The Celluloid Closet (Special Edition)

Starring:Lily Tomlin, Tony Curtis, Susie Bright, Arthur Laurents, Armistead Maupin, Whoopi Goldberg, Jan Oxenberg, Harvey Fierstein, Quentin Crisp, Richard Dyer, Jay Presson Allen, Mrs. Gustav Ketterer, Gore Vidal, Will H. Hays, Farley Granger, Paul Rudnick, Shirley MacLaine, Barry Sandler, Mart Crowley, Antonio Fargas
Director: Jeffrey Friedman, Rob Epstein
Studio: Sony Pictures
Product Type: DVD

Product Description

What "That's Entertainment" did for movie musicals, THE CELLULOID CLOSET does for Hollywood homosexuality, as this exuberant, eye-opening movie serves up a dazzling hundred-year history of the role of gay men and lesbians have had on the silver screen. Lily Tomlin narrates as Oscar®-winning moviemaker Rob Epstein (The Times of Harvey Milk and Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt) and Jeffrey Friedman assemble fabulous footage from 120 films showing the changing face of cinema sexuality, from cruel stereotypes to covert love to the activist triumphs of the 1990s. Tom Hanks, Susan Sarandon, Whoopi Goldberg, Tony Curtis, Harvey Fierstein and Gore Vidal are just a few of the many actors, writers and commentators who provide funny and insightful anecdotes.

Format: DVD MOVIE

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Author Armistead Maupin (Tales of the City) wrote Lily Tomlin's narration for this superb documentary, based on a book by the late Vito Russo, about Hollywood's treatment of homosexual characters in the 20th century. Never pointing a finger at anyone in the film community, The Celluloid Closet presents clips from more than 100 mainstream features (including The Children's Hour, Advise and Consent, The Boys in the Band, and The Hunger) that speak loudly in their respective images of gays and lesbians. The film makes a persuasive case for patterns of sexual mythology in Hollywood, such as presenting homosexuals repeatedly as tragic, helpless figures redeemed only through death or as back-street monsters cavorting in the shadows. Things change, of course, and clips from more recent films by gay and lesbian filmmakers suggest a more vital, diverse, autobiographical approach. There are lots of great interviews with screenwriters (Gore Vidal), filmmakers (John Schlesinger), actors (Tom Hanks, Whoopi Goldberg), and others to enunciate the major themes. --Tom Keogh

Customer Reviews:

A Must-See if You're Human.......2007-05-04

Where do I start? THE CELLULOID CLOSET is wonderful...it details the history of the portrayal of homosexuality in Hollywood. As a bisexual, it reached me on an almost cellular level because it was outlining something that I already knew. It's something that everyone should see in order to understand the true pervasiveness of heterosexism in our society. It also shows where a few of those roots may have come from - mainly censorship.

In the thirties, the Catholic Church in cooperation with the U.S. government instituted the Hays code, which put strict censorship limits on Hollywood films. This contributed to homosexuality being a taboo subject, and created a world in which generations were to grow up - one where homosexuality was coded, ignored, marginalized, and portrayed negatively if there at all. Society was stunted.

This pain is an inextricable part of the film, but it also manages to be entertaining and eye-opening for straight audiences. I'd recommend it for people who don't quite understand how pervasive homophobia and heterosexism are in our society. If you don't get it by watching this film, I'm not sure that I can help you.

Hollywood's Homophobia Exposed.......2007-03-19

In his groundbreaking book, The Celluloid Closet, gay activist Vito Russo argued that Hollywood's past harbored an abysmal record of portraying gay people on screen. Images of GLBT people in countless films of the classic era have subtly or not-so-subtly managed to malign, condemn, or misrepresent gay people in a manner that, in retrospect, is utterly mind-boggling. Using interviews and especially film clips, Mr. Russo's basic argument is well supported in this excellent 1996 film adaptation of his book.

The documentary includes in-depth interviews with screenwriters Jay Presson Allen, Arthur Laurents, Gore Vidal, Paul Rudnick, Barry Sandler, Mart Crowley, and writer / actor Harvey Fierstein, as well as actors Tony Curtis, Shirley MacLaine, Antonio Fargas, Susan Sarandon, Tom Hanks, Whoopie Goldberg, Harry Hamlin, writer Quentin Crisp, director John Schlesinger and others.

