Harvey Fierstein: ‘He Loves to Shock’

“Lies! All lies!”

Harvey Fierstein bellows at Anne Bancroft in his familiar foghorn voice. Bancroft, dressed very New York in matronly suit and broad-brimmed hat, sits with a reporter in the parking lot of a downtown Los Angeles warehouse, chatting about the filming of “Torch Song Trilogy.” Fierstein, who stars, writes and co-produces, eavesdrops, legs dangling off the tailgate of a prop truck. He grins mischievously.

“I’m watching you!”

Bancroft blissfully ignores him, quite adjusted to his constant bids for attention.

Even off-camera, Fierstein is on . He hugs and mugs. He blurts out sexual innuendo. He is the conscience and the clown, the heart and soul, the redoubtable creative force behind this very personal vision of gay life in the 1970s, and he never lets up. The cast and crew is clearly caught up in it--for a $4-million picture being filmed in 39 shooting days largely on makeshift sound stages in rented warehouses, it’s remarkably relaxed (production wrapped here last week).

Banter is nonstop . . . but no one tops Fierstein.

* On the set, getting ready to rehearse, Fierstein enters his movie bedroom, letting out a shriek.

“There’s a man in my bedroom!” he exclaims.

He reappears at the door with actor Brian Kerwin (“King Kong Lives!”), the handsome, square-jawed blond who plays Fierstein’s bisexual boyfriend, Ed.

“Aren’t you lucky?” says director Paul Bogart, causing chuckles.

“It’s a gift from the crew,” hollers a crew member. He draws bigger laughs.

Fierstein deadpans, “Could I at least have my type?”

* When shooting begins, Fierstein views a tight shot of Kerwin on a videotape monitor. “That’s very frightening, him that big on the screen,” Fierstein announces loudly. “In ‘King Kong,’ he never got close-ups like that!”

* During a break, Fierstein hugs cinematographer Mikael Salomon snugly from behind, trying to nibble an ear. “I talked to your wife this morning,” Fierstein coos. “She said I could chew on you.”

For the final shooting of the drag club scenes--with Fierstein resplendent as cross-dressing entertainer Arnold Beckoff, the central character--male gaffers showed up in matching gowns for “Grips in Drag” day.

Co-producer Howard Gottfried (“Network,” “Body Double”) credits Fierstein for the general ebullience.

“He’s got immense energy, and it’s non-stop,” says Gottfried. “I think the mood of a film is so important. And he brings such enthusiasm, such joy. And the jokes, especially with this production, the shtick.

“He loves to shock.”

No Trilogy

At 13, Fierstein decided he preferred boys to girls and “personally came out” (Harvey and his father pronounce the family name fire-steen ; his mother and brother prefer fear-steen ). When he watched “Gone With the Wind,” Fierstein recalls, he swooned over Clark Gable, not Vivien Leigh. He was performing in drag at age 16--while weighing 247 pounds (for filming, he’s now a svelte 170). To please his parents, he not only earned a degree in art from Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute, but he also began writing plays.

The semi-autobiographical “Torch Song Trilogy” played as separate one-acts at the legendary La Mama Experimental Theatre Club off-off-Broadway in 1978, but “no theater in America would put on the trilogy,” which ran nearly four hours--until an off-off-Broadway gay theater group called The Glines took a chance in 1981. It was about to close from lack of attendance late that year when a rave from New York Times critic Mel Gussow saved it.

It progressed to off-Broadway, then to the big time in 1982, when Fierstein, in his oft-quoted words, became the first “real-live, out-of-the-closet queer on Broadway.”

(“Tidy Endings,” the final segment of his “Safe Sex” trilogy that appeared less successfully on Broadway last year, will be shown on HBO Aug. 14, with Fierstein and Stockard Channing as the lover and ex-wife of a man who has just died from AIDS complications.)

“Torch Song” is the tale of avowedly gay Arnold, happily making a living performing musical numbers in drag, but desperate to establish a permanent relationship with the man of his dreams--and complete the cozy picture by adopting a gay teen-age son; a disapproving Jewish mother and sexually confused boyfriend complicate matters.

A frank, funny, poignant, sometimes angry demand for respect, it won a Tony for best play, while Fierstein got one as best actor. While off-Broadway, the play also launched the career of then-19-year-old Matthew Broderick (an Outer Circle Critics Award), who played the worldly, wisecracking teen; he now appears in the film as Arnold’s younger lover, Alan, a male model eventually murdered by so-called “fag-bashers.”

