Advocate.com's exclusive first look at Ang Lee's new film Taking Woodstock includes this photo of Liev Schreiber, who plays Vilma, a drag queen who serves as a bodyguard during the Woodstock festival. The film is based on the memoir by Elliot Tiber, the gay man who made one call and a few weeks later managed to stage one of the most defining cultural events in American history.
In this scene, which takes place about halfway through the film, Vilma is showing Elliot -- played by Demetri Martin -- a photo of himself and his lover when he was a marine in Korea.
James Schamus, the screenwriter of Taking Woodstock and CEO of Focus Features, which is releasing the film, says Lee, whose previous credits include Brokeback Mountain, describes Vilma as a sort of angel for Elliot, "someone who's going to be watching over him and helping become who he needs to be."
Schamus phoned from a sound-mixing session to tell Advocate.com a little bit about the new film and why the studio that brought us Brokeback Mountain and Milk is going to impress us once again.
Advocate.com: So Mr. Schamus, tell us a little bit about the film.
James Schamus: Demetri Martin plays our hero Elliot Tiber, and he's a gay interior designer who's living in Greenwich village, but he's gotten flat-broke and he's at that horrible moment where you have to move back in with your parents for the summer. And his parents are the most nightmarish Jewish parents imaginable who run a crappy little motel in the Catskills in the middle of nowhere. It's just a shit hole, and the bank is about to take it over. They're behind on the mortgage, and he goes out there to help them out. And he's trying to come up with schemes to figure out how to make money and save the hotel for them, and they always fail. And up in this Catskills town he's actually the president of the chamber of commerce because there is no real commerce; it's just a bunch of old folks sitting around. But every summer he gives himself a permit to hold a music festival on the front lawn of the motel.
And one day he hears that a neighboring town has thrown out some hippie music festival. So he picks up the phone, he calls Woodstock ventures, and goes, "Well, I've got a permit." And half an hour later they land in a helicopter, look at the dump of a motel and the swamp behind it, forget it. So then Elliot is like, "Three miles up the road is our friend who's got a farm, let's check it out." And three weeks later, half a million people are there. It's this crazy story of this guy who's kind of a bit of a schmuck, but a lovable one who happens to pick up the phone and make one call, and one of the greatest moments in the history of human culture ever happens. And in the midst of all this, he's also finding himself, and really coming to accept who he is as a gay man, and as somebody who can finally come out from the under shadow of his parents. And he literally, the last day of the concert, gets in his car and drives to San Francisco. And that's the end of the story.
It's really lovely to have a movie which, you know again, we always say this, after Brokeback, you know, the floodgates of gay cinema in Hollywood were supposed to open. And you know, it's like, "OK, let's do it again with Milk." I think what's great about this is that you have a gay hero, and it's just not really a problem. There was something tragic in Brokeback, and you have the issue in Milk, but it is great to work on a movie in which it's like, "What's the big problem?" He's going to be himself. It's very sweet. His gay identity is part of the story, but at the same time, so what!
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment