Get used to it

The Cambridge Queer Fest '98 honors Dirk

by Scott Heller

THE CAMBRIDGE QUEER FEST '98, At the Harvard Film Archive June 5 through 16.

There was a lot to love about Boogie Nights, but one of director Paul Thomas Anderson's sharpest moves was to set a loss-of-innocence story firmly within the world of porn filmmaking. Dirk Diggler's best years begin as a performer under the watchful eye of father figure/director Jack Horner. They were family. And cheesy or not, smut peddlers in the 1970s did believe there was more to their movies than the sex. Then the video revolution hit and the industry got wise. Churning 'em out was far more profitable than spending time on lighting or, Lord knows, a story. Guys like Dirk, directors like Burt Reynolds's Jack -- they were dinosaurs.

The Cambridge Queer Fest '98 (which is running over the next week and a half at the Harvard Film Archive) embellishes this morality tale through the clever pairing of a glossy softcore film from back then, Radley Metzger's 1972 Score, with an up-to-the-minute documentary on the business now, Ronnie Larsen's Shooting Porn. Like Jack Horner, Metzger is the porn producer as auteur. His films have the high sheen of a Technicolor musical. They think they're art.

Score is a delicious artifact from the swinging '70s. In a house above the Baltic Sea, deep in "the village of Pleasure," Jack and Elvira lure young couples who want to toss off middle-class inhibitions. Their latest playthings are Betsy, still suffering the after-effects of a Catholic education, and Eddie, her smily blond husband. (He's played by an actor named Calvin Culver, who went on to later fame as the gay porn star Casey Donovan. Good career move, Calvin.)

Elvira and Jack can be boring company, forever declaring their sexual independence. "I'd jump in the sack with a porcupine if it struck my fancy," Jack says. And the quartet of actors aren't really up to the arch banter, though Claire Wilbur, as Elvira, has her moments. Yet the look and feel of Score are a blast, especially the soundtrack, which is destined for a lounge near you. The film builds to a fantasy costume party where the wives get nasty upstairs and the husbands find each other, more tentatively, on the shag carpet in the living room. Trippy editing and shots reflected in mylar, mirrors, and glass tabletops make this Metzger's tour de force. Unfortunately, Score opened in theaters just as hardcore demanded more (or is that less?). The film disappeared quickly. But if blaxploitation can find an audience again, so can sexploitation, and Score.

Contemporary porn directors Chi Chi LaRue and Gino Colbert could retool Score for the '90s in a hot minute. These guys run a tight ship, as they demonstrate behind the scenes of Shooting Porn. "Grab it and snap it for me, Brian," Chi Chi demands, eyes fixed on a video monitor off set. "We can't have that slapping," Gino warns his actors as they get busy on a staircase. This is a "real vanilla" production, he reminds them. "They'll cut all that out."

If Score is all soft-focus and artsy camerawork, Shooting Porn is blunt and no-frills. In a crisp 75 minutes, it tells you just about everything you'd want to know about the gay porn biz. You'll meet Rip, the aging frat boy whose insistence that he's just "gay for pay" doesn't wash with his co-workers. You'll learn how top stars keep it up under the hot lights. You'll hear from marketers who design the all-important video-box covers, and reviewers who believe it's their duty to keep consumers from being ripped off.

You won't hear too much about drugs or AIDS, but Shooting Porn doesn't wish them away, either. And in the British-born actor Blue Blake, the film has its most articulate spokesman. "Porn for me is part of the journey," he says, his blue eyes turning wistful, his huge tattoo'd shoulders relaxing. Dirk Diggler would be proud. Shooting Porn is screening with Oscar-nominated animator Barry Purvis's short "Achilles," whose story of the love between Greek heroes Achilles and Patroklos is narrated by Derek Jacobi.

One day Mark Rappaport might just deconstruct Marky Mark's film career, as he did with a hunk of an earlier generation in Rock Hudson's Home Movies. Until then, we'll have to make do with The Silver Screen/Color Me Lavender (1997), Rappaport's mishmashy look at Hollywood's golden age. In an effort "to show gay overtones in seemingly innocent images," Rappaport has assembled a fabulous array of clips. Hope and Crosby, Martin and Lewis -- these comic duos will never look quite the same. Decked out in drag or, in one sequence, a pink sequined Nehru jacket, Hope is a charter member of Pee-wee's Playhouse. But Rappaport frustrates by never identifying the clips. Instead we get Dan Butler of Frasier cleverly inserted into some of the images, and never shy about telling us what we're seeing and what it means. Rappaport could take a cue from the "masters of insinuation and innuendo" who queered uptight Hollywood. Show, don't tell.

In today's queer cinema, gay culture is so much taken for granted that a film like Leather Jacket Love Story (1997) can depict its lead character's LA journey -- from West Hollywood all the way to Silverlake -- as some kind of rite of passage. Director David DeCoteau's vision of Silverlake as an artsy wonderland, where a drag-queen chorus dishes out wisdom, is a nice idea. But it's not well served by the gritty black-and-white cinematography. And Sean Tataryn is grating in the impossible part of Kyle, an aspiring poet who flees West Hollywood and finds love -- and a muse -- in a carpenter named Mike.

Fans of Takeshi "Beat" Kitano (Fireworks, Sonatine) have been waiting to see the taciturn Japanese actor/director play gay in Gonin, the 1995 yakuza drama that's slowly making its way to American screens. That he plays a hitman is old news. But even though Kitano doesn't appear till midway through director Takashi Ishii's violent phantasmagoria, Gonin is a must-see. The director's experience as a manga comic-book artist is in full flower, and every homoerotic subtext in John Woo is here pushed to extremes. Naoto Takenaka is memorable as the unhinged Ogiwara, a laid-off executive with a spastic giggle. Gonin follows the 1997 drama Bugis Street, Yonfan's colorful if sketchy melodrama about an innocent 16-year-old who leaves her village and comes to Singapore to work as a maid in a hotel that, it turns out, is home to the transsexuals and transvestites who operate in the red-light district.

The Cambridge Queer Fest '98 is curated by George Mansour. For more information call 495-4700 or visit http://www.harvardfilmarchive.org.)

THE LINE-UP

June 5

7 p.m.: Score
9 p.m.: Shooting Porn/"Achilles"

June 6

7 p.m.: Leather Jacket Love Story
9 p.m.: Shooting Porn/"Achilles"

June 7

7 p.m.: Shooting Porn/"Achilles"
9 p.m.: Score

June 8

7 p.m.: Bugis Street
9 p.m.: Gonin

June 9

7 p.m.: Leather Jacket Love Story
9 p.m.: Shooting Porn/"Achilles"

June 10

7 p.m.: Leather Jacket Love Story
9 p.m.: Shooting Porn/"Achilles"

June 11

7 p.m.: Shooting Porn/"Achilles"
9 p.m.: Leather Jacket Love Story

June 13

3 p.m.: The Silver Screen/Color Me Lavender

June 14

3 p.m.: The Silver Screen/Color Me Lavender

June 15

8 p.m.: The Silver Screen/Color Me Lavender

June 16

8 p.m.: The Silver Screen/Color Me Lavender