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Outfest 2012: Star Harry Hamlin, director Arthur Hiller attend 30th anniversary screening of “Making Love”
I’ve had a very busy last few days at Outfest filled with all kinds of different movie-going experiences from the very sexually explicit I Want Your Love on Friday night (OMG!) to a very satisfying collection of Boys Shorts on Saturday morning followed by the wonderful film Petunia. I’ll be posting more about those programs, as well as a panel I attended called TV Comedy’s Come A Long Way, Baby!, in the coming days.
But the emotional highlight was, hands down, the 30th anniversary screening of Making Love, the 1982 film that was considered so controversial at the time because of its story of a young married doctor (Michael Ontkean) coming to terms with his homosexuality. Kate Jackson played his television executive wife and Harry Hamlin an author with whom he becomes involved.
After the film screened, Hamlin was part of a panel that included director Arthur Hiller and writers A. Scott Berg and Barry Sandler.
“The first time I read the script I was turned on, I really liked it,” said the 88-year-old Hiller. “When I read it the second time I thought, ‘This is the kind of movie that should be made and I want to make it.”
Hamlin also talked about why he agreed to do the movie: “I read the script and did have a lot of people say I shouldn’t do it. I had just done Clash of the Titans and I always thought that movie was kind of stupid. I felt I wanted to do something to balance that out, something relevant to the time. I was looking for something real.”
Hamlin said that while watching the film again Saturday, he was struck by how it took place in “a more innocent time. No one had ever heard the word AIDS before.”
The handsome actor, once named People magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive, went out to gay bars – something his character of Bart did just about every night – and had to explain he was doing research for a role because he kept getting hit on.
“He was committed to the honesty of the part,” Sandler said.
The movie was the first major studio release with a gay story at its center and was the first film to come out after 20th Century Fox was bought by Texas oilman Marvin Davis whose reaction about releasing a “faggot movie” was not good.
But Sandler feels the studio did a good job at promoting the movie with a campaign aimed at gays and another more ambiguous campaign aimed at straights.
“The gay community was ready for it, there was great anticipation and excitement,” he said. “The studio was nervous about the straights. There was cryptic advertising that would say everything except what it was.”
Hiller talked about how he fought with one of the TV networks when it wanted to cut a kiss between Hamlin and Ontkean out for the television airing. He asked them: “Why did you buy the picture?”
The kiss was put back in.
Hamlin and the writers pointed out that the version shown on Saturday at the Harmony Gold Theatre did not include an overhead shot of Hamlin and Ontkean’s characters having sex.
Then they revealed that the shot was not of the two actors anyway.
Said Berg: “Barry went up to Santa Monica Boulevard to get two guys off the street from [the gay bar] Blue Parrot.”
“We just found the two hottest guys who we could find,” Sandler added.
Hamlin, who went on to star for many years on LA Law, continues to be reminded about the movie 30 years later.
“Pretty much not a day goes by, if I’m out in public, does somebody not come up to me and say something about this film. Some will have tears in their eyes and say, ‘Thank you for making this film.’ It really is seminal to a lot of people.”
Comments
(All comments are reviewed before being published, and I review submissions several times per day.)
Grant Taylor says:
Greg,
Nice to meet you and talk last night. It was good to see the film again.
Hope to see you soon. Will be at festival Monday night.
Grant
2201 East says:
I remember the night I went to see Making Love just after it opened.
Today I suppose most people wouldn’t think much about it. Back then it was powerful! I took a friend, an MD, who had just come out. A kiss between two men about put him back in the closet. I can say without apologies that Making Love made me cry that night and still can. I suppose you could say it was the Brokeback Mountain of its day.
Ed M says:
I saw this movie four years before I came out at age 31. I remember when the bedroom scene began, several couples got up and left the theater. I wondered, what did they think was going to happen? I was moved by the movie especialy the final scene. Kate Jackson’s best role.
jaragon says:
The trailer seems fairly tame; specially after that rather hysterical written warning. But hey it was 1982 after all…
ND Mitchell says:
I have seen bits and pieces of this film and actually have it on VHS or is it DVD..anyway it’s mixed in with the other VHS and DVD films I have stored away. I might have to watch this in its entirety since it is an Anniversay celebration.
Speaking of I Want Your Love….here is the link I received from Amos Lassen which has a trailer and a review…..
http://reviewsbyamoslassen.com/?p=17267
Kyle says:
After watching it, I walked into a gay bar for the 1st time in my life. It was snowing, and the song playing was Let’s Get Physical from Olivia Newton-John. I will never forget that night in my life. I was scared shitless. From then on, no looking back!
RichB in PS says:
What timing! As a young adult when I saw this movie and under similar circumstances in 1982, this movie changed my life.
Shaxspar says:
I was 25 and inside the Stonewall during the riot. I was also one of five who put together the first gay pride parade as the Christopher Street Liberation Front. I was in three longtime relationships — today we would call them marriages — and so when I heard Michael Ontkean and Harry Hamlin were doing a serious love story in 1982 about gay “marriage” (we called them “monogamous relationships,” I was really proud of the project. I had hoped to be able to say the same about Pacino’s “Cruising,” which has some merits:— but it portrays gays as sex fiends with no taste, restraint, intelligence, or capacity to love . . . so I was in the the protest when the film opened in Greenwich Village.
I would like to say that in all the publicity and talk about “Making Love,” I was continually struck and amazed that the lead actors did not make a big deal about “being straight,” or being gay, or playing roles, or anything else. It seemed everyone had the maturity and depth of character to make the film well, as a love story that happens to involve two gay characters, and then let it speak for itself. Few people today know the film. I hope this anniversary celebration brings well-deserved attention to it, and that a Criterion-type remastering with extras becomes available.
One sad correction. We knew about the “Disease” in 1980; we had friends already dead in 1982. Of course what was daily news in The Advocate and The Village Voice was not heeded by anyone seriously, except the French medical scientists as the Pasteur Institute. So when I saw the movie, I already knew where Mr. Hamlin’s character was heading . . . which made it all the more poignant.