The film begins by demonstrating the early prominence of the Hollywood "sissy". Shirley MacLaine observes that, "The sissy made everyone feel more manly, or more womanly, by occupying the space in between". But the relatively innocuous sissy soon gave way to Hollywood's penchant for presenting GLBT culture as a shadowy world of villains, subversives, and the mentally ill. The best we could hope for was that some sympathetic director might tone down the images of gays as sick and evil, a rendering that was more or less dictated by the censorship codes that were in force for much of the first hundred years of Hollywood history. By the late 1940's, Hollywood's version of gay people was as unrealistic and damaging as any propaganda ever wielded against any minority, anywhere, and the film proves that Hollywood maligned, marginalized and demonized an already disenfranchised minority. As Lily Tomlin says early on in the narration, "Hollywood, that great maker of myth, taught straight people what to think about gay people, and gay people what to think about themselves".

The powers that be were not content merely to ridicule us with the Franklin Pangborns and the Edward Everett Hortons of the art deco era. In the late 1940s and 1950s, Hollywood "grew up" and allowed "more realistic" depictions of gays and lesbians - which meant that for the next twenty-five years or so, we were portrayed as deviates, murderers, child molesters, or - if we were lucky - just plain seedy characters living on the fringe, almost always menacing, and never to be trusted. This period was followed by the "breakthrough" films of the late sixties - including such controversial attention-getters as The Killing of Sister George and The Boys in The Band. Meanwhile, lesser-remembered but influential films like Walk on The Wild Side, Advise and Consent, and The Detective continued to present us as pathetic and self-hating, occasionally benign but almost always sick. The most sympathetic storylines could be expected to paint us as hopelessly unhappy and maladjusted "problems of society," instead of simply showing us as what we are - people. One of the more brilliant sequences in the film employs a lengthy string of film excerpts to show how the word "faggot" has been casually bantered about the silver screen, in a manner that would have brought outrage had Hollywood dared utilize such a pejorative term in such a pervasive manner for any other minority. During this same period, Great Britain had a slightly better track record, with such genuinely sympathetic films as Victim and The Trials of Oscar Wilde.

The first light at the end of this bleak tunnel began in the 1970s with the emergence of more daring independent productions. In the past thirty-five years, hundreds of "Indy" GLBT films have catered to an ever-growing audience of gay people, who refuse to accept the malignant depictions that mainstream films have shoved down our throats for the better part of a century. Instead, GLBT viewers flocked to see more accurate representations of themselves than ever before, in films such as A Very Natural Thing, Making Love, Beautiful Thing, It's My Party, Jeffrey, It's In The Water, Parting Glances, Bargirls, The Watermelon Woman, Claire of the Moon, The Laramie Project, and Ma Vie en Rose.

For a while, Hollywood responded to our newfound and respectable popularity by producing a few movies that tried not to offend GLBT people and, at the same time, hold on to a straight or mixed audience. Frequently, it was the results that were mixed, not the audience. GLBT audiences went hoping to finally see accurate depictions of themselves, and straight audiences stayed away in droves. The big budget "gay" Hollywood films sometimes worked fine (Wilde, Philadelphia, Gods and Monsters, Personal Best, and, well, The Celluloid Closet all spring to mind), but, as often as not, Hollywood's attempts to woo a gay audience while holding the interest of heterosexuals just didn't work at all. The Birdcage, Stonewall, Kiss Me Guido, The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, In and Out and Flawless were all either too bland, too banal, too full of stereotypes, or too patronizing. Many were as insulting as the "sissies" of days gone by. For a while, it didn't seem possible to make a gay film that could manage to entertain straight audiences yet not insult its gay audience at the same time. Many of us began to demand more. The formula for GLBT entertainment had to be able to appeal to everybody, or what good was it? And how can the GLBT community ever reap the benefits of accurate portrayals of our lives on film, if we are the only people who see them?

As if in answer to these questions, since the release of The Celluloid Closet, an even more radical trend has emerged, that is, the inclusion of positive gay images in otherwise mainstream heterosexual movies. It started subtly; such films as Four Weddings and a Funeral, The Color Purple, Personal Best and As Good As It Gets finally arrived at a place we needed to be all along, presenting realistic, positive images of gay people, carefully integrated into the plots of otherwise heterosexual movies. This has been supplemented by gay movies that, thanks to their critical acclaim, have reached a wider mainstream audience (The Wedding Banquet, Swoon, The Living End). Now that the floodgates are open, I believe that this trend will be unstoppable. We have already had an Academy Award winner for Best Picture (American Beauty) that managed to present realistic gay people while condemning homophobia, and all within the context of a predominantly heterosexual plot. And the Academy's snub of Brokeback Mountain didn't keep a largely heterosexual audience from seeing it, loving it and, most importantly, learning from it.

