Grading the Majors: The Movie Studios, Part Two

Yesterday AfterElton.com ran the first half of a discussion of how the six major movie studios rate in terms of their gay visibility track records, beginning with Buena Vista, Warner Brothers and Fox. Today we move on to digging into the vaults of the three remaining studios: Sony, Paramount and Universal. As a refresher, we've repeated the general overview of the piece below, and then move on to the individual ratings.

Ladies and gentlemen, we present to you: Grading the Major Movie Studios … The Sequel.

General Overview: Assessing movie studios is a complicated business. The six major studios operating today are vestiges of the old Hollywood studios dating back to the industry's early days, but they bear little resemblance to those original studios in how they operate. Today they're owned by mammoth corporations and have opened subdivisions and acquired subsidiaries, many of which were once major studios in their own right. Unlike independent studios, which have themselves emerged as major enterprises, they tend to market movies to widespread mainstream audiences. Most of the clearly gay-friendly, gay-targeted movies you love were probably produced by independent studios, or the arthouse subsidiary of one of the majors.

Moreover, the extent to which a studio is involved in the actual day-to-day production of a movie varies significantly. For the most part, when we say a movie is produced by a particular studio today, it means the studio served as distributor and primary financial backer. In other words, it's the big name at the top of a poster that comes before all the individuals and production houses involved.

Nevertheless, despite these complications, it's possible to examine each studio's catalog of movies and see patterns emerge indicating the types of movies that a particular studio has a history of backing.

In general, the outlook here is not good.

Given how many movies have emerged over the years from major studios, it's disturbing how few instances there are of gay characters appearing at all. Worse, there are many cases when this visibility is of an entirely negative kind — perpetuating stereotypes, fostering fear of monstrously portrayed social deviants, or making gays the convenient targets of juvenile homophobic humor. This is particularly troubling when one considers that these mass-marketed movies, particularly those released in prior decades, served as the only place where many mainstream moviegoers — including gay ones — encountered images of gay life.

Obviously, it's impossible for an article of this scope to address every movie with gay content (for a look at how lesbian issues are handled in popular culture, visit AfterEllen.com). Hopefully this article will invite further discussion. Please feel free to post comments expanding on readings of particular movies mentioned here. Or if a particular movie stands out for you as having been particularly gay-friendly or homophobic, track down the studio that produced it and post a comment about it.

SONY PICTURES ENTERTAINMENT

Parent company: Sony

Major subsidiaries: Columbia TriStar, MGM

Other subsidiaries: United Artists, Sony Picture Classics, Screen Gems, Destination Films, TriStar Pictures

Overview: When it comes to gay visibility, Sony Pictures seems to have a split personality, with movies that fall into extremely positive or highly negative representations.

This makes sense given that this massive studio has steadily acquired other major studios, many with their own long histories in the business. To encapsulate a very long and very complicated story, Sony purchased Columbia Pictures in 1989, and, along with Comcast, acquired part of the famed old world Hollywood studio Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 2005. MGM had already merged with and taken over another major studio, United Artists, in the 1980s.

A telling example of the kinds of disparate depictions of gay men these various studios have produced is the contrast between The Silence of the Lambs (1991) (from the now defunct Orion, which was sold to MGM) and Philadelphia (1993) (from Columbia TriStar), both from director Jonathan Demme. It's common movie lore how Demme, in response to gay groups protesting the horrifically negative portrayal of the cross-dressing killer in Lambs, went on to helm the more gay-friendly Philadelphia, a movie not without its problems, but at least one that earnestly pleads for acceptance. There's a kind of poetic justice in both of these films, originally produced by separate entities, now being part of the same bigger studio.

But even within the catalogs of individual studios and divisions that now fall under the Sony umbrella, there are films that fall into wildly diverging gay-friendly and gay-phobic extremes.