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Film screenings have several purposes: often
the screening benefits a good cause, and usually there’s an
after-party (frequently with open bar, and hopefully munchies, if
not a sit-down dinner), and best of all, you get to trump your
friends, saying, “I already caught that—at a screening.” As for the
quality of the film itself, cross your fingers. Sometimes the best
that can be said is that at least the audience didn’t toss popcorn
at the screen. Such was the case at the
Miami Gay and Lesbian Film
Festival’s screening of
The Walker, where even after only ten
minutes of
Woody Harrelson’s egregious Southern drawl, most members
of the audience seemed as desirous as we were of moving on to the
open bar—I mean, after-party.
The latest addition to
Paul Schrader’s “night
worker” oeuvre (comprising his screenplay for
Taxi Driver, as
well as his direction of 1980’s
American Gigolo and 1992’s
Light Sleeper),
The Walker positions another of
Schrader’s male “misfits” in a culture which threatens to eat him
whole—but unlike the mesmerizing
Gere in
Gigolo or
DeNiro in
Taxi Driver,
Woody Harrelson’s Carter Page
III
seems closer to
Woody in Toy Story: he’s wooden and unreal.
His depiction of a gay man appears to have lifted from an
unpublished
Truman Capote novella. That accent—heavens! As if he
were just learning to speak again after a near-fatal accident.
In early February 1980,
American Gigolo
was released. It was not the first film about sex workers, but it
was certainly the biggest film with the most buzz about sex workers
who were male. In
San
Francisco, where I was living, the opening night lines circled the
block.
Richard Gere was fresh off the success of his moody triumphs
in
Looking for Mr. Goodbar and
Days of Heaven. The
soundtrack was by disco wiz
Giorgio Moroder, with
Deborah Harry of
Blondie singing “Call Me”—and the costumes by a little-known Italian
designer by the name of
Giorgio Armani. And on that chilly San
Francisco night, the boys had come out in droves—wearing their
individualized versions of that iconic film poster of a slouchy
Gere
with his soft-shouldered
Armani blazer. Everyone wanted to be a
hustler that night.
Schrader’s
Gigolo was probably a
watershed moment in the legitimization of the sex worker, and
pornography, industry in American society. Alas, no cultural moment
seems destined to be captured in
Schrader’s latest work.
And so on to the after-party at
Angler’s
Resort, which, interestingly enough is located on a section of
Washington Avenue once better known for sex workers than boutique
resorts. The new owners are committed to cleaning up the
neighborhood (which should be joy to the ears of the owners of the
Astor Hotel, the lone redoubt of chi-chi digs in a nabe customarily
assaulted by night’s more colorful characters) and, to their credit,
the restaurant
Maison d’Azur is already bringing a bit of the French
Riviera to a strip of Washington more accustomed to looking like the
seedier parts of Marseilles. The sleek interior design has been
done by J. Wallace Tutt, the eye behind Versace’s Casa Casuarina on
Ocean, and at the after-party, the brand-new Pool House, with its
triplex villas, had been commissioned to serve as one of the party’s
bars—with a bartender named Ariel who brought
Richard Gere’s Julian
Kaye right back to mind. Which only goes to prove: good things do
come around again, even if in slightly different forms.
Best always,
Mark and Robert
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