall, but several of the local acts, including a Gothic chanteuse with a Diamanda Galas aspect, and a famous blond Polish folk singer with a middle-aged Nico edge, who seems to be somewhat of a national favourite, are actually quite cool.
Still, the entire conference seems to be somewhat ill-conceived and arbitrary, so I'm quite looking forward to the bus trip to Auschwitz tomorrow. In fact, visiting the notorious concentration camp was one of the reasons I wanted to come in the first place. I'd heard about various controversies surrounding the infamous death camp - that it has become a tourist attraction, a creepy theme park of sorts, and that there had been talk of erecting a McDonald's either on or near the site. "What are they going to put on the sign," I ask one of the Polish organizers to test the local attitudes about the phenomenon, "over six million served?" (I always find such tasteless jokes are justified if used in the name of anthropological research. Plus I was a little drunk.) His laughter seems a little malevolent. Soon I will discover that almost a million people a year visit Auschwitz, making Poland the third most visited European country, and dealing with this mass tourism has made Auschwitz into a very disturbing and politically charged behemoth indeed.

Next Month: Auschwitz

Auschwitz was a gas. Now before you get your tits in a Gordian twist, let it be known for the record that I'm just paraphrasing that old Sex Pistols classic, "Belsen Was a Gas" - going back to my punk roots, as it were. As probably the most gruesome and horrifying phenomenon in modern history, it's almost impossible not to kid around a little about the Sex Pistols, er, I mean, about the Holocaust, from time to time, particularly since its the biggest sacred cow in the book. Why, even Seinfeld made light of the sanctimoniousness of "Schindler's List" in the daring episode in which he gets caught making out with his girlfriend during that terrible movie.
In the recent controversial book "The Holocaust Industry", Norman Finkelstein, a Jewish scholar, argues that although the Shoah may have been the Superbowl of genocides, the memory industry surrounding it has become politicized by Israel to the point where victimization and suffering has become internalized and promulgated as the centrepiece of Jewish cultural identity. "There's no business like Shoah business," kidded Abba Eban, a former Israeli foreign minister, which goes a long way toward illustrating just how warped the whole business has become.
The organizers of the Polish gay conference I'm attending have decided to send a delegation to Auschwitz, so I dutifully sign on, unaware of the spectacle that we will soon become there ourselves. In typical Polish fashion, a bus is scheduled to pick us up at the main conference meeting place - a building adjacent to an abandoned, Soviet sports stadium - at 5 a.m. for the five hour ride to the site of the infamous death camp. But when the twenty or so of us delegates arrive at this ungodly hour in the pouring rain, the building is locked and the bus is nowhere in sight, so we all have to huddle under a flimsy canopy in the dark and wait. After an hour or so, the Communist-era bus comes chugging along, and we board and are on our grim way.
As the bus bops and jostles over the bumpy road to Auschwitz, passing the impoverished farmhouses along the way, I have no choice but to listen to some of the other delegates tell their side of things. One self-proclaimed ultra conservative Scandinavian faggot in particular prattles on about the banalities of extant gay culture, announcing, for example, that divorce rates among heterosexuals in his neck of the woods are higher than amongst homosexuals, pulling statistics out of thin air as such petty ideologues are wont to do. He waxes nostalgic about how nice the pink triangle, sewn onto the clothing of homosexuals in concentration camps, used to be as a symbol of the gay movement, but how happy it makes him to see its replacement, the rainbow flag, hanging in so many windows in Stockholm. A balding, unhealthy looking man who claims to be 25 but looks more like 45, I can't help but think I wouldn't mind exterminating him myself. All that he and the other delegates seem to be able to talk about are the so-called advances being made politically by gays - marriage rights, hate crime legislation, major advertising sponsorship for gay events - so I'm forced to put on my walkman and crank up my tape of horror theme favourites really loud. As we pull up to Auschwitz, on cue Bernard Herrmann's terrifying theme from "Psycho" literally plays in my head.
Unwittingly having become part of the official Auschwitz gay delegation, I'm mortified to discover that we are met not only by the woman who seems to run the museum, and her assistants, but also photographers and reporters and video cameras from German and Polish television. I will spend much of my time trying to avoid the cameras, hiding behind dark glasses. We are ushered into a conference room where an official ceremony acknowledging the murder of homosexuals in Auschwitz takes place, including a Scandinavian dyke delegate singing some sappy song she wrote for the occasion which borders on pitiful. The fags make some half-assed presentation involving some papier-mâché plaque commemorating the event they whipped up the night before or something. In the middle of one particularly forced poignant moment involving a speech about the extermination of homosexuals - and I'm not making this up - the cell phone of one of the aggressive, plodding German TV cameramen goes off, and its programmed to the opening notes of "Deutschland Uber Alles"! Everyone pretends it isn't happening, but I'm absolutely agog. It's like a scene from one of my movies.
