Hey Straight Guy! Why you making a gay movie? Part Two

by Nick Pistorino

When I was senior in high school, I first heard about the concept of gay marriage when Massachusetts very suddenly legalized it. My first reaction?

“That must be cool for gay couples.“

I had no real concern one way or the other because I am not gay nor did I know any openly gay people at the time. Since it had absolutely no effect on my life whatsoever, what was there to care about? Although I started with pure apathy, I quickly became extremely passionate about the subject.

I read a pamphlet against the legalization of gay marriage endorsed by my family’s religion, the Catholic Church.  To this day it is one of the most hateful things I’ve ever read, but the language they used was drenched in confectioners sugar. If you cut through the BS, the pamphlet simply stated:

We don’t like gays and we certainly don’t like gay marriage, and since we can’t outlaw a person from being gay, we can try to outlaw them from legally marrying each other.

I fully believe that the Catholic Church has every right to deny homosexuals from marrying inside their property, especially since doing so would go against the teachings of The Bible,  which or course is the basis of their religion and where homosexuality is specifically condemned on many occasions. Nevertheless, I don’t believe that they have any right to try and affect legislation of legal rights outside of the Catholic Church. They can turn away every gay couple they want to, but all men and women are born with the same legal rights in this country under the Constitution, which includes homosexuals. It currently does not say anywhere in the Constitution that the Bible has any impact regarding legal issues. In fact, it expressly states that no religion should have any impact regarding any legislation.

Now I didn’t go to a public school, I went to Archbishop Williams High School, a Catholic high school. Around this time, I was already getting fed up with the church due to the allegations of pedophilia at the same archdiocese that my school operated under at the time. To me, this pamphlet was the last straw. If you follow the teachings of Jesus, which I still currently do, his message was very simple:

“Do onto others as you would have them do unto you.”

If you truly follow those words, and look at this issue pragmatically, there really isn’t a single solid argument against gay marriage.

Senior year was a great year for me. I started a very successful creative relationship with the writer of this film, Mike Lake. Within the span of a couple of months this relationship quickly grew to give both him and I recognition from our school and also some short term financial gain. Because of this, I was approached by the Dean to enter a competition for CSPAN to make a film about an important social issue. I couldn’t think of anything I was more passionate about than gay marriage, so I decided to do a mock 50′s educational propaganda film about it. Quickly I realized that I did not have the time, nor the technical expertise to pull of such a film. Although I was disappointed that I failed to make the one film that actually said something, I am very glad that it will never see the light of day. Besides the fact that it was poorly shot and had I entered this film I would most certainly have been kicked out of school, I did not present the message well to the viewer. Instead, I relentlessly rammed the message down their throats, which is not always the best way to make a point.

Fast forward to junior year of college, and my 5-day film crew have just been given “propaganda film” as our genre. After presenting my previously failed idea from high school, we decided to change it to be much more entertaining and less preachy. The end result is a well made and very entertaining movie with no real message behind it. It  does satirize the overly dramatic fears of homosexuals in the 50′s, but yet it has no mention of gay marriage. I was disappointed that we couldn’t have had a stronger message, but I’m happy we didn’t throw in a message when we didn’t have the time to properly present it.

The next year Mike sends me his short story entitled “A Queer Theory.” I instantly fell in love with the idea because I hadn’t seen someone literally show the nonsense of the logic behind the “slippery slope” theories against gay marriage in a movie before. Now I had the time, freedom, and plenty of experience to make this the movie that I always intended to.  After hundreds of rewrites, thousands of man hours, and years of trial and error I believe I have accomplished what I originally set out to do.

In the end what drove me as a straight guy to make a gay movie was a mixture of my love for both original comedy and proving illogical ideas wrong. I am still very passionate about gay marriage, not because it directly affects my life, but because I have yet to hear a solid, logical, and objective argument against it. If and when this is presented to the Supreme Court, I have no doubt that the evidence will clearly show there is no legal standing to deny two consenting humans their natural born right to marry each other.

