IF I COULD BE A TEEN POP STAR: An interview with Boychick director Glenn Gaylord. By Warren Curry 4/24/02 Part 2 of 3

Photos Courtesy of Brad Bergman

What were some lessons you learned while making Lost Cause that you brought to Boychick?

I honestly have to say that you try to bring lessons from one film to the other, but you're really reinventing the wheel every single time. As prepared as I was, the situation was different. It was a different ballgame with different considerations in regard to scheduling and shots and preparation. If anything, I just learned to calm down and enjoy the process. I really had a lot of fun on Boychick and even though there were far more roadblocks -- Lost Cause was a relatively easy shoot and Boychick was fraught with one thing after another -- I was able to just enjoy it. When we had to consolidate shots and compromise and not really ever able to get that wish list, that was o.k. with me, because I was happy with what we were getting. I enjoyed the process of consolidating shots -- it actually makes you a better storyteller. Instead of having to get coverage from five different angles, figure out how to do it from one and see how it plays out. That was a really fun learning experience.

You've been to a number of festivals with both of your films. Have there been any particularly memorable festival experiences you can tell us about?

With Boychick the San Francisco Gay and Lesbian Film Festival was far and away the greatest festival experience yet. They screened Boychick in the most popular program festival, in the first slot, in the Castro Theater, which holds about 1600 people. It was sold out, the audience was cheering it and imitating it when they were coming out of the theater. I couldn't have asked for better support or response on either end. It was the highlight of my whole film career so far. As far as film festivals that I didn't attend, which I wish I did: Concurrently, the Seattle Film Festival was happening at the same time as the San Francisco one and I made a choice of which one to go to. I won the Seattle festival and I would've liked to have seen that! I would've liked to have enjoyed that experience, but that doesn't take anything away from how great it was in San Francisco.

Lost Cause is informed by your personal experience working at an organization similar to the one depicted in the film. Talk a bit about that.

I worked for many years at an AIDS organization and saw that there was this huge bureaucracy getting in the way of helping people. All I was hearing from people who were calling up was, "Where does the money go? What do you guys do? How come nobody ever returns my phone calls? I can never get anyone on the phone." I wanted to say something about it because I wanted to be part of the solution and felt that this was an area that nobody had covered. I thought that the whole AIDS theme had been played out in film to the point where all you saw were tinkly, piano music, disease movie of the week. They weren't effective, they weren't good and there was nothing interesting about them. I wanted to make an AIDS film for people who were sick of AIDS films. I wrote a script about it -- it sort of came out in this flurry over a very short period of time -- and now, 17 drafts later, am still writing it and shopping it around. It became very obvious that the powers that be, the gatekeepers, didn't really want to approach this subject matter and they were really turned off by it. That just sent a message to me that it was something worth doing. The next step was to make a short. People needed to see what the tone of this is -- that it can be comedic, there can be some quality to this and it can appeal to more people than what they initially thought. The script really came out of being on hold with the cable company, just trying to question my bill. I got transferred around so much, it's so frustrating and I knew everybody goes through this, everybody can relate to that, but if I want to raise the stakes, I'm going to need to apply this to something a little more dire than the cable company. That's how the idea came about.

In Lost Cause the subject matter that you target is obviously very serious. Have any audiences been offended by the film?

So I've heard, but nobody's come up to me and said so. There have been a couple of film festivals that have said, "Our audience wouldn't go for this." That's fine and you're dealing in the film world where you never really get a direct, honest answer from people, so you have to sort of infer it. I think that I'm not all that welcome in certain sections of Phoenix, if I remember correctly. Again, my whole attitude is that if there's an elephant in the room I'm going to talk about it and hopefully it'll bring about some good. A lot of AIDS organizations have expressed the need to use Lost Cause as a training film of what not to do. That's the best compliment I could get; they see that there is something productive in there.

Both of your films focus largely on gay characters. Do you feel we're moving closer to a time when films with gay characters won't be considered primarily for a niche audience and will cross over to a broader range of viewers?

I think we're already there. I'll use television as an example: Queer As Folk has a very large straight female following. Six Feet Under has better ratings than The Sopranos and there's a large gay sensibility to that show. The success of a sitcom like Will & Grace, the fact that Rosie O'Donnell came out, etc. People are easily able to talk about it, instead of whispering about it now that the crossover potential has been realized. Now I think that "gay filmmakers," whatever that means, whether it's a straight person making a gay film or vice-versa, just need to make better films. There's been a lot of crap. I think people became too focused on the issue of being gay, as separate from anything else that can occur in life. They wanted to make a point and I think it became really boring and really stale fairly quickly. I would just like to see sensibilities that reflect better storytelling or better sense of the world out there and how this fits into the world.

The first time I saw Boychick, the only comparison I could come up with was Todd Solondz. When I saw it a second time, that comparison didn't really hold up. With that said, what are some of your influences?

I'll name some films that I like and you probably won't see the connection, because I really think my major influence was my mother. My mother was a writer and she taught me the love of writing and the love of creating things. She was a writer, a painter and I was always around that and she really encouraged self-expression. I think my sense of humor came from her, being the youngest of eight children and having a really wild upbringing that fostered creativity. I love Network, Aliens, The Birds, Paper Moon, which is one of my favorite comedies from the 70's. Then I also love things like Sunset Boulevard and All About Eve, which I think are great satires.

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