Moral watchdogs, of course, were hardly enamored of a play that insisted homosexuals have the right to live life as fully and freely as heterosexuals. Nor were all gay people fond of Fierstein’s romanticized saga, some criticizing it as a paean to middle-class “normalcy” and nuclear family conformity, what they saw as a false American dream--although a gay backlash quickly died, Fierstein told Newsweek in 1983, with the onslaught of AIDS.

Some gay activists also found soft-hearted Arnold Beckoff too understanding of heterosexual oppression--personally out-of-the-closet, perhaps, but not very militant. Fierstein admitted in a 1984 New York Times interview that he was probably less forgiving in real life than Arnold, whom he saw as an Everyman who happened to be attracted to members of his own gender: “Everyone wants what Arnold wants--an apartment they can afford, a job they don’t hate too much, a chance to go to the store once in a while and someone to share it all with.”

Many seemed to agree, finding the play universally touching and inspiring. It played on Broadway for three years; the national company toured for two years and the “bus-and-truck” company (one-night stands) for one, playing smaller cities nationwide such as Des Moines, Tulsa, Omaha, Iowa City and Peoria. (Surprisingly, it was not a big hit in San Francisco). Fierstein estimates the crowds were 70% heterosexual.

“My audience,” he claims, “has always been very general.”

The Truth of History

But will “Torch Song” be able to pull in sizable audiences as a movie, particularly when AIDS now permeates the national consciousness?

The story, running from 1971-1980, before AIDS surfaced, deals frankly with the conflict between promiscuity and commitment among many gay men--clearly on the side of monogamy. The producers plan to dedicate the film to persons who have AIDS and are helping to battle it, plus a message that urges AIDS education and safe sex--while emphasizing that love and affection can exist in spite of the deadly virus. But in his adaptation, Fierstein has left the play’s story-line essentially intact--including a notorious sex scene in the crowded backroom of a gay bar. He says the issue of AIDS did not influence him at all as he wrote the script.

“I’m not ashamed of what we did. There was anonymous sex--there still is. Hopefully, it’s now safe anonymous sex. Shall we pretend we didn’t have sex?”

He bristles a bit, his dark eyes flaring.

“Would you have me lie about history?”

Gottfried says the problem was discussed--at one time, the two producers considered making the story contemporary, but abandoned that idea: “Let’s face it, the AIDS issue would be on people’s minds.” Even with a pre-AIDS time frame, however, the laughs may not be quite the same for some.

Not Less Funny

Bancroft recalls being “utterly devastated by the play” when she first saw it in New York several years ago. “The subject matter had never been done before, in such a truthful way.”

But, in reading Fierstein’s film adaptation, she says, “The first thing I noticed when I read the script--I didn’t feel the same kind of joy. I had (that) reaction, and I told it to Harvey.”

She attributes the difference in her feelings to the impact of AIDS. Similarly, Broderick says his reaction to the adaptation was “absolutely different” from his response to the stage version.

The reality of AIDS made reading the script “very sad,” Broderick says. “It seems very dated now--it’s a part of history. In some way, it (the play) adds a new perspective to AIDS. The innocence that’s in the story now somehow seems more poignant.”

But Fierstein remains adamant that “Torch Song” still works. “Not a week goes by,” he says, “that the play isn’t playing somewhere.” (It opens Saturday at Studio Theatre, Long Beach Community Players, in Long Beach). “And I’m proud to say that ‘Torch Song’ benefits have raised a lot of money for AIDS,” he adds.

“Is homosexuality any less funny now? Gay humor has not changed. It’s one of the things helping us get through AIDS.”

More to the point, he feels, is the need for gay people to see themselves as something other than victims: “All we ever see is AIDS, AIDS, AIDS. The fact is, most of us don’t have AIDS. And we deserve to see that.

“I’ve said it before: Homosexuality does not equal AIDS. That’s the big lie. There is more to gay life than AIDS.

“It’s important that pieces like ‘Torch Song’ get written, so there’s something other than just AIDS. We have to stay in touch with an undiseased life.”

If the virus has changed the public’s perception of “Torch Song’s” subject matter, perhaps it will be in a positive way: “Maybe the audience will be more on my side when I fight with my mother (in the movie). Maybe people will understand Arnold’s celibacy more easily.” (After Alan’s death, Arnold swears off casual sex, waiting for his true love to come along.)

But nothing has changed the central “love story,” he insists.

“ ‘Torch Song’ is about self-respect, and that ain’t going to change.”

Selling a Sitcom

Big money offers for film rights have been plentiful, Fierstein says, but he turned them all down, determined to bring his “Torch Song” vision to the big screen intact.