After the ceremony we're all corralled out into a courtyard where they used to hang up prisoners by the thumbs while two obnoxious dyke lovers play a lugubrious song on the violin and oboe. The previous evening the same unattractive pair had been necking so furiously and obnoxiously in front of my during an entire play about male prostitution that I'd felt like exterminating them. They dedicate their selections to their respective dead fathers, a gesture which in the context of the overriding horror of the place seems merely saccharine and phony.
I'm sad to report that the treacly sentimentality surrounding the camp has become so weighed down with the rhetoric and signifiers of sorrow and victimization that the whole enterprise has become somewhat meaningless and abstract. The Poles, who are predominantly Catholic, apparently view Auschwitz in terms of Christian martyrdom, which is in conflict with the Jewish model of suffering and perdition without redemption which to them the Shoah represents. The sixty thousand Poles murdered in the camp were primarily dissidents of some kind - intellectuals, political prisoners, the elite - who could be perceived as conscious martyrs of the Third Reich, as opposed to the millions of Jewish victims, many of whom were innocent women and children who simply thought they were being evacuated from the country. The two conflicting styles of commemoration add a disturbing political schizophrenia to Aushcwitz. Add to this that the sheer volume of tourism which has developed - the numerous commercial kiosks which sell beautiful postcards, the cafeteria, the Japanese tourists posing for photos beside the ovens - and you can understand why Aushcwitz has been dubbed the theme park of concentration camps.
To add to the surrealism of the whole experience, our very sincere, emotional tour guide, an art history student who guides us methodically through the whole Auschwitz experience, takes me aside at one point and advises me to take care of my wallet because there are numerous pickpockets in operation. This is not surprising since there are so many people milling through each building and exhibition of horror - the rooms full of the familiar piles of shoes, eye glasses, and prosthetic limbs behind glass walls - that its almost like lining up for rides at an amusement park. I myself consider stealing some toilet paper from the Auschwitz washrooms, considering my hotel bathroom is always out, but I think better of it.
I'm not saying I didn't learn a lot from visiting Auschwitz. I didn't really previously comprehend the sheer scale of it, for example, that there were at least forty or fifty Aushchwitzes in Poland alone, and that this site was merely the largest of them. We take a shuttle bus over to Birkenau, approximately three kilometers away, which was an enormous camp of forty hectres where the trains pulled up and the prisoners, after a cursory visual inspection by a doctor, were separated into those who would live for a few months of hard labour before being worked and starved to death, and those who would go straight to the ovens. Wandering by myself through the vast fields of prisoner barracks and gas chambers and crematoria, I do start to get inklings of the horror, the horror.
The five hour bus ride back to Warsaw is a sombre affair. We stop at a truck stop that has nothing but a few stale Danishes and bitter coffee, and because of the lack of washroom facilities, everyone is running into the bushes to pee.
Back at my hotel, I have an overpriced meal at the restaurant in the lobby served by stuffy waiters with no discernible sense of humour. I almost feel like trying out my favourite Polish joke on them (Q: Did you hear about the Polish lesbian? A: She liked men), but I've already discovered that Polish people don't really realize that the rest of the world makes jokes at their expense. Having the previous day chipped my fake front tooth with a beer bottle, I give the grumpy old security guard with the gun strapped to his waist a crooked grin on my way back to my lonely room, which he does not deign to reciprocate. I pee in the sink and go to bed.
The next day I shoot David, a 19 year old art student who speaks little English, for Honcho magazine in my hotel room. A volunteer for the conference, I've had my eye on him all week and finally got up the nerve to ask the organizers to ask him if he would pose for me. The boy is a prototypical eastern European type, handsome, high cheek bones, naturally well built, and with an extremely hairy ass which he offers to shave, but I tell him its perfect for Honcho. He brings his fellow art school boyfriend to fluff him; probably the only club kid in Warsaw, he has fades and rings in his eyebrows and wears the same clothes every day I see him - a short, gaudy faux fur jacket, tight spandex pants, and plastic black platform space boots which look like they're about to fall apart. Apparently he gets beat up a lot. Unfortunately David is one of those models who can only get it up three or four shots at a time, so the shoot takes a gruelling three hours to complete.
After all that work I wander around the old part of the city, which was completely destroyed during the war but painstakingly reconstructed in the eighties like some strange simulacrum of the past, mostly for the purposes of tourism. I prefer the dour, monolithic Soviet era architecture myself. At one point I run into some of the gay delegates from the conference. I ask them which direction they're going in, and when they point one way, I tell them I'm headed in the opposite direction and beat a hasty retreat, an old trick I often use that works every time.
Aside from the well attended seminar dedicated to my work, I spend the rest of the conference witnessing a rather pathetic Mr. Poland strip competition, and watching a special screening of the first ever Polish gay porn movie. It's a creepy, Twin Peaks-like affair, shot in some dank basement and starring a young man who looks like a sideshow pinhead. I make a French exit and go back to my lonely hotel room and watch Mia Farrow in "Hurricane", her voiced dubbed in Polish by the same monotone man I've been listening to all week.

