Tommy O’Haver | Billy’s Hollywood Screen Kiss / 1998

interesting and funny homosexuals

by Douglas Messerli

 

Tommy O’Haver (screenwriter and director) Billy’s Hollywood Screen Kiss / 1998

 

Roger Ebert’s 1998 review of Tommy O’Haver’s film Billy’s Hollywood Screen Kiss begins:

 

“We wouldn't be fascinated by a routine Hollywood love story simply because the leading characters were heterosexual; we'd want them to be something else besides, like interesting or funny. The same standard isn't always applied to gay-themed movies, which sometimes seem to be based on the idea that gayness itself is enough to make a character interesting. It isn't, and the best recent movies with gay characters (High Art and The Opposite of Sex) have demonstrated that.

     Billy's Hollywood Screen Kiss seems besotted by its sexuality, and wouldn't be able to pass this test: Would the film be interesting if it were about heteros? The story involves Billy (Sean P. Hayes), who announces at the outset, ‘My name is Billy, and I am a homosexual’ ....Billy tells us he grew up in Indiana (montage of old snapshots of tousle-headed lad squinting into camera), and now lives in Los Angeles, where he rooms platonically with a gal-pal named George, for Georgiana (Meredith Scott Lynn).”

 

     Over the years Ebert has often written very sensitively about LGBTQ films, and at some level his criticisms of O’Haver’s film are correct; but I might mention that both the films he names as examples of more complex gay-centered works of that period (1997-98) basically concern a number of figures unsure of their sexual orientation or hiding from the reality of it. And more importantly, if I were to ask him about how many successful films which were made “simply because the characters were heterosexual,” I should imagine he might have had to name so many thousands that he would have quickly abandoned the task. Whereas, I can at least aspire to watch all of the LGBTQ films made in cinema history, and the vast majority of those works are very much about gay, lesbian, and bisexual figures who struggled not to be identified as being anything other than heterosexual. How few of the major figures in LGBTQ films might even today blithely announce in the very first frames, “My name is Billy, and I am a homosexual,” even that sounding every bit like the truth demanded by those who participate in Alcoholics Anonymous, something expressed more out of guilty truth-telling than pleasure and joy.

    I can tell you that in 1998 such a statement still seemed somewhat revolutionary, and yes as a gay man I very much was interested in finding out more about Billy Collier simply because he was homosexual.

     The trouble is that we don’t find out that much more about the charming Billy played by Hayes. Although everyone in Billy’s world seems to know the Polaroid photographer quite well (one joyfully greeting him wherever he seems to go), we learn only that he wants a more serious and long-lasting relationship than the one he is currently in with Fernando (Armando Valdes-Kennedy), apparently a very good lover, but who is also in an open relationship with another, the two of them encouraging Billy even to join them in a threesome. Billy may be sure of his sexuality, but he is still a product of birth state Indiana when it comes to exploring polyamorous relationships. Such things weren’t even talked about much in 1998.

      We also soon discover that Billy has a very special friendship Georgiana (George)—a straight girl in love with the straightest of the straight, Andrew (Christopher Bradley)—who performs the important role for Billy that used to be described as a “fag hag,” a female best friend who loves a gay boy so much she’ll do nearly anything for him. And we soon discover that Billy has another good pal in a slightly older man, Perry (Richard Ganoung), a successful photographer who is even willing to play producer for Billy’s next project in which the broke cameraman hopes to recreate iconic screen kisses, snapped as Polaroid snapshots, using drag queens as the females and a cute new boy he’s just met in a coffee shop, Gabriel (Brad Rowe) as the male in iconic scenes such as Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr smooching in the returning tide in From Here to Eternity.

     And finally, we do realize that Billy has suddenly fallen head over heels in love—yes, even he would use such a worn-out cliché to describe it, and in his dreams performs a dance with him in manner of Fred Astaire—for Gabriel. Indeed, Billy is not truly the major character of this film, since the romantic Polaroid-carrying dreamer spends the rest of the film trying to determine whether or not Gabriel is straight or gay, and if he might be gay or even if he might become gay, whether Gabriel might be sexually interested in him.

      Such concerns may certainly not be of much interest to heterosexual audiences, but I can tell you they are of immense importance to LGBTQ people looking for someone to love or simply be with like themselves in a world in which there simply aren’t as many candidates as there are for heterosexual men and women.

       Gabriel, moreover, we gradually perceive is what LGBTQ people refer to as a “tease.” He keeps talking about his girlfriend back in San Francisco while dropping whole necklaces of pearls that he might like Billy and other boys, at one point even being willing to share a late night bed and a bit of petting until he decides he isn’t. Is the beautiful blonde-haired Brad Pitt stand-in toying with Billy or just having difficulty coming out? These are the questions about which Billy and his movie obsesses.

        It doesn’t help even if all those around him, including his best friends George and Perry insist he stop “projecting,” that he give up imagining that all cute boys might be gay. That, however, simply comes with the territory of a romantic homosexual still playing with a childhood toy camera  bought for him by a doting mother as a substitute for his being uninvited to a childhood friend’s birthday party after openly telling him that better than Playboy he liked magazines which showed naked men!

      His interest in Gabriel strangely helps the cute kid to hook up with another, far more successful photographer of male underwear ads, Rex Webster (the permanently over-the-top performer Paul Bartel), his giggling and fawning friend, and another figure at Webster’s art opening, Holly (Holly Woodlawn) who together take Gabriel into seemingly new territory.

       Ultimately, once Billy has finished his shoot, all paths lead to Catalina where Webster has taken Billy and a bevy of other briefly clad boys to shoot them in their skivvies, obviously hoping to draw one of them, preferably that angelic blonde into his bed.

        I certainly agree that this isn’t the most profound exploration of the gay scene, particularly since O’Haver’s world seems to be about as deep as Billy’s Hollywood memorabilia and a Calvin Klein wiene roast, but then that’s the way things always seem to be in Catalina, itself a gigantic tourist photo spread the locals have whipped up to lure in tourists.

      Georgiana, having broken up with the brain-starved Andrew gets an easy fuck from of a permanently drugged-out paramour, Gundy (Carmine D. Giovinazzo), the brother of her and Billy’s lesbian friend; Gabriel finds what he has known he was “supposed to want” all along, the love of or at least sex with another pretty underwear model; and Billy gets, well terribly heartbroken of course, going so far as to toss away his camera into the waves. But Georgiana realizes, when she can’t rid herself of Gundy, that she really loves Andrew. And Billy, after talking about his broken heart with Perry, finally gets his very own Hollywood kiss—from none other than Perry who explains that he too once had his heart set on a new young boy in town who wanted nothing to do with him, a kid from Indiana named Billy. And Gabriel...well, only time will tell.

     Meanwhile Billy’s new photo show is a big hit, several of his new works being purchased by Rex Webster himself—probably, one can imagine, as mock-ups for his next underwear shoot. And Billy finds himself a fresh new boy in town, Joshua (Robbie Cain) who deeply admires the “master’s” great art.

      I’d say that as a satire of gay love with a picture postcard vision of Hollywood, O’Haver’s movie ain’t that awful. And certainly it’s a good deal better than a dozen or so other heterosexual comedies that year which demonstrated the male’s obsession with an unobtainable woman, the subject also, incidentally—a far more profound 1998 movie, I’ll grant—of Shakespeare in Love, and in which great ado was also made about the sex orientation of the central characters.

      And finally, let me add, I do find Billy not only “interesting” but very “funny.”

 

Los Angeles, May 9, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2022).