This past year has seen even more gay characters inserted into otherwise heterosexual plotlines; Capote, Quinceñera, Shortbus, Infamous, Running With Scissors and The Night Listener all had gay characters who were central to the plot. Hopefully this trend will continue, and as GBLT people integrate themselves more fully into society, so too will their images be seamlessly added to American cinema.

An interesting and informative on the history of the portrayal of gays in the movies.......2006-09-16

I had been intending to see this documentary pretty much from the time it first came out until recently when I finally did see it. I was both pleased and surprised that it completely restricted itself to an analysis of the images that appeared onscreen and disappointed that in the end not much was really said of any depth. So, I was in the odd state of being relieved that it was not a bad film like it had the chance to be (by delving into speculations about the sex lives of famous Hollywood personalities) but that it wasn't quite as good as I hope it would be.

I had wondered beforehand if the film would cover such topics as the frequent speculation about Cary Grant and Randolph Scott (for which there is amazingly little evidence; the basis for their having been lovers seems to rest almost exclusively on their having roomed together for many years); the rivalries between the Cole Porter set in Hollywood and the Noel Coward set; efforts to hide the bi-, homo-, or pansexuality of actors such as Errol Flynn, Robert Taylor, Laurence Olivier, Danny Kaye, Tyrone Power (all of whom were in fact one of the three); or the proclivities of various actresses. In fact, there was astonishingly little comment on the sexual orientations of the various people in Hollywood. Instead, the entire film deals almost exclusively with images on the screen and only on the screen. This, however, turns out to be far more interesting than a voyeuristic plumbing of the sex lives of the stars. Being a movie buff I had, of course, seen a number of obviously gay characters in the movies. Joel Cairo in THE MALTESE FALCON is merely one of the better known. The documentary is at its finest when it unearths many gay and lesbian images from films of the twenties, thirties, forties, and fifties, decades in which self-censorship limited what could be shown in the movies. Some of these images will be familiar to anyone who has seen many films, such as Mrs. Danvers in REBECCA (those it should be pointed out that even as it is the movie tremendously mutes the lesbianism that is far more blatant in the novel). Many others will be far less familiar. The number of scenes with unmistakable homosexual scenes will, I believe, surprise most people who have seen a lot of movies. The most interesting moment may have been when Gore Vidal admits that he and William Wyler decided that Ben-Hur and Messala had been lovers. Stephen Boyd was informed of this and he acted his half of the relationship with this in mind, while Wyler and Vidal decided not to tell the rather conservative Heston of any of this.

In the end, limiting the discussion of homosexuality to the images on the screen somewhat limited the scope of the documentary. I'm not quite sure what ultimate point they were trying to make, unless it is the somewhat trivial one that gays have been treated negatively in the movies, though that has improved somewhat in recent years. Not knowing what their ultimate goal in the film was, I can't say whether they achieved it.

Still, despite an ambiguity at the heart of the film about what they were trying to accomplish, this remains a very interesting film. It is narrated by Lily Tomlin. At the time of its first presentation on HBO the story was widely circulated that she had informally agreed to come out of the closet at the time the film was first shown. At the last minute she seems to have a change of heart. She remains to this day the most poorly closeted person in the United States. To me this points to a perhaps even more interesting story: the way that actors and actresses and directors have stayed closeted over the decades. For every Rupert Everett and Ian McKellan there have been forty actors to stay closeted. That ongoing struggle between maintaining a public image while living a very different life privately is one I find fascinating.

All in all, this is a very good documentary. I definitely recommend it.

Above average movie.......2006-08-14

This movie is about how homosexuals has been portrayed in movies over time. In the early years they were made fun of. Mostly men being sissies. But that didn't seem as bad as when the '50s and early '60s when they were shown as pathetic creatures who lived a miserable existence and deserved to die. How hard it must have been if you were gay or lesbian growing up in those times! Then the '70s and early '80s they were mostly villains. Finally we are starting to make realistic films of gay life. And I for one sees that as a good thing.

It's a good movie for historical information and for open minded people.

a valuable documentary.......2006-07-09

To me, this film is worth owning, not just renting to see once. One only wishes it could be updated continually, especially to include 2005's Brokeback Mountain. However, it has so many gems that I recommend it for gathering so much history together.

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The Celluloid Closet

ProductGroup: DVD
Binding: DVD

The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies
The Making of a Gay and Lesbian Community: Before Stonewall
Out of the Past: The Struggle for Gay and Lesbian Rights in America
Paris Is Burning
The Wedding Banquet

ASIN: B000BUOU3W

Product Description

A documentary surveying the various Hollywood screen depictions of homosexuals and the attitudes behind them throughout the history of North American film.

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