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Boston's reel world

Local indie filmmakers take on the religious right, body obsession, and the art of being butch

by Christopher Muther

The corner of Warren and Dartmouth Streets, in the South End, is a busy place at 2 a.m. on a Saturday. At least, that's what filmmaker Roland Tec found out last summer as he prepared to shoot the first scenes for his movie All the Rage.

"We were there unloading our equipment, and all these guys were walking home from the bars and trying to figure out what we were doing," Tec says. "I think we really interrupted something. That's a real cruisy corner."

Whether it's Tec and his crew capturing the quest for the perfect man in the South End, or Shoshana Rosenfeld filming butch lesbians with her Fisher-Price movie camera in Jamaica Plain, Boston is in the midst of a mini-boom in queer independent filmmaking.

Of course, the number of films being made in Boston is minuscule compared to the activity in such camera-crazed locales as New York and Los Angeles. After teaching a class in Boston for the past year, queer-film trailblazer Barbara Hammer says she didn't see much filmmaking -- gay or straight -- going on in the Hub. Yet Boston's queer indie filmmakers are taking on creative, compelling topics that are missing from the lesbian-and-gay film canon: body obsession, the religious right, even the butch's art of motorcycle riding.

Stephen Kijak's 1996 movie Never Met Picasso, about an artist and her gay son, led the wave of queer filmmaking in the Hub. With Boston as a backdrop and a few B-list Hollywood stars (Margot Kidder, Alexis Arquette) rounding out a cast of local actors, Never Met Picasso made the rounds of national lesbian-and-gay film festivals. The attendant publicity smoothed the way for other local filmmakers to peddle their wares at film festivals around the country.

Whereas most queer documentary filmmakers focus their lenses on celebrities (see False gods), their counterparts in Boston have taken on the arguably more difficult task of documenting the lives of ordinary people. Which shouldn't be much of a surprise, given that our community is known more for politics than for partying. (We are, after all, the biggest queer community in the nation without a circuit party or a seven-nights-a-week dyke bar.) Boston would never give the world Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered: The Paul Lynde Story. Instead, expect down-to-earth looks at such topics as the experiences of people taking protease inhibitors. What's more, most of Boston's filmmakers aren't clamoring to get to Hollywood. They're happy to stay right here.

"I don't think you have to live in LA to make films," Tec says. "Woody Allen has been making movies in New York for years. I like Boston as a setting -- it's beautiful to shoot, and I want to do more of that. I want to stay here."

Tec, 30, is negotiating to get All the Rage, his first feature-length film, distributed nationally. It was first screened last month at the San Francisco International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, where, Tec says, it was "very well received." (After a screening at OutFest, the queer film festival in Los Angeles, the LA Times called All the Rage "a knockout," and the San Francisco Bay Guardian said the movie was "a must-view for gym bunnies and the terminally handsome.") The movie makes its local debut with a one-time screening at the Coolidge Corner Theatre, in Brookline, on September 30.

Tec's movie, which he shot "in the family of under $1 million, like Sex, Lies and Videotape," on money raised from investors, is a funny and brutally honest examination of gay male narcissism. Christopher, a self-centered attorney with a perfect life, is looking for the perfect mate. Like many gay men in urban environments, he's endured a string of one-night stands as he searches for someone to meet his impossibly high standards.

"Christopher is an embodiment of what I see as a larger problem," Tec says. "I think gay men in urban settings are getting really good at making sure we're alone. We're keeping ourselves apart emotionally, and one of the ways we're doing that is through our obsessive pursuit of the perfect body."

Tec, a Connecticut native who moved to the Boston area to study music composition at Harvard University, has been writing, acting, and directing here for several years. After working on movie crews for friends, he shot his own first film in 1993 -- a short called Hooking Up. The 13-minute movie looks at the similarities between several gay couples as they move from tentative post-date goodnights toward passionate romps between the sheets.

Not only did that early effort help Tec find investors for his first full-length film, but the subject matter of Hooking Up prefigured the self-examining tone of All the Rage. Now, with authors like Michelangelo Signorile and Gabriel Rotello exploring the emotional toll exacted by the cult of physical perfection, Tec says he thinks film audiences are ready for a story about the problems facing urban queers.