“The struggle wasn’t getting it made, but getting it made the way I wanted,” he says, while director Bogart sets up the next shot.

He claims he could have taken many times what he’s making up front, if he’d taken certain offers. “They wanted to make a sitcom out of it, to castrate Arnold. There are a lot of liberals who like homosexuals as long as they keep their zippers closed.

“(Producers) were not interested in doing the whole story. They were basically interested in the third act (which focuses on his conflict with his mother). Because there was no sex in that act--no possibility of sex. Ed was married, the kid was a kid, and I was mourning for Alan, so it was safe for them. It’s OK to be homosexual, as long as you keep your thing in your pants.”

Among the sillier offers: “My favorite was, ‘We’ll do the movie and pre-sell (the concept) as a TV sitcom.’ ”

Four years ago, producer Howard Gottfried expressed interest. When Fierstein learned that Gottfried had produced three Paddy Chayefsky screenplays (“The Hospital” and “Altered States,” in addition to “Network”), he got excited, “Because it meant he respected words.”

Gottfried agreed the play had to be filmed in its entirety, in fact extended to include scenes of Arnold actually performing his drag numbers. He and Fierstein entered into a gentleman’s agreement. “He (Gottfried) was just nuts enough for me to love him,” Fierstein says. “I forgave him his heterosexuality. . . .”

To this day, hyphenate Fierstein doesn’t even know if his play was ever formally optioned. “Oh, don’t ask me that, honey. I don’t know how any of that works. I just know that I had approval of artistic decisions--that’s all I wanted.”

In fact, no money was exchanged, no contracts signed, while Gottfried helped Fierstein write the script--his first screenplay. They shopped a second draft to the studios.

“There was some progress with Columbia, some interest with Disney and, at one time, 20th,” recalls Gottfried, a slim, chatty man with tousled gray hair. “There were the ordinary problems you have with studios, but especially with provocative material like this.”

None of the studios wanted Fierstein to star; Dustin Hoffman and Richard Dreyfuss were the prime candidates mentioned. “Both were totally wrong,” says Gottfried, “because they’re simply too old. There was never a doubt in my mind that it should be Harvey (who is 34). I’m not demeaning either of those two fine actors, but it’s a typical studio approach--ill-advised, ill-thought-out, it just never would have worked.”

He attempted futilely to privately finance the project. So he started scaling down the cost and pitching smaller production companies, still with no commitments from the other actors. New Line Cinema, best known for offbeat (“Hairspray”) and exploitation films (the “Nightmare on Elm Street” series) took a year-and-a-half to say yes.

“They went through the same apprehensions as the others did,” Gottfried remembers. “We had lots of differences over money and creative control. But they were the only company willing to sign the check--and we have creative control.”

Reduced Fees

The addition of established names like Bancroft, Broderick and Kerwin--who won a Drama-Logue Award and Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle nomination for his performance as Ed in the L.A. stage production--changed the picture’s scope. Karen Young will play Ed’s wife, Laurel, newcomer Eddie Castrodad portrays the teen-age boy, and female impersonator Charles Pierce and actor Ken Page appear in drag show numbers.

Paul Bogart, whose feature film career (“Skin Game,” “Oh, God, You Devil”) has been only a middling success, is best known as a TV director. The winner of five Emmys, his credits range from sitcoms (five years of “All in the Family”) to PBS specials to miniseries (the critically praised “Nutcracker: Money, Madness and Murder,” starring Lee Remick as convicted murderer Frances Bradshaw Schreuder).

Acting credits will be alphabetical.

“Everybody is working for a fraction of what they usually get,” Gottfried says. “I mean, everybody --Matthew could get what we’re spending on the entire picture (Broderick characterized his salary as “near scale”). And those reduced fees are allowing us to make (the equivalent of) a $10-million film.”

Bancroft, up since dawn to re-shoot a scene on the day of an interview, says the picture, compared to those she’s accustomed to, “is greatly scaled down. You don’t have the luxury of a lot of rehearsal. You have to do a lot of it at home, on your own. I certainly must be better prepared with my lines, because there’s no time to work on them here.”

In some ways, she’s surprised to be playing the combative mother of a homosexual son who refuses to conform to straight family life as she demands, carries on his life style without guilt or shame, and performs publicly in women’s clothes.

“When I first read the script, I thought I could never ever do this. I turned it down at first. I thought it over a great deal. Then I realized every mother in the world has a child that is worriness, troubleness and sadness-making, if there is such a word. So all of the underlying emotional conflicts that his mother has, I have. If a mother thinks she has no worries like this, she’d better look again.

