Review: HBO's "Cinema Verite" Tells Fascinating Story of the First Reality TV (and the First Out Gay Man on Series Television)

James Gandolfini, Diane Lane, and Tim Robbins

Psychologists have long known that the mere act of observing someone changes that person's behavior. They call it the Hawthorne Effect.

In 1971, a visionary documentarian named Craig Gilbert had the crazy idea to film an actual family in their home over many days and turn the resulting "story" into a TV series, An American Family, that aired in twelve parts on PBS in 1973.

It was the invention of "reality" television, and it was a sensation at the time, and a huge controversy, in part because the family's oldest son Lance was gay (but also because the marriage between Pat and Bill Loud slowly, but dramatically unraveled on screen).

The documentary about this one particular family turned out to be a nexus of a number of important social forces all simmering just under the surface of the time: the rise of feminism and gay liberation, the implosion of the traditional nuclear family, and the dawning realization that, for centuries, a lot of straight men had gotten away with living lives of massive privilege and entitlement.

The series and its social context are all the subject of a truly fantastic new movie debuting on HBO on April 23rd, starring Diane Lane, James Gandolfini, Tim Robbins, and Thomas Dekker, as Lance, the man who is sometimes credited as being the first out gay man on series television (although it's a little-known fact that he never actually "came out" on camera: viewers just made correct assumptions based on the way he looked and acted).

The movie is breathtakingly well-acted, especially by Lane as Pat, Gandolfini as the brilliant but apparently ruthless Gilbert, and Dekker who creates an eerily convincing recreation of flamboyant, rebellious Lance.

Early on in An American Family, Pat goes to visit Lance in New York where the 20-year-old is staying at the Chelsea Hotel. Bristling with energy and self-discovery, he takes her to a drag review where she sees the "woman" who wants to marry him — a woman who happens to be a man. It's all captured on camera, and in Cinema Verite we see what was going on behind-the-scenes as well: Pat's slowly dawning realization that this project she's volunteered for may expose to the world things that she didn't necessarily want exposed.

There's another scene when Bill comes home from a trip with a bad full-body sunburn that he claims he got at a construction site ("Without a shirt?" she says). The next day, on camera, Pat visits a friend of the family — who also has a bad, full-body sunburn.

It doesn't get much more real than this. Later, we see Bill casually hitting on women on camera with Pat in the room.

Thomas Dekker as Lance Loud, far right