EVENT: He wrote the plays Reckless, Blue Window, and Prelude to a Kiss, and the screenplay to Longtime Companion. His new play, The Dying Gaul, about insidious dealings in the movie industry, opens this week at Intiman.
I don't know if you're familiar with the bio boxes, but they tend to be very frivolous interviews-- "I'm happy to be frivolous. I'll talk about anything. There's a documentary called After Stonewall--or something. I just remember getting totally jazzed on coffee and just jabbering, and then my father saw it on television--I hadn't seen it--and he said, 'So, is this really good that everyone knows you're uncircumcised?' I said, 'What are you talking about?' He said, 'Uncut is the third word out of your mouth.' Then he said, after a pause, 'What is wrong with you?'"
Is this play based on your own experiences in Hollywood? "Not really. I've worked with good people out there. The problem with that whole world is that you've got to make something that is going to sell as well in the gay ghettos as it does in the small villages in Indonesia. So their sights are very peculiar--they're not interested in varying from a particular norm. It's very hard to make a good movie that way."
The gay characters aren't exactly role models; what's been the response? "I got a GLAAD award, so I guess they weren't so... what's most important is not that gay characters be role models--who the fuck wants to be a role model?--but that we be three-dimensional. We're the Stepin Fetchit white folk: the faggy neighbor, the silly hairdresser. I'm not interested in that."
What's the most flabbergasting thing a movie person has said to you? "In the last scene of Prelude to a Kiss, the girl played by Meg Ryan has been taught to say, in Dutch, 'You have such beautiful teeth'--or Alec [Baldwin] says that, and she replies, 'The better to eat you with.' An executive said to me, 'I think we need to put something sexual in there.' I said, 'Well, "The better to eat you with" is sexual.' And he said, 'Oh, I don't get that at all. Why don't we have Meg go down on her knees in front of Alec?' I said, 'Okay, but first you have to go down on your knees'--and that's when we stopped talking."
Is there anything that would tempt you to sell your soul or betray your principles?
"Money."