Currently reading : Animal Farm and 1984 By George Orwell

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Raspberry Reich Scene 2

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yDKfBwqZXo

9:18 PM - 5 Comments - 8 Kudos - Add Comment

Tony Ward in Rusty..s Misogyny
Current mood: amused

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wyMO659GPD8

11:09 AM - 6 Comments - 8 Kudos - Add Comment

My Latest GT Column
Current mood: adventurous
Category: Parties and Nightlife

I don't want to keep promoting my new melancholy gay zombie movie, Otto; or, Up with Dead People, but I must talk about my recent visit to London, and as I was there showing Otto at the London dyke and fag film fest, I'm afraid I'm going to have to mention it again. I hope you don't start to consider me as big a media whore as Madonna and Mariah, the two horsewomen of the pop apocalypse.
I can barely remember the details now, having subsequently taken the show on the road to Belfast, Brussels, Turin, and Linz and Krems, two small burgs in Austria. (Linz is where Hitler went to High School, which goes a long way toward explaining the Third Reich.) I vaguely recall staying at a very tourist-y four star hotel called the Strand Palace, right across the river from the NFT where the festival was held, and I have a hazy recollection of shooting three little boy art whores (an affectionate term – don't take it the wrong way) in my hotel room for the upcoming Sex issue of this very magazine. But what I remember most is that it's all about Shoreditch now. My American friend the author Travis Jeppesen (who could be the next Burroughs, and whose novel, Wolf at the Door, you should read) tipped me off to a No Bra show at a place called White Hat in White Chappell, a night called Club Cool. It was the first time Travis and I had seen Susanne Oberbeck, who is No Bra, perform, and she was truly magnetic – a kind of Modiglianiesque amalgam of Nico, Mary Woronov, and Buffy Ste. Marie. (Look for her song Doherfuckher on the Otto soundtrack, available later this year on Crippled Dick Hot Wax Records.) Afterwards we went to the Joiner's Arms for last call, a Shoreditch dive bar that reminds you how determinedly low homosexuality can go, witness the drugged-out fag in a white baby-tee with ass antlers (that's what we call those unfortunate symmetrical tattoos right above your crack) getting bitch-slapped by his fireplug black fag hag best girlfriend. These creatures make Santa Monica Boulevard look like Shepherd's Bush.
The following night, after my first screening, I took a wild stab on the recommendation of a stranger on MySpace and went with another newfound MySpace friend (it's the only way to fly these days) to a charming party called Nuke Them All at club Images in Hackney. It was a fun, young mixed electro crowd, although what the middle-aged leatherman wearing nothing but a dog collar was doing on the dance floor I still haven't figured out. There was also something unsavoury involving female strippers going on in the basement, but I didn't get a very good look. Although the patio was rocking, it was also freezing so we bailed in favour of Lee Adam's Club Kaos at Stunners, a Cosey Fanni Tutti little bar nestled in the middle of the club hell that is Cable Street Studios on Butcher's Row. There I was privileged to meet Othon Mataragas, the amazing classical experimental musician who also contributed a brilliant track to the Otto soundtrack. I can't really tell you what anyone else was doing at the club, but I for one was ingesting things publicly that Amy Winehouse could only dream of in private. At seven in the morning we all piled out of the club to witness the most amazing snow blizzard I have ever seen: huge wet snowflakes blanketing the old industrial site, transforming it into a Dickensian picture postcard. Trippy! I finally caught a mini-cab at 8am driven by a friendly East Indian cherub who couldn't speak a word of English. At that point, neither could I. Somehow between the two of us, and thirty pounds later, we figured out the way back to my hotel.
My second screening was the following afternoon at 4pm, so I must have still been high as a kite when I introduced it. (As Travis' Lithuanian boyfriend said when he first met me, "Aren't you too old to be doing drugs?") I did actually manage to catch a couple of movies at the festival over the next couple of days, including my friend Ela Troyano's excellent documentary about La Lupe, the late great Cuban diva, and Tom Kalin's audacious "Savage Grace" starring Julianne Moore, a study in mother-son incest that should be required viewing of every homosexual who has ever had mother issues, which means all of you.
The piece de la resistance of my London tour was when I finally got to see the Divine David herself, David Hoyle, live at the Vauxhall Tavern. In the company of Susanne and my friend Johnny Jones (formerly Volcano), I had the great pleasure of seeing this genius performer essay an entire show on the subject of trade unions, a little bit of political pornography that was right up my arse – er, alley. Eviscerating everything from the Olympics to Kylie Minogue to Robert Mugabe, Mr. Hoyle proved that nothing is or should be sacred, not even the cows. (David Hoyle on Kylie: "And now what do the young people do? Dream of being a lobotomized cunt like Kylie Monogue!" Testify!) Afterwards I ended up at a party at the apartment of experimental electro musician Richard Torry, former member of Leigh Bowery's band Minty, who had been Ms. Hoyle's accompanist. It was a stellar ending to a London trip that made me realize that London, in its current incarnation, makes New York look a little like Geneva.

Currently listening : La Maison De Mon Reve By CocoRosie Release date: 2005-06-15

8:26 PM - 2 Comments - 4 Kudos - Add Comment

Otto Wins Riofan Visions Award
Current mood: aroused
Category: Art and Photography

Hey Kids: so fyi my new movie Otto; or, Up with Dead People just won the Visions Award at the Rio De Janeiro Fantastic Film Festival (Riofan). This award is conceded by a jury of cinema students to the best film in the Visions Section of the festival, dedicated to independent and radical films, with an experimental/auteurist approach to the horror/sci-fi/fantasy genres.
Now I don't care much for awards, but this one was kind of cool because a) I didn't even know my movie was playing there; b) it was voted by film students; and c) it was sort of vindication for having the film turned down by some other fantasy film festivals because they can't handle zombie horror mixed with tender gay love. Cretins! Otto will also be showing in July at the Puchon Fantasy Film Festival in South Korea, which I will likely be attending, and it will be in competition at the Sitges Fantasy Film Festival in Spain in October, which I will attend for sure. Stay tuned!

Currently listening : Noah’s Ark By Cocorosie Release date: 2005-09-12

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Charlton Heston RIP
Category: Movies, TV, Celebrities

I wrote this article on Chuck Heston a few years back. RIP.

