Review: In "Hollywood to Dollywood," Cute Twins Desperately Seek Dolly Parton

Garry and Larry Lane at an idol of their idol

I first learned about Larry Lane earlier this year when I interviewed him after he and his twin brother won the campy reality show Wipeout (in terms of competition, it was, um, a wipeout). The world has long been fascinated by twins, and I figured our readers would be particularly interested in these twins, because they're gay (and because, um, they're cute).

And sure enough, you were.

At the time, Larry told me about a documentary he and twin brother Gary were working on that told their whole life story, centered around a trip they made to hand-deliver a script they'd written for their idol, Dolly Parton. In fact, they used their considerable prize money from Wipeout to buy the rights to use fourteen of Dolly's songs in the movie.

Last week, Larry sent me a copy of the movie, Dollywood to Hollywood, in anticipation of the movie's screening at Outfest in Los Angeles (on July 16th) and at various other film festivals in the months ahead.

Truthfully, I was wary. What if I didn't like the movie? Larry is such a sweet, earnest, wholesome guy the last thing in the world I wanted to do was pour cold water all over his and his brother's dream.

I needn't have worried. The movie's terrific — a true crowd-pleaser all the way. And best of all, it captures exactly what is so interesting about these two guys — and the fact that they're twins is really the least of it.

Youthful-looking 36-year-olds, the Lane twins herald from a small town North Carolina. And like many a gay boy, they felt like they didn't fit in back home. After coming out to each other in their teens, they soon set off together to Hollywood to try to make it as filmmakers (working as actors and models to pay the bills).

But even though they'd left their small Southern town behind, they were ambivalent: they'd never really come out to the folks back home, who now considered them local heroes. And even though they'd come out to their mother, she still hadn't been able to accept their being gay.

What to do in a case like this? Go on a road-trip to see if they can meet Dolly Parton! The "point" of their quest is so they can give her a screenplay they'd written especially for her. But it soon becomes clear that what they both really want is for the gay icon, who holds a particularly special place in the heart of many southern gays, to give them both the unconditional motherly love and acceptance that they can't get from their own mother.

Does Dolly deliver? Well, to tell you that would give away the whole ending of the movie. But suffice to say that they wouldn't have much of a film if they didn't get some kind of big blonde closure.

Is the "road trip documentary" a bona fide genre? If it is, it surely includes all the features here: cameos with celebrities such as Chad Allen, Beth Grant, Dustin Lance Black, and Leslie Jordan (who are either Lane friends or fellow Dolly lovers, or both), and on-the-road adventures that include everything from the wacky (weird people they meet, some intra-twin squabbling) to the serious (a wind-storm and an actual flood in Nashville).

And before they can actually worship at the shrine of Dolly, they make mistakes both small and big (they forget to bring the actual script to their first would-be encounter with Dolly, and there are a few hints that the script itself may not yet be quite ready for prime time).

Production values and sound are (mostly) very good, and of course the movie makes excellent use of all those wonderful Dolly songs.

But what's easily the most interesting thing about the movie is its look at American Southern culture, particularly as it applies to gays.

Clearly, there are pro-gay Southerners (just as there are bigoted non-Southerners). But it seems clear from the movie (and personal experience) that American Southern culture in general is at least twenty years behind most of the rest of the country on GLBT issues.

At the same time, Gary and Larry are Southerners themselves, with a deep and affectionate understanding of the culture and its mores. Watching them try to explain (and sometimes justify) Southern bigotry, even as they're direct objects of it, gets to the bottom of this issue in a very personal way. It reminded me a bit of the 2006 documentary Small Town Gay Bar (except that Hollywood to Dollywood is a lot more entertaining).

Anyway, this look at GLBT issues from a Southern point of view makes the movie feel both "retro" (in that the attitudes seem like something from a very different era), but also fresh and "different" (in that it's so rare these days to see Southern culture presented from within that culture, not mocked and criticized from the outside).

I thought the movie did have a couple of missed opportunities.

Gary and Larry actually have a pretty successful Hollywood career going on, but the movie doesn't really detail this. Had they done so (and cut down the "celebrity" interviews), it might've made the "Hollywood" part of the title make a little more sense.

Meanwhile, given how important Larry and Gary's mother and their hometown are to them, it's a shame neither were on the route to Dollywood or that the twins didn't swing by for a visit. It's completely understandable why they didn't — Mom probably wouldn't have agreed to be on camera anyway (but then again, that's kinda the point and would've made a great visual contrast with Dolly, who clearly loves being on camera).

Anyway, with so much of the movie's subtext about the mother and their hometown, it's a shame we never meet her or see it, except through a couple of photos and a very brief home movie.

But these are quibbles. When I first talked to Larry, I wondered how anyone could not like such a nice guy. I feel the same way about his and his brother's movie.