Nick

Hey Straight Guy! Why you making a gay movie? Part One

by Nick Pistorino

“This scene is flat. How can we make it funnier? I know, let’s add a really gay guy! Or better yet, let’s put a macho character into a gay situation! Yay originality!”

When I get asked why as a straight filmmaker am I making a gay movie I say, “Because there aren’t any good ones.” Ever since Paul Lynde became the center square, the world of comedy has become obsessed with stereotypically flamboyant gay men and tired gay jokes. It’s great that homosexuality is becoming more and more excepted, but I’m getting tired of being fed the same garbage for over 30 years. I find it insulting as an audience member that writers choose to insert gay characters into their unrelated story simply for comic relief. Come up with original characters that pertain to your story!

As a comedian, I love taking something completely stereotypical, and finding brand new and inventive ways of looking at them. I’m not going to just pepper in a gay joke just to spice up something poorly written. Instead I’ll make an entire movie exploring new and creative ways to tell many gay jokes. The sad part is that no one has a problem with throwing in a gay line or a gay scene for a quick laugh. If you make your entire movie about homosexuality or gay rights, that’s when people get scared. Luckily the scariest parts of comedy happen to be the funniest.

Catching On: The Day the World Turned Gay is my second foray into the gay movie business. My first was Boys on Boys: The Guide to Homosexuality (I love colons) that I made as part of the 5 day film festival with my college roommates. I first had the idea in high school to make an 50′s educational movie satire about gay marriage. Three years later when my group received “propaganda” as our genre in the festival, I immediately resurrected the idea of doing an educational movie satire. Instead of it being about gay marriage, it just became about  the outrageous claims 50′s educational films made against homosexuality. It won us second place in the festival, and now we have over 80,000 views on YouTube.

Since we only had 5 days to write, shoot, and edit  a movie with a genre, character, and two lines already chosen for us, we really didn’t have time to care about what we were actually doing. Every once in awhile we would say to each other “Is this going too far?”, but someone would immediately hush that person and say “No, it’s hilarious!” Personally I am far prouder of that particular movie than any other I’ve made up until Catching On. We pushed the boundaries as far as we could without overstepping them, and everyone was perfect for the role they played. Although everyone who starred in the movie was either part of the team or someone I lived with at the time, I still don’t think any other group of people could have done a better job given the circumstances.

One year later Mike showed me his story which was entitled “Queer Theory” at the time. Comedically what drew me to making this story into a movie was the idea of setting up a world that’s somewhat normal, and then tearing that world down piece by piece. After I read it I realized in order to make our point we had to frame it to make it look as absurd as possible. I had the idea that we turn it into a horror movie, where gays and lesbians quickly take over the world in the cheesy, over dramatic style that has made horror movies so comical.

The most satisfying part was how we decided to handle gays and lesbians in the movie. Instead of having cute and clever jokes on both groups, we decided to go the complete opposite direction. Every joke will be completely stereotypical; gay men are feminine, lesbians are masculine, period. To make the point that every gay person doesn’t act the exact same way, we need to show how ridiculous it would be if every gay person acted the exact same way. But where is the originality in that? Since it’s a horror movie, we were able to put those stereotypes in new and original situations that they have never been shown in before. Instead of lesbians just being masculine, they are zombie-like with super human strength. Instead of gay men just being feminine, they’re also creepy and horrifying.

So there are two reasons I as a straight man decided to do a gay movie. One reason was because of the challenge as both a straight filmmaker and as a comedian to make a good and original movie portraying the same stereotypes that have been around for over 30 years. The next part of this discussion will explain the other reason.

Nick

I’m the director, and I have the T-Shirt to prove it.

by Nick Pistorino

I look through an LCD screen, I see a man in drag running after a bowling ball in the very same parking lot I’ve been forced to park my car in snow storms for the past 4 years. It’s that moment as a director when the vivid vision rattling in your head for the past 6 months has come to life. You look around at your cast and crew and they look back at you and without words they say to you, “I can’t believe this is actually happening.” It was then that I knew this movie was meant to be made.