"People are interested and compelled to look at the issue of body obsession," Tec says. "It's not only gay men -- a lot of lesbians were also excited to talk about it at the screenings. On that level, it resonates with people. It's a gay film that's serious. Eighty percent of the movie is funny, but the underlying themes are serious."

'A responsibility to tell stories'

Jay Corcoran knows about body obsession. In Tec's film, he plays Larry, the gym-bound buddy of the shallow main character. But in real life, Corcoran, who is quickly developing a reputation for his work behind the camera as well as in front of it, blasts the gay aesthetic that drives more and more men to the gym.

In his 1996 documentary Life and Death on the A-List, Corcoran showed the damage gay men inflict upon themselves by placing beauty and youth above all else. To make the movie, he spent more than a year with the late actor and model Tom McBride, who was dying of the AIDS-related brain disease progressive multifocal leucoencephalopathy. The heart-wrenching film documents McBride's physical and mental deterioration as the former A-lister watches his own transformation from the man everyone wants to the man no one notices. The 45-minute documentary will be released on video August 26.

"I wanted to do it not only for Tom, but for all of us who are gay men in the 1990s," Corcoran says between sips of fruit juice. "I had to spend time in the forefront of the New York gay club world, and the whole time I thought, `This is unbelievable, what we do to one another and how we abuse ourselves.' The damage that we inflict on ourselves and each other is mind-boggling."

Corcoran says he was initially inspired to film the documentary after watching another friend with AIDS change as he grew closer to death. During his last few months of life, Corcoran says, this friend was "almost sage-like" and at peace with himself.

"I regret to this day that I didn't document it," he says. "Then when Tom called me one morning for breakfast and told me he had four months to live, my jaw just dropped. I realized I had to record this. So I borrowed a really crappy camera and just started shooting. A year and a half later, I ended up with four cameras, 50 hours of footage, and this story."

The 38-year-old actor and director, who grew up in Wellesley, starred for a year in the off-Broadway show Party while he was working on A-List. Last year, he returned to Boston to star in Tec's film, and then stayed on to live with his partner in the South End.

Corcoran is now filming his second documentary, which follows a year in the life of six people with HIV and AIDS who are taking protease inhibitors. He estimates that unlike the first film, which was shot on a shoestring budget of $10,000, the new documentary will cost roughly $100,000 to produce -- still a bargain by Hollywood standards.

After just two months of filming, Corcoran says, he's already captured compelling issues on celluloid. Some of his subjects have seen such improvements in their health that they're struggling with a return to work after spending the past 10 years preparing for death. Others are scrambling simply to pay for their expensive drug regimens.

"I feel like a casualty of the AIDS war," Corcoran says. "I don't have AIDS, but watching my friends who do, I'm deeply affected by it. I'm so affected by it I almost feel like I have a responsibility to tell these stories."

Smells like butch spirit

Jamaica Plain indie filmmaker Shoshana Rosenfeld has spent the last two years working on a different kind of documentary, one about a group of people she says have been ignored for too long. Rosenfeld's Scent uVa Butch features interviews with more than 20 butch women.

"Butches are my favorite pastime," the 37-year-old filmmaker says with a smile. "I thought it would be a fun project to work on. For me it's really a celebration of butch-identified women. I see myself as a vehicle for their voices to get out there."

For the past two years, Rosenfeld has been talking to butches across the country and filming them working out, fixing cars, cruising other women, and just hanging out. The $50,000 documentary marks the first time Rosenfeld has stepped behind the camera, although she has experience working on the film crews of smaller-scale projects. Her day job, meanwhile, is consulting with companies to prevent sexual harassment and gender bias.

The documentary, which she hopes to complete in time for the 1998 queer film festivals, is shot in three formats: high-eight, pixel, and digital video. For the grainy pixel footage, Rosenfeld has been using a toy video camera that records on audiotape. She says the different textures of film are meant to represent the differences between the women in the movie.

The one similarity that Rosenfeld says she's found among the women she's interviewed is their eagerness to talk about the butch experience. Because there is so little information available about butches, she says, many women were eager to share their stories.

One thing that quickly became clear during filming is that there's no one definition of "butch." One of Rosenfeld's interviewees, 23-year-old law student Tex Clark, says that for her being butch is about having power. Although she's most comfortable wearing men's clothes, Clark says that she has no desire to be a man. But as a butch, she says, "I can be the master of my world and nobody's going to objectify me. To be feminine is to be looked at. I don't want to be looked at. I want to be the looker. I don't want to be the product, I want to be the consumer."