It’s been a very Charlton Heston summer. The living spectre of the macho, lantern-jawed actor who, depending on which source you refer to, may or may not become an octogenarian in October, keeps returning to haunt me like the Holy Ghost. The prospect of Mel Gibson’s upcoming "The Passion", an allegedly anti-Semitic film version of the events of the last twelve hours of the life of Jesus Christ – in Aramaic, no less - has some pundits, including myself, waxing nostalgic for the good old days when a member of the goyim like Chuck Heston could play such high-profile Jews as Moses in The Ten Commandments or Prince Judah in Ben-Hur so sympathetically and straightforwardly. (Based on Gibson’s previous work, I personally can’t imagine him doing a better job of depicting the crucifixion of Christ than superior film-makers such as Passolini in The Gospel According to St. Mathew, or John Waters in Multiple Maniacs, or even Monty Python in Life of Brian.) Say what you will about Heston’s politics, but you have to hand it to him – he’s definitely Jew-positive.
(Just as an aside, I recently interviewed Paul Verhoeven, director of Robocop and Starship Troopers, who continues to threaten to make his version of the life of Christ, in which the Lord and Saviour would be portrayed as a guerilla leader more along the lines of a Che Guevera. Now that’s a New Testament I could relate to.)
It’s almost a shame that Heston’s image has been tarnished in the latter part of his career. (I may be willing to forgive him for his stint as the director of the National Rifle Association, but I’m not so sure about his tenure as president of the Screen Actor’s Guild.) There are certain unsavoury images of the man who would be Moses that I can’t get out of my head no matter how hard I try. I’m thinking of the NRA speech in which he crowed that God would have to pry the gun out of his cold, dead hands, and of course his unfortunate cameo in Michael Moore’s propagandistic documentary Bowling for Columbine. The prank on Heston at the end of that questionable film, in which the boorish Moore gains entrance to Moses’ home under false pretenses as a purported member of the NRA and proceeds to berate the addled Alzheimer’s victim and cancer survivor for his position on gun control, had the opposite of the intended effect on me. Moore’s maudlin and unconvincing appeal to Chuck’s humanitarian impulses (with a sad sack expression, he places the photograph of a child shooting victim on the actor’s porch and starts to whine about "the children") made me more sympathetic to the man who, after all, not only protected the innocent by parting the Red Sea, but who also saved countless lives during his disaster movie period in the early seventies (Earthquake, Airport ’75). Moore might also do well to remember that Heston in his day was extremely active in the civil rights movement, marching alongside Martin Luther King, Jr. in the sixties, and even narrating the King documentary "King: A Filmed Record… Montgomery to Memphis" in 1970. A man, after all, should be judged for the entirety of his life, and not just one sad chapter.
But it’s Heston’s sci-fi period, his great trilogy of Planet of the Apes (1968), The Omega Man (1971), and Soylent Green (1973), that will always endear me to the Chuck. The Royal and the Revue (with a nice, brand new wide screen), the two rep cinemas in Toronto with the most adventurous programming, have screened a couple of these classics of late, and they couldn’t be timelier. With the world teetering once again on the verge of potential holocaust, nuclear or otherwise, these cautionary apocalyptic features of some thirty odd years ago seem more relevant and less far-fetched today than ever. In each movie Heston plays a cynical maverick who survives the self-destruction of mankind. In Planet of the Apes he volunteers for a space mission to a far off planet because he believes that there has to be something better than mankind somewhere out there in the universe. What he doesn’t realize is that his journey has taken him to Earth in the future, which is now ruled by apes after humans destroyed the planet with atomic war. (America vs. Iran, perhaps?) In The Omega Man (now available on DVD), Chuck is the only survivor of a worldwide plague that was unleashed as a result of experimental germ warfare. Anthrax anyone? And in Soylent Green, Chuck plays a New York cop surviving in a world that has destroyed its environment through rampant industrialization, pollution, and over-population. Guess they passed on the Kyoto Accord. (Oh, and by the way, Soylent Green, the food that everyone’s eating, is made of people, as Chuck so chillingly informs us in the final scene of the movie.)
So don’t be too hard on Chuck. He knew better than anybody that the lord giveth, and the lord taketh away.

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Personal Review of Otto
Current mood: pensive
Category: Life

Here is a personal review of my new movie Otto; or, Up with Dead People that my friend Nikolaj sent me. it is one of my favourite reviews so i thought I’d share it. xxx Blab

Just wanna say I really enjoyed Otto. It was both overly amusing and really beautiful. My favourite scene was probably the scene at the dumping ground... it did for the film what I felt the spoken word sequence about people drained by forced labour and dirty subways (etc etc, I don’t bother to look up the quote right now) did for Raspberry Reich. It’s the looking into the camera with the same intensity as Tilda Swinton’s Orlando, saying that though we are playing around and turning everything upside down, we still have something serious to say. We are not treating this with humour and irony because it’s not serious, but exactly because it is so serious that it’s the only way we can comfortably get this close.
It reminded me of a review of Kurt Vonnegut’s final novel "Timequake" saying that so much art is making banalities seem like heavy issues, but the real art is the art that manages to treat the heaviest things light and playfully...

Currently listening : Accidental Autobiography By Patti Smith Release date: 25 March, 2003

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Check out this video: Otto; or, Up with Dead People - LaBruce - First Full Trailer

Check out this video: Otto; or, Up with Dead People - LaBruce - First Full Trailer



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My CBC Blog Entries from Sundance 0/8. You can also go to www.cbc.ca
Current mood: chill
Category: Games

This is the fourth time I've been invited to Park City, Utah to attend Bob Redford's little vanity project (which has become one of the top five film festivals on the planet), and it's my third world premiere. Funny place to have a world premiere, in a remote mountain ski resort in one of the more conservative states of America — especially considering I don't ski — but that's show business.

When I first traveled to Sundance in 1995 with my movie Super 8 1--2, the festival was essentially two snow banks and a pre-eyeliner Jared Leto. But even then it had apparently become too mainstream for some disgruntled film folk, who started up a parallel film festival, Slamdance, that year. (A few years later, an alternative to the alternative, called Slamdunk, would emerge, followed by Tromadance, the only festival with no entry fee and free screenings.)

I can't remember much about my screening in 1995, but I do vividly recall attending Larry Clark's Kids, the sensation of the festival, as the guest of its executive producer, Gus Van Sant, and its writer, Harmony Korine. I remember because Gus and his then-boyfriend, D-J, and I smuggled a bottle of tequila into the screening and kept slipping it to Harmony, who was under the legal drinking age. Fun times!