“A child can break your heart, but like nobody else on Earth, they can mend it.”

Broderick says he had no qualms about taking a gay role now that he has established as a Broadway and feature-film star.

“I can’t worry if people will think I’m gay (because he portrays a gay character)--I don’t know that they’ll think that. And I can’t depend on people like that, anyway.

“I look very hard for good parts. One nice thing about making money, which I’ve done in the past, is that I have the freedom to do what I want. It’s nice to take advantage of that. And it’s nice to have a role where all the responsibility isn’t on me.

“As a piece of drama, it (‘Torch Song’) stands on its own. It is political, but it’s really a love story, about family, and a lot of things. I like the politics of this movie--I’m very much behind it--but that’s not the main attraction for me. It’s the drama.”

“Torch Song” is Broderick’s first acting job since his much publicized driving accident in Northern Ireland, which left two Irish women dead, Broderick with a broken leg and other injuries--but fined only $175 for careless driving. He says the experience neither haunts him nor affects his concentration as an actor--”certainly not”--although the accident did indirectly influence his decision to join Fierstein and company.

“There’s something attractive about working with a close friend after not working for a year,” Broderick said quietly on the couch of his small trailer. “I never felt I owed anyone anything--that’s not a good reason to take a part.

“But there’s something scary about coming back to work after so long away from it. This (movie) gives me some security.”

Barriers of Taste

There have been the usual problems attendant to a modest budget. Gottfried admits, “We would have preferred to film the whole thing in New York. That would have been nice.” Two weeks of exteriors shot last month in New York were plagued by rain, putting production briefly behind schedule. Day-to-day setbacks have been annoying--an entire day’s footage was ruined by a Los Angeles color lab (Quipped a crew member, “That’s what you get for using Labs R Us.”).

But major concerns seem to be creative.

The play’s story-line has been completely restructured. Arnold’s mother now enters the story early and the two quickly become antagonists, two people who deep down love each other but have utterly opposing views about life. Unlike the play, the film will also introduce viewers to Arnold’s father and brother. Family background and events--including Alan’s violent death--merely talked about on stage are dramatized on film. Every character now has his or her own beginning, middle and end.

The danger in adapting any play is wordiness, “but the talky part is easy to work on,” maintains Gottfried. “You’re never going to adapt a play and take out all the words. It’s what the words do for a project that means something.”

What loomed as the most sensitive creative issue was the infamous “backroom scene.” In the play, Fierstein as Arnold visits a gay bar and ends up with an unseen orgiastic group in the back room. The scene in question finds Arnold bent over with his pants down--trying but failing to make conversation with the man behind him, even smoking a cigarette--while being sodomized.

Hard as it might be to believe for those who missed the play--or for those simply offended by homosexuality--the scene drew howls of laughter from audiences. (Needless to say, it also smashed barriers of taste and subject matter on Broadway and elsewhere.)

In the play, Fierstein was alone in a tight spotlight; the rest was left to the imagination. During filming last week, Fierstein as Arnold was surrounded by 25 actors, playing barroom patrons mingling in group sex.

There was to be no nudity. “Absolutely none,” says Fierstein two days before filming the scene. “I think the most you’ll see is hands come around me and open my belt. And you’ll hear a zipper.”

Or maybe not. The film, and the scene in particular, will be carefully tested on preview audiences. “If it doesn’t work, it won’t be in this film. That’s why I have final cut. If it doesn’t come off as completely human (rather than exploitative), it comes out.”

It will also depend on whether audiences can handle the scene, says Gottfried: “The chances of that scene staying in the movie . . . I’m not insensitive (to public reaction). But we’d be insane not to shoot it--it’s a hilarious scene.”

Specter of AIDS

In a sense, it’s the equivalent of all those scenes in straight coming-of-age films, when a father or older buddy takes a young man to a whorehouse, where he’s turned off by the dehumanization and sexual objectification of the experience.

“It’s a very metaphorical scene--that moment in life when you really understand the difference between sex and love,” declares Fierstein. “It’s Arnold trying to make something human out of an inhuman situation.”

The specter of AIDS haunts that scene perhaps more than any other in the script. But Fierstein maintains that because the government, medical establishment and media were so slow in responding to the encroaching epidemic, most gay men were uneducated at the time about the fatal virus.

“We may have been committing emotional suicide (with rampant anonymous sex),” he says, “But we were not committing physical suicide.”

How moviegoers in Middle America will react to such material remains to be seen.

