The Wrap Article: Lesbian Director Lisa Cholodenko Responds To Backlash From Lesbian Community About Her Film The Kids Are All Right!!!
Director to Lesbians: ‘Kids Are All Right’ Not Irresponsible
“Some people in the lesbian community think that it’s not a good thing to explore a lesbian that wants to have an affair with a man,” said Lisa Cholodenko about the blowback she’s received over her touching and often hilarious movie, “The Kids Are All Right.”
“It didn’t seem irresponsible or reckless or like I was damaging any community.”
Cholodenko and her writing partner Stuart Bloomberg stopped by the ArcLight in Sherman Oaks for a Q&A Thursday, following a showing of her critically acclaimed movie. Part of TheWrap’s ongoing Academy Screening List, the site’s Editor-in-Chief Sharon Waxman hosted the discussion. (Photographs by Jonathan Alcorn)
Cholodenko is best known for such indie faves as “High Art” and “Laurel Canyon.” Blumberg has worked on such studio screenplays as “The Girl Next Door” and “Keeping the Faith.” Both were nominated for Golden Globes earlier this week for “Kids.”
The two were old friends when they met by chance in 2005 at 101 Coffee Shop in Hollywood. Cholodenko was working on a drama involving a lesbian couple with two kids and the sperm donor who disrupts their lives but hadn’t been able to break the story.
“I’d been talking about sperm donors for months, but I had never met a sperm donor,” she laughed.
“I was a sperm donor in college, and I always wondered if I had children, what would I do?” recalled Blumberg.
“It was like manna from heaven,” said Cholodenko. “There was my sperm donor!”
Blumberg’s ideas were more than seeds, however. He was a full collaborator, working side by side with the director when he was in L.A. and long distance when he was home in New York City. “It wasn’t a thing where if the character had a penis I wrote it, and if it had a vagina, Lisa wrote it,” joked Blumberg.
“I give this man some props for being very wise,” said Cholodenko of her partner. “While he has not experienced 25 years of marriage, he added a lot that I thought was really profound.”
“I can readily imagine the horrors of marriage without going through it,” quipped Blumberg. “But beyond that we really wanted to tap into the universal-ness of marriage and a family and what it is to be a parent, what it is to be a child.”
An acquaintance of Cholodenko, Julianne Moore signed on years before production began. “It had to be a recognizable A-list excellent actor that’s going to give the film some stature,” insisted the director. But years passed as they tried unsuccessfully to finance the movie.
In the interim, Cholodenko had a child and Blumberg went to work on other jobs.
In the end, they wound up with only $3.5 million and a 23-day shoot with five weeks of prep, a far cry from the $13 million the pair thought they would get for the movie.
“If we hadn’t spent so much time writing it, I would have walked away from that,” recalled the director. “That’s a very, very short time to make a film.”
As reality dawned on them, cuts were made, including a river-rafting scene that was to take place in the first act. One item that couldn’t be sacrificed, however, was the rights to Joni Mitchell’s “Blue.” During an ensemble scene around the dinner table, Annette Bening, as Jules’ partner, Nic, breaks into song. “People were saying, ‘Joni Mitchell’s too expensive,” recalled Blumberg.
“The publishers were pretty cool about it, but she charged us a lot of money,” rued the director. “At the end of the day, it had to be that song.”
The Wrap Article: Oscar Winning Actress Halle Berry Says Hollywood Doesn’t Care About Black Women.
Who Wouldn’t Wanna Finance Halle Berry? ‘Everyone, It Seems’
Who wouldn’t want to finance Halle Berry?
“Everyone, it seems,” the actress said.
“There’ve been roles that I’ve really wanted to play and I’ve had to listen to producers say to me, ‘We don’t want to go black with the role because if we go black it changes the whole story because who would her parents be? Then we got to cast a black guy for the father. Then it becomes a black movie and then who’s going to see it?”