The following year, I presented the world premiere of my movie Hustler White. at Sundance. Hollywood had really begun to descend on the festival with a vengeance, like a plague of sewage (see: the South Park episode about Sundance). It was still fun, but there were too many agents and entertainment lawyers and other men in black running rings around the poor Parker Poseys, desperately looking for the next big thing. As I had partly financed my film by pre-selling U.S. rights, they pretty much left me alone. Besides, a movie featuring an amputee hustler who pleasures his clients with his leg stump isn't necessarily the kind of indie fare they're looking for to break into the multiplexes.

Four years ago I returned to Sundance with The Raspberry Reich, a sexually explicit movie about the leader of a gang of extreme left-wing terrorists who makes her straight male followers have sex with each other to prove their revolutionary commitment. Once again, it wasn't exactly Little Miss Sunshine, and as it had been pre-sold to US. distributor Strand Releasing, I wasn't paid much mind, although the film did go on to play at over 150 film festivals worldwide. This time I was a little shocked to discover that Sundance had become so overrun by Hollywood types that Paris Hilton herself was in attendance. In fact, at one party, I was asked to relinquish my banquette beside the DJ booth to make way for the Queen of All Emptiness. Only to prove that chivalry wasn't quite dead yet, I magnanimously complied.

Returning this year with my new movie, Otto; or, Up with Dead People, all bets are off. It's another world premiere, but this time we haven't pre-sold the U.S. territory. I will be attending with my Canadian co-producers, Jennifer Jonas and Leonard Farlinger of New Real Films, and our sales agent, Charlotte Mickie of Maximum Films, who will have the pleasure of trying to sell a melancholy gay zombie movie with political overtones to a mob of distributors looking for the next Juno. On the upside, I'm in the Park City at Midnight section alongside Diary of the Dead, directed by recent Toronto resident George A. Romero, the master of the zombie genre. Apparently we used the same camera to shoot our respective zombie movies, the Panasonic 900 HDX. I couldn't be more thrilled.

Day 1


I arrive in Salt Lake City in the early evening on a cramped little Delta jet airliner, the only direct flight from Toronto. I noticed while reading on the plane that my movie, Otto; or, Up with Dead People, got a mention on the front page of the National Post — but maybe that's because it seems to be the only Canadian dramatic feature playing at Sundance, which is kind of scandalous. Come on, Canada: represent!

My pre-reserved shuttle is waiting for me as planned; I share it with five other Canucks on their way to Park City. The chatty driver plays the best of Dan Fogelberg for the whole 35-mile drive, solemnly informing us that the singer recently passed away. I feel like slitting my wrists.

My spirits are lifted when I arrive at our little ski chalet, which couldn't be more adorable. My Canadian co-producers, Jennifer Jonas and Leonard Farlinger, have already arrived, are sitting beside the roaring fireplace; the kitchen is stocked with food and drink. Sundance can be so quaint.

I only have a couple of hours to eat and shower and change before my friend Brian arrives to whisk me back to Salt Lake City. You see, I've been invited by a club promoter named Justin Strange to guest DJ at his Thursday electro-indie club. The bar is called The Trapp Door, which is right next door to a country and western watering hole called The Trapp (the heavily tattooed bartender there apparently wants to meet me). Justin is a local It boy, promoter and DJ who has a queer radio show that he interviewed me for several years ago when I was at Sundance with my last movie, The Raspberry Reich. Justin has "The Revolution Is My Boyfriend" — a slogan from the movie — tattooed across his stomach. I guess you could say I have a local fanbase.

After many years of attending Sundance, I've learned that you ignore Salt Lake City at your own peril. It's simply bad form to jet in from Hollywood or Toronto and breeze through a city of a million people without even saying a howdy-do. My appearance has been nicely promoted, and I also have an interview, alongside zombie master George Romero and Troma Film founder Lloyd Kaufman, in The Slug, the cool Salt Lake City free weekly. We've also extended our stay at Sundance by one day so we can attend our screening in Salt Lake City on Tuesday evening, after which I plan to drop into the Trapp to meet that bartender. My Salt Lake screening last time was sold out and by far the most enthusiastic.

Salt Lake City is about sixty percent Mormon, and a good number of them are either reasonably moderate or non-practicing. It's actually pretty civilized. My friend Brian, whom I met in Berlin, is from a Mormon family who kicked him out of the house when he was seventeen for being gay. He's reconciled with them since then, and he's spending a few months here before moving back to San Francisco. He's also friends with Gus Van Sant, so he's going to visit the set of Gus's Harvey Milk movie — which begins shooting on Monday — and maybe even nab a small role. Brian is a wild child who picks me up for the drive to my Salt Lake City gig in a car that looks like it's falling apart. He says it took a beating when he drove to Denver through a blizzard recently. He said he had to get out of town because he was bored out of his mind.

Brian is also friends with Brian Singer, the director of such movies as X-Men and Apt Pupil, the latter of which starred Brad Renfro. Brad was just found dead in his L.A. apartment last week at the age of twenty-five. I hung out with Brad once about seven or eight years ago in Toronto, along with the actresses Bijou Phillips and Dominique Swain, when they were there shooting a movie called Tart. Brad was a sweet kid of seventeen then who'd already had some problems with drugs and the law. Hollywood's a tough town, and once a year it descends on a small ski resort town called Park City. More carnage to follow.

Day 2

Friday was the first really busy day of the festival, so Park City was crawling with film industry types looking for product. The free shuttle buses that chug along the snowy streets were packed with people talking loudly and sometimes obnoxiously about the films they'd seen, what's hot and what's not. My co-producer Leonard Farlinger tells me on one shuttle he overheard six people loudly debating the merits of my oeuvre and whether or not they were going to check out Otto. One was a naysayer, so Leonard yelled out as he got off the bus that he'd seen Otto, and it rocks. It's nice to have people in your corner.

