The Dying Gaul marks the film directorial debut of gay playwright/screenwriter Craig Lucas, and is based on his play of the same name. As its website proclaims, this psychosexual thriller is a “tale of lust, power, corruption, betrayal and revenge set in the seductive world of the Hollywood elite.”

This movie explores the dangerous social intrigues that can ensnare those who flirt with society's sacred taboo of threesomes (especially threesomes with a gay man as one point in the triangle). In doing so, The Dying Gaul harkens back to other ground breaking, gay-related “ménage-a-trois” movies including Paul Verhoeven's dreamlike and chilling The Fourth Man and John Huston's probing and harsh Reflections in a Golden Eye. Not gay-related, but equally lurid and over-the-top, the threesome in the shocking Fatal Attraction also comes to mind.

In classic suspense/film noir fashion, The Dying Gaul begins innocently, with all the fabulous superficial trappings of success and the good life in Hollywood. A young talented, screenwriter is discovered, hits “the big time” and is introduced to the world of beachfront mansions, filmmakers' plush corporate headquarters, ritzy private parties, red-carpet movie premiers, etc. Yet beneath this sun-drenched Apollonian world of the entertainment industry elite, a darker, more primal Dionysian underside begins to ooze upward.

As soon as sex enters into the story, facades start collapsing everywhere. The more the sex continues, the more the characters unravel and corrupt each other. Slowly we are seductively and inexorably drawn into the hidden, private worlds of the film's three lead characters.

The Dying Gaul stars Peter Sarsgaard (Boys Don't Cry, Kinsey) who plays Robert, a screenwriter devastated over the loss of his lover to AIDS. To cope with his grief, Robert has written a screenplay that tells his lover's personal story. A studio executive offers him a million dollars for it. But there is a catch: he must change the central characters from “gay” to “straight.” Wrestling with the dilemma he now faces, Robert finds himself drawn into a web of deceit and seduction with his new Hollywood handlers from which there may be no escape.

When Robert is enticed into “selling out” his screenplay by changing its gay characters to straight characters (thus betraying his sacred trust with his dead lover), a “monster from the id” is released in him. His inner guilt begins to wreak havoc in his personal life, and starts him on his destructive path.

As in classic Greek or Shakespearean tragedy, the ghost of Robert's deceased lover appears to him intermittently throughout the film, serving the “chorus” function of revealing Robert's distraught subconscious.

Campbell Scott (Longtime Companion, Roger Dodger) as the closeted bisexual Hollywood mogul Jeffrey gives one of the most realistic interpretations of this kind of person I've ever seen. Jeffrey is one of those dual natured (some would say “two-faced”) power-players who manipulate everyone around them in order to maintain their openly straight/hidden queer lifestyles. Safe behind their façade of wealth, power and artistic prestige, they carry on with impunity and complete lack of conscience. They manage to get away with all this, as former President Clinton famously noted, “because they can.”

Scott's brilliant characterization of the ever-schmoozing Jeffrey includes the creepy and overbearing innocence, naivete, and “nice guy” quality that often sugar coats such driven, problematic personalities.

Patricia Clarkson (High Art, Far From Heaven) plays Elaine – the lovely, elegant, winsome and seemingly happy homebody wife of film producer Jeffrey. To her credit, Clarkson creates a dead-on-target, model characterization of this Hollywood “Stepford housewife” type.

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