Coming out of ‘The Celluloid Closet’
A look back at the landmark LGBTQ documentary with co-director Jeffrey Friedman
By Lissa Townsend Rodgers
Released just over two decades ago, the documentary The Celluloid Closet begins in the silent era and traces the depictions of gay characters in film through the medium’s first century, from cringe-inducing stereotypes to more fully realized portrayals. The film is a wise, witty education in LGBTQ culture and film history that includes a dizzying array of film clips to back up its premise, as well as insightful (and sometimes hilarious) interviews with the likes of Harvey Feinstein, Quentin Crisp, Susan Sarandon and Tom Hanks. Tribeca Shortlist recently spoke with co-director Jeffrey Friedman about finding clips, corralling interviewees and how the Internet would have made things easier.
One thing that stands out about the movie is that it’s educational, it’s political, but it’s also fun. Was it hard to find that tone?
That actually was dictated by Vito Russo’s book. He did a slide and clip show presentation that he toured around with. His tone was activist and angry, but his love of the movies was really the driving energy of his presentation and what made it so entertaining. I would say the tone we struck was following the lead of Vito. The most important thing was that the movie be entertaining.
The movie was based on Vito Russo’s book; he approached you about doing a film. How was working off of someone else’s idea different from your usual process?
The genesis of every film is different, this one we sort of slowly worked our way into. Vito came to us — it must have been around ’89 or ’90 when we were finishing Common Threads, in which he was one of the storytellers of the AIDS quilt. He’s an old friend and he kept enlisting our help in getting The Celluloid Closet made into a movie. We said we’d help him write proposals, we went to a couple of meetings, the project didn’t really get traction and it seemed like a complicated film to attack because of all of the clips and the rights. And how do you make a film out of it? The book is really kind of an argument, it’s kind of a rant…. we started coming up with ways to approach the project from a story point of view and we put together a reel. It really took a while.
How did you choose the interview subjects for the movie?
We wanted to get a cross-section of the film crafts. Certainly, we wanted to get actors, because that’s who people want to see the most. But also we wanted to get directors, producers and studio people, all of the people who were in one way responsible for creating these images, who consciously or unconsciously created this mythic idea of what gay people are. So we went through the lists of credit on the films, we started with the stars and we basically went for everybody, knowing that most of them would say no.
Once a few people came on board, then other people saw it was an interesting and reputable project to get involved in. The same was true for getting the studios to come on board with the clips. Our executive producer Howard Rosen, was going to studio heads and once we’d gotten one studio — I think the first one was Columbia. We’d already gotten a clip from them for Common Threads, so they knew us and were willing to make a favored-nation deal with us for those clips and so Howard was able to go to all of the other studios and say, “Columbia’s doing it, don’t you want to do it too?”
Would it be easier to make this film now, with the internet to do research and track down clips?
Today it’s hard to imagine the process we went through, it was so cumbersome. We had fax machines! We relied a lot more on archivists. I think eventually we’d still end up at the doors of some film archives….
There were always different archivists who thought, “Oh, that sounds interesting.” And they’d remember some clip they had come across. Especially some of the early silent section — it was something somebody at a film archive had seen and just thought of when we called him about some other clip from a different movie.
So a lot of other people gave you ideas, as well as the people working on The Celluloid Closet?
People we had working on the film, the editors… they were like film buffs, founts of information. They were the kind of people who had seen so many movies on TV and on tape, they knew all the supporting casts, the production designers, who did the hair and the costumes, so they were also a great source.
It sort of became a community effort as people heard about the project and wanted to get back to us about some film that somebody had heard of. And some of them came up in the course of our interviews. We talked to Tom Hanks about Philadelphia and we asked him the question we asked everybody which was: What was the first gay image you remember seeing in movies? He told us about seeing this movie, Vanishing Point… he told this great story about being a teenager embarrassed by all the homo references and making fun of them. It became a great little moment in the film, but it wasn’t something we were planning to do.
What was the first gay image you remember seeing in the movies?
One of the earliest ones I remember being aware of — I’m sure because I was just figuring out my sexuality when I saw it — it was Rock Hudson in Giant, which is not a gay character. I went to the movie, I remember I was with my mother and I remember being intensely embarrassed by the way Rock Hudson was shot — there were these shots on him, low-angle shots from the floor looking up between his knees. Homosexual anxiety! I think the first gay image I saw that made me happy, that made me feel good about myself, was Cabaret. That was kind of the breakthrough film of my growing up.
Looking back now, is there anything about the film you would change, or anything you would add?
Towards the end of The Celluloid Closet, I would make different choices because I’d have more to choose from. I think thematically…. In terms of the story of the evolution of gay images, I guess I would broaden out and move to television and cable. Right about the time the movie came out, HBO was just starting original programming, a lot of gay characters were appearing quickly, much more quickly than in movies. I think if I were making one that ended today, there would be a shift around the millennia as we move toward TV, cable and streaming.