After puttering around at Sundance headquarters with my other co-producer, Jennifer Jonas, we head for our first party, a Wall Street Journal-sponsored affair for the opening film of the Slamdance film festival, a Canadian effort called Real Time. Our international sales agent, Charlotte Mickie, is also representing this film, a hit man movie starring Randy Quaid. Quaid stands laconically at the party in a big furry parka. Nearby at the bar, Freddy Kreuger – or at least the guy who plays him in the Nightmare on Elm Street movies – chats affably with several guests. If he'd worn his famous razor hand it might have livened things up a little bit.

Definitely livening things up is another Toronto Bruce, Bruce Bailey, and his husband, Alfredo Ferran Calle, both co-producers of Otto; or, Up with Dead People. Bruce has come to show his support, and he will be throwing an exclusive dinner party for people involved in the making of the film on Sunday night. In his Tom Ford for Gucci black evening coat with black fox fur trim and black bowler hat, he definitely stands out against the white snow banks of Sundance.

At this point we try to get the star of our picture, Jey Crisfar, a 19-year-old ingénue from Brussels, into the party, but because he's underage, it's impossible. Utah is technically a dry state, so liquor laws are draconian: the drinking age is 21; you can't order doubles (you have to order a single with a sidecar, a shot on the side); and you can't mix more than two kinds of liquor in one drink. I guess we won't be drinking any Zombies!

We decide to split the party, just as Robert Lantos himself makes his grand entrance. His company, Maximum Films, is our sales agent, so I guess I should meet him, but right now we're just two ships that passed. During the day.

It's late afternoon, but I'm hungry and here in the boondocks, people eat early. We all walk down Main Street to Zoom, Robert Redford's restaurant here in Park City. We don't have a reservation, but Bruce had dined here last night and met Redford himself – and gave him a promotional postcard for our movie, which has a naked boy on it! – so he's already chummy with the maitre d' and we're quickly squired to a table for seven. Seven mojitos later, the food arrives, good hearty ski country fair, and we chow down like the Donner Party.

Saturday is our big day, the world premiere of Otto, so after dinner when everyone else goes to the premiere of Real Time, I decide to go back to our old-school seventies-style chalet and spend some time alone to meditate on my accomplishment, a film two years in the making from the beginning of writing until now. As fire figures prominently in the movie, I light one in the fireplace and gaze into the burning embers. It's nice sometimes to spend a romantic evening at home alone.

Day 3

Saturday is the world premiere of Otto; or, Up with Dead People, and I'm surprisingly calm. I've already shown the film to my husband, Antonio, who, trust me, is my harshest critic, and to Katharina Klewinghaus, the female lead of the picture, and they both really like it, so that's good enough for me. The rest is just gravy and stale popcorn.

In the afternoon Jeremy, my Otto, and I catch a movie called The Broken, a British horror movie about monstrous doppelgangers who break out of mirrors to murder and replace people. Think Invasion of the Body Snatchers meets Alice Through the Looking Glass. Despite its overabundance of horror clichés, it isn't half bad. Then again, that must mean it isn't half good.

After picking up my director's jacket and having lunch, Jeremy and I try to find a liquor store, trudging through slushy parking lots and a maze of snow banks. When I finally choose my booze for the Otto after-party and try to check out, the mean man at the cash register looks at us askance and asks Jeremy for I.D. I tell him he isn't 21, and the guy freaks out and tells us to get out of the store immediately because it's illegal for minors to even be on the premises. He informs me that we're on the surveillance cameras and that I shouldn't try to come back alone to buy booze today. That's Utah for you. For alcoholics, it's like the seventh circle of hell.

After a brief rest and a cocktail at the chalet, we change and get ready for our pre-screening dinner at a restaurant called The Windy Ridge. I've been invited to participate in a gathering which includes Isaac Julien (here with his new documentary on Derek Jarman), Tom Kalin (with his feature Savage Grace, starring Julianne Moore), Greg Araki (here to celebrate the 15th-anniversary reissue of his movie The Living End) and, apparently as kind of an afterthought, me. Marcus Hu of my usual U.S. distribution company, Strand Releasing, coordinated the event, and since all the filmmakers have Strand in common, and as we were all lumped together under the moniker New Queer Cinema in the early nineties, it only makes sense that the four of us, still crazy and going strong after all these years, should celebrate together.

When we get to the restaurant, however, it seems my entourage has been set up with a long table in an adjacent room next to the kitchen. Oh well. As a former farm boy, I'm always more comfortable with the help anyway. I do mingle in the main dining room with the other three filmmakers, each of whom I've known for many years, and we pose for photos together. When I bring Greg Araki over to our dining table in the sticks to say hello to everybody, he remarks, "Wow, this looks like the kids' table!" It's actually quite a smart way of looking at it: the kiddy table is always the most fun. Jeremy, who is a big fan of Greg's great movie Mysterious Skin, is thrilled to meet him. Tom Kalin also comes over and hangs out. He's very gracious and sweet. We reminisce about the time we both gave a talk on queer cinema at the Pompidou Center in Paris. I can't wait to see his hot new mother/son incest movie. It's his first film in fifteen years, and it already made quite a splash at Cannes.

Two more of my co-producers – my L.A. gallerist Javier Peres and my fellow Canadian artist and international art world It Boy Terence Koh – finally make their grand entrance. Terence is wrapped in an obscenely expensive black and white chinchilla and fox coat. Heady with excitement, we fast forward through our meal and head for the Library for our world premiere.