Berry was speaking at a special showing of her new film “Frankie and Alice” Monday night at the Aero Theater in Santa Monica, part of TheWrap’s ongoing Academy Screening Series. TheWrap’s Editor-in-Chief Sharon Waxman led a post-movie Q&A with the actress. (All photographs by Jonathan Alcorn)
“Frankie” is the real-life account of Francine Murdoch, a victim of multiple-personality disorder. What sets it apart from your usual “Sybil” redux is that one of Murdoch’s personalities is a white racist named Alice.
“That’s probably one of the reasons I was drawn to this material, being of two different races,” confessed Berry, the child of a white psychiatric nurse mother and a black hospital worker.
“I had a real understanding of what that kind of hatred is and what that kind of racism is and what that does to a family,” said Berry. “T helped me relate to both Frankie and Alice because I grew up sort of in that world.”
“Some of the things that Alice had to say … I didn’t feel right in my body, either,” confessed Berry. “I just said, ‘God forgive me, forgive me. This isn’t who I am, forgive me!”
Does Halle Berry, Cleveland’s most famous daughter, identify as a white woman or a black woman or neither? “I realized early on that even though I was both, nobody really perceived me as both,” recalls Berry. “Because I was perceived as black and discriminated against that way — that’s the group I identified with the most even though I grew up my whole life with my white mother.”
One time, she said, “I wanted to play a forest ranger and the producer said to me, “Nope, there are no black forest rangers,” recalled Halle Berry in front of a raucous crowd last night at Santa Monica’s Aero Theater. Berry replied, “Really? You’ve gone all around the world and you know there are no black forest rangers.”
“My niece is a black forest ranger,” interjected a member of the audience. “That’s so awesome,” shouted Berry as the crowd laughed and applauded.
When asked if, given her unique background, she could identify with President Obama, himself the son of an interracial couple, Berry professed to having a deep understanding of how he felt when he grew up, how he feels as a man and where he fits in the world.
“We can identify as a black people but still acknowledge the white side of who we are,” asserted the actor.
“But I think for him or I to walk around and say we’re white, we’ll wind up in a hospital somewhere,” she joked, to a burst of laughter from the audience.
Berry said she first heard of Murdoch back in 1999 when she was filming the HBO movie “Introducing Dorothy Dandridge.” Through her mother’s work with the mentally ill, Berry had an affinity for the subject matter but had no idea it would take 10 years to put the project together.
After winning the Academy Award for “Monster’s Ball,” she assumed it would become a lot easier to mount “Frankie and Alice,” but sadly found that not a lot changed as a result of winning Hollywood’s highest honor.
“But winning did energize me to keep fighting for this because if I could win the Academy Award, which I never thought I would do in my lifetime, I thought surely I can make this movie,” she recollected.
Berry’s response has been to move on with her career without anger or resentment and pursue projects like “Frankie and Alice.” To get the movie mounted, she called in favors from collaborators throughout her career, including her “X-Men” cinematographer, Newton Thomas Sigel. “It was really about using all of my resources for the last twenty years of my career and trying to pull this thing together,” said Berry.
Despite the limited budget, Berry was adamant about making the movie a period piece set in the ‘70s. “Back in the ‘70s, this idea of multiple personality was not something that was widely believed to be even real,” she insisted. “She was perceived to be a black junkie that really wasn’t suffering in any way and was not really in need of any medical help, and that’s how hospitals were at the time.”
Despite the downbeat nature of “Frankie and Alice” and its jaundiced view of mid-century race relations Berry remains optimistic. “Slowly things are changing and we’re finding more equality as we go but we’re still in the process,” she said confidently. “We’re certainly not there yet but we’re going in that direction. So I’m hopeful.”
NY Times Opinion Piece: Is America Ready For A Gay President?
Op-Ed Columnist
A Gay Commander in Chief: Ready or Not?
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: December 18, 2010
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Readers’ Comments
Readers shared their thoughts on this article.
Jimmy Carter is putting the out in outspokenness.
In an interview with bigthink.com, the former president was asked, “Is the country ready for a gay president?”