The Idea:
When Mike came to me with his short story over a year ago I thought two things;

1. “Wow this would be an amazing movie”
2. “There is no effing way this will ever be made into a movie.”

The idea that gay spreads across the world by people playing “grab-ass” is not a movie most filmmakers would have the balls to make. Even though I knew it would never be made into a movie, my mind could not stop coming up with ideas. Once Mike transferred to Emerson, he decided to resubmit it as a short story; almost entirely because he’s lazy and didn’t want to come up with another idea. Since his class was going to give him feedback, I gave him some of my ideas to try out in the story. It came back with an overwhelming response, particularly from Mike’s professor who happened to be part of the gay community. That’s when we started to explore the option of turning this into a screenplay.

The Screenplay:
For the next 6 months Mike and I worked on the screenplay. Write, rewrite, rewrite, rewrite, rewrite. I can’t tell you how many versions of this script we’ve gone through, but I can tell you that we’re still rewriting it even after half of the movie has been shot. There were times in Mike’s basement where we were arguing for over an hour about a line of dialogue. Our creativity spawns from the fact that we are so unbelievably insecure that we will think the script is crap until we know it will kill in every scene. With the script finished (for the time being) it is now time to cast all of these completely ridiculous characters we’ve come up with. Having seen how horrible the casting experience can be in the past, I’m not optimistic.

Nick Pistorino (right) wanted everyone to know his title on the first day of shooting.

The Casting:
I’ve never ever had casting that has gone this well. We were able to cast our entire movie just from the 3 casting sessions we held. That’s 12 roles, and I offered most of them on the spot.

When Mike wrote the character of Adam I envisioned this person who was clearly gay, hilarious, and horrifying at the same time. Enter the one and certainly only Ryan Gillis. It’s the first time in my life that I was literally speechless after a performance. As long as I’m making movies, there will always be a role for Ryan, always. After Ryan’s performance I remember Greg coming up to me and saying, “This next guy is Ralph Lowman (our televangelist character)”. In walked Wayne, who delivered the role with a slight southern drawl exactly how I wanted it. Adrienne was next and I felt bad because her character only had one line, but she knocked everyone off their seats with laughter when she delivered it.

One of the harder characters to cast was Jeffy Davis because it is extremely difficult for an actor to deal with such an over-the-top role like Jeffy. This role has literally no subtlety to it, however, Tony came in and completely transformed in front of our eyes. I remember I told him to look directly into Chuck’s eyes and he never broke focus. Chuck still has problems sleeping.

We held a separate casting session to make sure all of the main characters had chemistry. When Will and Brian read together I immediately saw the father/son relationship I was looking for and cast them both. The only hard decision I had to make was over the character of Lisa. Both actresses were completely different, but both were innocent and hilarious in their own way. In the end I went with my gut and chose Autumn, and I’m glad I did because she gave me the performance I had envisioned when Mike and I wrote her character.

The Production:
Sadly I can’t go into great detail about the production until after the movie is released but here is the slow and skinny of how each shooting day has gone:

Day 1: 17 hour indoor shoot in unbearable heat, most of it body heat.
Day 2: 10 hour indoor shoot in a semi-vacant hotel.
Day 3: 12 hour outdoor shoot on a main street with inappropriately dressed men holding extremely offensive signs.
Day 4: 12 hour outdoor shoot where our shooting location changed 3 times and included an axe through a hood, a door ripped off it’s hinges, 12 people running after a bowling ball.
Day 5: 12 hour outdoor shoot at a fully functioning local TV Station
Day 6: 12 hour indoor shoot in a Pharmacy that wrapped at 3:30 in the morning

We’ve seen a lot of different faces and called in a whole lot of favors. I know it’s cliche but without everyone’s help and support our monster never could have been possible. Seriously, I think everyone at this point has done almost every job imaginable. We’ve made some mistakes, but we’ve also had a lot of fun on this movie as well, and I for one cannot wait until everyone see’s it. I can tell you one thing; you have never seen a movie like this before, and you will never see one like this again. That isn’t just a promise, it’s a guarantee.

-Nick