In the green room I'm still not nervous and I handle an interview with the French TV station Arte with aplomb, if I do say so. The next thing we know we're whisked onto the stage to present the movie. I calmly introduce everyone, including my director of photography, James Carman, who has just arrived from Brazil with some sort of awful virus he got on the plane. He can hardly stand up.

It's pretty much a typical Sundance screening for me. About a half an hour into the film, there is a scene in which one zombie f---s another zombie in the rotten hole in his stomach. On cue, entire rows of people stand up in unison and walk out. People always walk out of my screenings here, but sometimes it's difficult to distinguish between those suffering from brutally long days of film-watching (ours is a midnight screening) - festival burn-out, as it were - and those who are genuinely offended by the film or dislike it for other reasons. But for the majority who stay until the bitter end, there is a very enthusiastic response, judging by the lively Q and A. My best review so far, however, comes from a group of six straight teenage girls and boys who are waiting outside the theatre when I leave. Shari Frilot, the programmer who introduced the film, tells me she doesn't even know how they managed to get into the screening, which is restricted. As I pass they all yelled "Great movie!" and "That was awesome" and "Thanks for making that movie!" You can't ask for a better review than that.

Day 4

The second screening of Otto; or, Up with Dead People at Sundance, bloody Sundance is today at 3pm at the Egyptian theatre, my favourite venue in Park City. It's the location of the world premiere of my last movie, The Raspberry Reich, a historic old theatre with sconces featuring Egyptian pharaohs. It's the same theatre where Larry Clark's Kids made such a splash at Sundance back in 1995.

I'm almost late for my own screening, so I have to run up Main Street, which is on a relatively steep hill, to get there on time. As the elevation of Park City makes the oxygen a little thin, I arrive totally winded and sweaty. The theatre is full, and the screening, in a more intimate theatre, is much more successful than the premiere. The audience seems to be really into the film, with very few walkouts, although the gut-f---ing scene always manages to clear a few people out. I'm not sure if we've sold the film yet, but I'm not really focusing on that. For me it's more important to observe how it plays to audiences and how people respond afterwards.

The Q and A today is very positive and enthusiastic. Afterwards out on the street two fellows tell me outright that they like my zombie movie better than George Romero's Diary of the Dead. Considering I think that film is brilliant, I take it as quite the compliment.

After the screening I have a couple of drinks with my old friend Danny Vinick of Brink Media, who hails from Tuscon, Arizona. He tells me that he's attended Sundance every year for the past ten years except for last year, and that he thinks that the festival may have jumped the shark. I tend to agree: although I thoroughly appreciate being supported over the years by the festival, and although I think the core staff and programmers are amazing, it has become too commercial and "indie formulaic" for my tastes. Then again, I guess it's just reflecting the zeitgeist.

I get lost on the way back to my chalet in the hills of Park City, which kind of remind me of a snowy version of the Hollywood Hills. The streets are so convoluted that even the over-priced taxis here find it difficult to find their destinations.

Tonight is the dinner party being thrown by two of my co-producers, Bruce Bailey and Alfredo Ferran Calle, at their nearby chalet. Bruce is a notoriously good host, and his largesse is legendary, so of course he's pulled out all the stops, from baked brie to champagne to Remy Martin. He's hired a local chef and a hostess, who have laid out an amazing dinner for eight. Strangely, Bruce and Alfredo don't sit with us at the table, but rather hover around and tend to our needs and observe us from a distance. Later, Bruce informs us that his inspiration for the dinner has been the Luis Bunuel film The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. It's a classic Bruce Bailey touch.

Bruce is threatening to write a short memoir on his experiences and observations here called Death in Sundance. I can't go into details, but there are some backstage shenanigans going on that would be appropriate for the Thomas Mann treatment.

After dinner I smoke a joint and take a dip solo in the outdoor hot tub. I think it's the first time I've ever drunk champagne in a Jacuzzi. Good times. I look up at the moon and run over the events of the past few days in my head. I'm still a little hungover from the after party the night before, when we had fifteen or twenty people over after our premiere. Someone brought some party favours and we imbibed plenty of booze until the wee hours. Someone spilled beer on Terence Koh's chinchilla. It was quite the soiree.

Day 5

Okay, forget everything bad I've said about Sundance, because today I saw the film Patti Smith: Dream of Life, and then I watched her perform at the festival's music café, and it was magical. The film is an incredibly moving meditation on death and loss, shot by the director Steven Sebring in the style of a visual poem, in lush 16mm using only natural light. I dare you not to cry when Patti Smith talks about how the premature death of her brother became a positive force in her life, because his spirit opened and filled her heart like a flame, allowing her to absorb all his best qualities. Her reading of the Declaration of Independence followed by a brutally thorough recitation of all the heinous acts that George W. Bush has perpetrated against America is shockingly raw and powerful.

At the intimate concert, she and her band — including her son Jackson, who was standing in the corner of the stage because, she said, he'd been bad today — not only played some of her great songs (like Dancing Barefoot and Power to the People) but she also did amazing covers of Neil Young's Helpless and Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit, which had me in tears again. Her banter with the audience was warm and natural — like when she declared it was the altitude not drugs that was making her winded, or when she quipped that the circulation of air in your lungs changes "when you're 92!" (For the record, she's 61 and looks fantastic.) But my favourite moment was when she confessed she sometimes feels like Patty Duke in Valley of the Dolls — the part where Patty as a down and out Neely O'Hara hears her own song on a jukebox in a crummy bar and says to a stranger, "Hey, that used to be me!" I wanted to run up and kiss her when she quoted that. I did get a chance to speak to the director, a lovely man, and tell him that his film is beautiful.