Even as John McCain and other ossified Republicans were staging last-minute maneuvers to torpedo the “don’t ask, don’t tell” repeal, the 86-year-old Carter was envisioning a grander civil rights victory.
“I would say that the answer is yes,” he said. “I don’t know about the next election, but I think in the near future.”
The news that Leonardo DiCaprio and Armie Hammer will smooch in an upcoming movie about J. Edgar Hoover and his aide Clyde Tolson — buried near each other in the Congressional Cemetery on Capitol Hill — is a reminder of an “Advise and Consent” Washington where being a closeted gay official made you vulnerable to blackmail.
Others feel we’re not ready for a gay president, citing the fear and loathing unleashed by the election of the first black president. “Can you imagine how much a gay president would have to overcompensate to please the macho ninnies who control our national debate?” Bill Maher told me. “Women like Hillary have to do it, Obama had to do it because he’s black and liberal, but a gay president? He’d have to nuke something the first week.”
I called Barney Frank, assuming the gay pioneer would be optimistic. He wasn’t. “It’s one thing to have a gay person in the abstract,” he said. “It’s another to see that person as part of a living, breathing couple. How would a gay presidential candidate have a celebratory kiss with his partner after winning the New Hampshire primary? The sight of two women kissing has not been as distressful to people as the sight of two men kissing.”
Because of the Defense of Marriage Act, he added, “it’s not clear that a gay president could use federal funds to buy his husband dinner. Would his partner have to pay rent in the White House? There would be no Secret Service protection for the paramour.”
Frank noted that we’ve “clearly had one gay president already, James Buchanan. If I had to pick one, it wouldn’t be him.” (The Atlantic blogger Andrew Sullivan aims higher, citing Abe Lincoln, who sometimes bundled with his military bodyguard in bed when his wife was away.)
Frank said that although most Republicans now acknowledge that sexual orientation is not a choice, they still can’t handle their pols’ coming out. “There are Republicans here who are gay,” he said of Congress, “but as long as they don’t acknowledge it, it’s O.K. Republicans only tolerate you being gay as long as you don’t seem proud of it. You’ve got to be apologetic.”
Sam Adams, the mayor of Portland, Ore., hopes that the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell” will help persuade “the collective conscience of the United States that gay people are just the same as anybody else. We shouldn’t have to die in the closet. The irony is, as mayor, I marry people, but I can’t marry Peter, my longtime partner.”
There are no openly gay senators, governors, cabinet members or Supreme Court justices. There are four openly gay Democratic House members, once David Cicilline of Rhode Island gets sworn in.
Representative Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin recalled that during a race for State Assembly, a voter she thought was “trouble” swaggered up to her. But she need not have braced herself. “If you can be honest about that,” he told her, “you’ll be honest about everything.”
She said she took her former girlfriend, Lauren, to White House parties to meet three presidents, interactions that she thinks “really helps change minds and advance the cause.”
Representative Jared Polis of Colorado said he took his boyfriend, Marlon Reis, to a White House Christmas party this year. He said Marlon is “very popular — some of his best friends are Republican spouses.”
Fred Sainz of the Human Rights Campaign fretted to his husband that a gay president would be anticlimactic.
“People expect this bizarro and outlandish behavior,” he told me. “We’re always the funny neighbor wearing colorful, avant-garde clothing. We would let down people with our boringness and banality when they learn that we go to grocery stores Saturday afternoon, take our kids to school plays and go see movies.”
After studying polling data for a decade, Sainz thinks a lesbian would have a better shot at the presidency than a gay man. “People are more comfortable with women than they are with men because of stereotypes with gay men about hypersexuality,” he said.
André Leon Talley, the Vogue visionary, pictures a lesbian president who looks like Julie Andrews and dresses to meet heads of state in “ankle-length skirts, grazing the Manolo Blahnik kitten heels.” She would save her “butch trouser suit for weekends at Camp David and vacation hikes in Yellowstone. No plaid lumberjack shirts at any time.”
Gayblackcanada 