Ask the Flying Monkey (March 25, 2008)

Eventually, the deal with New Line lapsed. Take Me Out, the 2003 Broadway play about a gay baseball player showering naked, stole some of The Dreyfus Affair’s thunder, but in 2006, the project was optioned for a fifth time, by producer Andrew Lang (2005’s Loverboy and Duane Hopwood). At the time, there was a flurry of articles about how the breakout success of Brokeback Mountain (2005) would finally make the Hollywood studios more receptive to gay storylines.

But was it true? Brokeback Mountain came out in 2005. We’re now well into 2008 and, except for Gus Van Sant’s The Mayor of Castro Street, which just finished filming, there are no major gay movie projects on the horizon. Even Entertainment Weekly has noted the surprising lack of Brokeback imitators.

So where exactly does that leave The Dreyfus Affair? A spokesman for the producers tells me, “There’s no news to report right now, but things are simmering along nicely.” IMDB.com reports that after writing three drafts of the script for Lang, author Peter Lefcourt (who is also an Emmy-winning television writer) is doing one final “polish.” But will this be the version that finally gets made?

Who the hell knows?

Still, there is some cause for optimism. In addition to The Dreyfus Affair, it also mentions a number of “promising” gay projects in development: Love! Valor! Compassion! (1997), Angels in America (2003), In & Out (1997), The Broken Hearts Club: A Romantic Comedy (2000), and The Mayor of Castro Street (2009).

Except for The Dreyfus Affair, they all eventually got made (in the case of Mayor, it’s now in editing).

Q: With all the publicity about “Nuke” on As the World Turns, I wonder if you know whatever happened to Brian Starcher, who played Hank Eliot, the first gay character on daytime. This was also on As the World Turns, back in 1988. – Russell (again)
A: Except for a brief role in the pilot for Babylon 5 back in 1994, Starcher seems to have disappeared into the ether. Which is sad, because he’s a part of gay TV history. Still, this article from 1989 is pretty comical in how often it reiterates how veeeeeeeeery heterosexual Starcher really was — how he was sooo into sports, how relieved he was that his male “lover” was never seen on the show, and how much he missed love scenes with women.

Sign o’ the times, I guess.

Brian Starcher (circa 1989)

Q: Have there been any re-stagings of Nijinsky's ballet Jeux with three male dancers as he originally intended instead of the one male and two female dancers he opted for in 1912? – Marshall, Tacoma, WA
A: Jeux, the last orchestral work of influential French composer Claude Debussy, premiered in 1913 in Paris, with choreography by Vaslav Fomich Nijinsky, considered one of the great male ballet dancers of all time. The work was originally intended to be an erotic encounter in the woods between three young men, though the creators got cold feet and ultimately presented it as a (still risqué) ménage à trois between a man and two women.

The work was not a success, and was soon completely overshadowed by Stravinsky’s shocking and revolutionary Rite of Spring, which premiered two weeks later by the same company (also choreographed by Nijinsky).

Has the work ever been presented with three men, as originally conceived? In fact, Rudolf Nureyev tried in 1970 to recreate it on film, but the producers turned him down (the film was ultimately never made).

With all the attention paid to Matthew Bourne’s astonishingly successful, Tony Award-winning, mostly-male production of Swan Lake, I was certain I would discover that someone had similarly restaged Jeux. But while there have been a few new productions — laboriously and creatively recreated from the music and from photos, since the original choreography has mostly been lost — the ones I was able to track down all stayed with the original staging’s two women and a man.

Helloooooo, blue state ballet companies! Marketing opportunity here! When was the last time you saw one of your productions on Youtube?

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