On a less magical note I also dropped in on the Telefilm party at the Yarrow Hotel today with my star, Jey Crisfar. It was a fairly sober affair, although I did meet the Canadian Consul General of Utah, his son and his assistant. The latter two saw Otto; or, Up with Dead People and they really liked it. Others, however, definitely do not. I've already come across some over-the-top nasty reviews on a few horror websites, which was exactly what I was expecting, and rather hoping for. You know, zero stars, pretentious, that sort of thing. (I love when people call me pretentious.) I'm really getting tired of these horror dweebs. They're usually misogynists and homophobes who secretly (or not so secretly) get off on women being eviscerated and chopped up in crappy horror films. My friend Candy and I once did a satire of horror fanzines called Dumb Bitch Deserves To Die! because that's basically what some of them are thinking, and sometimes even blatantly writing. Actually it's all part of my strategy – to draw these straight horror jocks into my movie on the promise of a zombie plot and then torture them with sensitive gay love scenes and lesbian feminism. My diabolical plan is already working! Eviscerate the haters!

My co-producers Jennifer Jonas and Leonard Farlinger got some dispiriting news today. Apparently Alliance has reneged on their commitment to give a reasonable theatrical release to their excellent horse race film, All Hat. They're just going to dump it into two small theatres in Canada in order to score a quick TV sale. It's really disappointing when Canadian film industry types don't support their own artists. Filmmaking is already hugely complicated and challenging enough as it is without having to fight the very people who are supposed to be promoting and distributing your work. Nice going, Canada!

Day 6

After a good night's sleep, it's time to face the last dance at Sundance. It's hard to drag myself away from our cozy fireplace, but I'm scheduled to appear on a panel at the Queer Lounge entitled "Gay Filmmakers and Sexual Provocation," a subject upon which I do have a thing or two to say. My fellow panelists, Isaac Julien, here with his Derek Jarman doc, and Lesli Klainberg, who co-directed the TV series Indie Sex, are both quite agreeable. Kyle Buchanan, the Advocate film critic who conceived and moderated the panel, isn't afraid to dig into contentious subjects, like whether or not GLAAD — the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, and sponsor of the Queer Lounge — tries to censor or otherwise influence Hollywood scripts and teleplays. I've always vehemently and publicly opposed this strategy, and I do so again today. A representative from GLAAD denies that the organization still does this, and says that he is no longer in favour of his organization trying to act as a lobbyist to coerce "positive portrayals" of gays and lesbians out of Hollywood writers and producers. After all, as Isaac comments, "One man's treasure is another man's trash."

Just as the panel began, a rumour started to spread like wildfire through the room, and indeed, through the whole festival. Unhappily, it turns out to be true: Heath Ledger has been found dead in a New York apartment. First Brad Renfro, who was 25, dies just a few weeks ago, and now the 28-year-old Ledger is gone. And didn't Owen Wilson almost meet the same fate a couple of months ago? Drugs and depression seem to be rampant in young Hollywood these days. Like Emmaline Henry says to Mia Farrow in Rosemary's Baby, "A pain like that is a clear sign that something isn't right." Hollywood, heal thyself.

My co-producer Bruce Bailey is in fine form today. He informs me that he ran into William H. Macy in the chocolate store, talked him up and gave him our promotional card featuring the nude drawing of Otto by artist Christophe Chemin. Mr. Macy said it looked like an Aubrey Beardsley drawing. Smart man, because that was exactly the reference intended. Bruce is a fearless promoter of artists that he supports and respects (he's also the man behind the amazing Toronto artist Kent Monkman), so it's great to have him here to work his magic.

Bruce and his husband, Alfredo, and I are picked up after the panel by one David Berg, a Salt Like City denizen that Justin Strange, my DJ buddy, brought to our party the other night. Mr. Berg is a political activist and vegan who, at the age of 35, has already run for Utah state legislature twice. He is also a staunch supporter of Dennis Kucinich, and indeed his car has rather large Kucinich for President and Impeach Bush stickers on it. He informs us in his booming yet lilting voice on the trip down to Salt Lake City, where we have a Sundance screening of Otto tonight, that contrary to its conservative Mormon reputation, his city is one of the most progressive and leftist in the country. After showing us some of the local haunts, including a gorgeous little lefty library and tearoom called the BeeHive and a darling little dive of a gay bar called Radio City, I'm beginning to see what he means. David has a thing or two to say about Park City, the richest place in the entire state, and how Sundance tries to appease Salt Lakers with a few token screenings and events in the city to keep them at a distance. In reality, he says, they really don't want the people of Salt Lake City to come near Park City unless they work there, and indeed they won't even allow a bus line to run up to the exclusive resort. I'm fascinated by the local politics.

David may be right, but I have to say, as with Sundance four years ago, my Salt Lake screening is by far the most fun and enthusiastic: it's a full house of real, not festival, people; there are no walk-outs; and the audience is not afraid to show their love in the Q and A. Heady with success, we drive afterwards over to Justin's club night at a roadside tavern called Todd's Broken Record. We just make it for last call at one a.m., but as Justin has set aside a half-dozen pitchers of beer for us, we're able to party until the bitter end. The joint is jumping with crazy kids, and I've noticed that the females of Salt Lake in particular are quite fetching!

Not knowing how to take no for an answer, David drives us all the way back to Park City. We get a flat tire on the way, which means I don't get back to my chalet until well after 3am, and I have to be up in a few hours to catch my flight back to Toronto. It's been quite a ride: the most fun I've ever had at Sundance. We haven't sold the movie yet, but at least we've launched it with a splash. I guess that's about all you can ask for when you're trying to sell a melancholy political homo porno zombie movie.

Currently watching : Sunday Bloody Sunday Release date: 16 September, 2003

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