"I don't see anyone in my movie as more or less butch," Rosenfeld says. "It's not about comparing degrees of butchness, which is why there's no one famous in the movie. I didn't want to establish a norm for butchness. I would have run the risk of everyone comparing the people in the video to her."

The documentary has no narrator. Throughout the filming of Scent uVa Butch, Rosenfeld has avoided putting her own voice in the film. Instead, she's let the women tell their own stories about their childhood, sexuality, class background, and relationship to their bodies.

"I think there's an enormous sense of humanness that comes through," Rosenfeld says. "You have people talking about their lives from a position of power, rather than being objectified. They're just saying `Here I am. This is who I am,' and it's not in rebuttal form."

Twisted 'history'

At the opposite end of the spectrum from Rosenfeld's documentary style are Josh Oppenheimer's fanciful and sometimes disturbing films, which fall somewhere between fiction and fact. Oppenheimer, 22, a recent graduate of Harvard University, just completed his second movie, the 45-minute The Entire History of the Louisiana Purchase.

The film has nothing to do with the Louisiana Purchase, and everything to do with Oppenheimer's manic obsessions with the religious right, underground militia groups, pop culture, and alien abduction. Made during the past year, for $8000, as his senior honors thesis at Harvard, the film traces the story of a woman who believes she has been impregnated by aliens. The story is told through moody montages and voice-overs, old commercials, monster-movie clips from the 1950s, and interviews with everyone from the inventor of the microwave oven to a man who purports to be the Antichrist. Oppenheimer is getting the film ready to appear at international film festivals in New York and Rotterdam.

"The interesting thing about Louisiana is that it's not quite a mockumentary or a faux documentary, because the people on the whole are not actors," Oppenheimer says. "Except for a couple of people, everyone thinks the story is true. Not only is it genuine footage about a fictional event, but there was another aspect of it where the process of the film was actually like making a documentary, a personal documentary."

As in his first film, 1995's These Places We've Learned To Call Home, Oppenheimer slips into the militia groups of the heartland in Louisiana Purchase -- this time passing himself off as an alien abductee. By infiltrating militia groups and telling the story of a fellow UFO passenger who was impregnated by the aliens, Oppenheimer immediately gained the trust of the militia members. They figured that "no one from the federal government would infiltrate as an alien abductee," he says.

This foray behind enemy lines was not the first time the young filmmaker has come face-to-face with ideological foes. During a summer in England, he infiltrated ex-gay groups, posing as a man looking to become straight, and then used information about the groups' secret conferences and meetings to organize protests and disrupt them. He also secretly taped his therapy sessions and group meetings.

"What was amazing to me, and what led me to infiltrate, was the way people could put themselves through hell needlessly because they believed in some form of heavenly redemption," he says.

As for why he's drawn to such bleak subject matter, Oppenheimer says it "comes from being born into a family of Holocaust survivors." He also notes the irony of having been raised in New Mexico -- given his last name. "You grow up being associated with the end of the world in everybody's eyes, because it's assumed you must be related to the inventor of the atomic bomb. I think I took that on subconsciously. Whenever you meet someone, they think your family wants to put an end to everything."

He's currently planning his next short film, a fictional/nonfictional account of a couple in England who tortured children and recorded their screams as they died. A recipient of a 1997 Marshall Scholarship, Oppenheimer plans to make the film in England, where he will study at London's Royal College of Art. He is also planning his first full-length feature, The Declaration of Independence, or Why Betsy Ross Agrees with the Founding Fathers, a movie about a cult that plans to take over Las Vegas.

He says his films will gradually move in a more standard narrative direction, but don't expect quick accessibility from a man whose last movie showed a mother cooking her baby in the microwave.

Whether it's Oppenheimer's apocalyptic visions or Tec's comedic soul-searching, local queer filmmakers are giving the world a no-nonsense Bostonian's view of the world. Their low-budget, high-quality filmmaking is blazing a new path for future generations of queer filmmakers to follow.

Christopher Muther is a frequent contributor to One in Ten; he can be reached at cmuther@aol.com.

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