I’m telling you, there is a longer movie here – or maybe even a sitcom!”I made it as kind of a test for a feature idea,” said Lisecki (pictured with leading man Wilkas and Curious Thing director Hain). “I’ve been friends with both of those actors for a long time, Matt and Jen who are friends from college, and they  both really wonderful. We all live in New York. She’s just like a true genius, they are a perfect combination.”

I had already seen Billy and Aaron at the Outfest Fusion festival in the spring and got even more out of it on the second viewing. The film, written-directed-produced by Rodney Evans, focuses on African-American composer Billy Strayhorn, and the personal and professional consequences of his decision to live as an openly gay man within the homophobic jazz milieu of the 1940’s.

Brandon Delagraentiss stars as Billy and Ignaro Petronillia plays his lover Aaron.

Evans, who was writer and director of the 2004 feature Brother to Brother, told the crowd after the screening that he would like to expand his short into a full feature exploring Strayhorn’s association with Duke Ellington.

“It lasted over decades: Billy was 23 when he met Duke and really lived in the shadows of Duke and wrote a lot of the songs for the Duke Ellington Orchestra but didn’t get a lot of the credit for it,” he said. “So both the short and the feature sort of deal with the repercussions of that in his personal life, within his psyche. I think he made a real specific choice to live openly as a gay man in exchange for kind of staying in the shadows and not getting the credit for what he wrote and produced for decades. The films are both trying to deal with how that impacted him on a personal and psychological level and the feature gets much more in-depth.”

Guy Shalem doesn’t plan to make a feature film of his terrific short GaySharkTank.com but he did tell me that he hopes to make GaySharkTank.com 2 in time for next year’s Outfest and promises that among the cast members will likely be Neil Patrick Harris.

NPH’s partner David Burtka has a role in the current film as a showtune loving guy in search for love.

“Neil was supposed to do that part and then we decided he was too famous,” Shalem tells Greg In Hollywood. “So he was on set, he watched us work and gave suggestions. I think we’re going to do a GayShark2 so you actually have an exclusive. We might do it for next year’s Outfest and Neil’s going to be in it.”

A synopsis: In early 2010 Chatroulette.com, a website that allows people to meet other online strangers via webcam became an internet sensation. Gaysharktank.com is a film about the first gay knock off site told through the interactions of 25 strangers looking for love, lust, and other things you might look for.

The short film has 30 cast members including Burtka, Coco Peru, Jai Rodriguez, Dan Bucatinsky, Geoffrey Arrend and Stephen Daniel Guarino, among many others. It took 2.5 hours to film and apparently many of the cast members (some of whom are pictured, left, with Shalem at Outfest Saturday) had a few cocktails to take the edge off.

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