Late last month, Fierstein told Calendar that he foresaw a broad audience for the picture. But he told the New York Times that its commercial chances were “iffy at best. It is not a movie you’ll be able to show on airlines. I can see people jumping out of the plane the first time they see me in full drag.”

More recently, Calendar again tried to pin him down.

“I have days when I say it will be a huge hit, then days when I think it will be a cult film,” he said with a sigh. “I really don’t know. I’m too close to it. Jesus, 10 years doesn’t leave you much space to stand back and get a clear view.”

Gottfried, with four years invested, thinks he has a sharper focus. “It’s not an art movie,” he says, sounding very much a producer. “It will be platformed into a broad market. We’re making a commercial movie here. How is it going to sell in the hinterlands? That was what the studios were concerned about. I’m not sure. We’re making a movie of entertainment and ideas.”

Certainly, the success or failure of the picture rests largely on Fierstein, who is in almost every scene. “The audience,” Fierstein sums up, “is either going to care about Arnold or not. You can disagree with him--but you’ve got to care about him.”

A sound track of classic torch songs will be heard throughout the film, sung by the original artists. A couple others--”Love for Sale,” “As Time Goes By”--will be performed in the film’s Club East Fourth, Fierstein’s homage to New York’s real-life 82 Club, which once featured legendary drag queens who did their own singing, unlike the lip syncing to records that proliferates in drag shows today.

“The entertainment value is there,” promises Gottfried. “It’s a lot of fun, this movie.”

The Busybody

On the set of Arnold’s living room, with the New York City skyline visible out the windows, a framed photo sits on an end table showing Fierstein affectionately nuzzling Broderick’s neck. It was Fierstein’s choice to represent Arnold’s favorite picture of the deceased Alan, one of his endless touches.

“They call me the one-man crew,” he says. “I do props. I mess with makeup. I help people with lines. I check the clothes. I make them all nuts. They say, ‘Harvey, isn’t writing and acting enough?’ I say, ‘No!’ ”

Fierstein’s cyclonic energy and busybody nature apparently haven’t been a problem. Bogart, a portly, white-bearded man, sits in his director’s chair absorbing suggestions from cast and crew without a flicker of resentment. Fierstein, of course, makes more suggestions than anyone.

But: “I would never give another actor notes (directions),” Fierstein swears. “You don’t overstep that line--well, you try not to. I try very hard not to step on Paul’s toes. One reason I picked him, is because he’s very relaxed. He told he he has a ‘fun factor’--if it’s up, he does good work. So I try to keep his fun factor up.

“He does take suggestions. He does listen. We battle out what we have to battle out, but with good humor.”

But Bogart is no pushover. Before filming, he reminded Fierstein--then over 230 pounds at 6 feet tall--that he would be portraying the lover of Matthew Broderick and Brian Kerwin on the big screen , with unforgiving lighting and close-ups. “Would you cast yourself as Arnold Beckoff?” Bogart asked his star.

Fierstein got on a strict diet and aerobics regimen and dropped over 60 pounds.

Waiting for Mr. Right

“I don’t find life altogether different (being trim), though I do like the way I look now,” Fierstein says. “I got up this morning at 7 a.m. and there was a movie with the Fat Boys eating like six pizzas. And I said, ‘I should get this videotape, because I’ll never want to eat again!’ ”

It’s a Saturday morning. Fierstein, away from the hubbub of the set, has called the reporter to finish the interview. The call lasts nearly two hours and when the reporter apologizes, Fierstein croaks sardonically, “All I have to do all day is go get dog shampoo.”

One senses that the stage--and now, the movies--provides Fierstein a surrogate family, perhaps supplanting Arnold Beckoff’s “Torch Song Trilogy” dream. Fierstein’s currently uninvolved romantically, he says, and thoroughly celibate.

He first tried a life without sex about five years ago, “when ‘Torch Song’ had become so busy, I’d stopped having sex, anyway. There just wasn’t time. I was bored with sex, frankly. And, of course, there was AIDS. I said to myself, ‘Why don’t you stop carrying on until you meet somebody who’s worth carrying on with?’ ”

His abstention was broken by a two-year relationship, then again by an affair “with a sweet kid of 20” that lasted a few months. His latest celibate period will reach “two years this August.” The plan, he says, is to “wait until you meet someone you love.”

“I’m not all that happy,” he adds, laughing, but with a touch of Arnold Beckoff’s ruefulness. “Sex is important. I like having a man’s arms around me. I like kissing. I just haven’t found the right one yet.

“You can tell them I’m available.”