MOVIES : Out There, Struggling : There’s been a flurry of gay-produced and gay-oriented independent films, but some filmmakers fear the wave has peaked and the money has dried up

Consider two films. Both deal with lovers, outcasts from society, fugitives from the law who are propelled toward a tragic fate by a hostile world, a chaotic universe and obsessive love . . .

(“Bonnie and Clyde”? “Gun Crazy”? “Harold and Maude”?)

. . . Their creators stretch the boundaries of traditional narrative, roll the stylistic dice and generally challenge your expectations . . .

(Fellini? Altman? Penny Marshall?)

. . . The films are new, independent, and their characters are gay.

(Oh. Why don’t we just call it the new gay cinema?)

Well, perhaps we should consider things a bit further . . .

“The Living End,” Gregg Araki’s very dark and punkishly comic road saga about two HIV-positive lovers (which opened Friday), and “Swoon,” Tom Kalin’s elegant and intoxicating treatment of the infamous Leopold-Loeb case (which opens Sept. 25), certainly deal with gay characters. And gay issues. And they’re part of what has seemed like an explosion in gay-produced and gay-oriented independent films over the last couple of years--including “Poison,” “My Own Private Idaho,” “Paris Is Burning,” “Edward II” and “The Hours and Times.”

But both films also wrestle with crime, hypocrisy, mortality, redemption, truth--matters that heterosexual cinema has always tried to deal with. The films--all these films--also differ wildly in both style and attitude. So to relegate these two films, or any of the current crop of gay-made films, into the same category requires a certain bias. As well as a certain leap of faith.

“I think there have simply been good gay filmmakers always,” said Jennie Livingston, whose highly successful debut documentary “Paris Is Burning” concerned black and Latino drag queens. “And gay content in film always, usually in the independent sector. But before and after the (Hays) Code, gay subject matter was not permissible in Hollywood, or only permissible as an index of freakishness, which of course you still see in films to this day. Someone is rarely a gay person because they’re a gay person. They’re usually a gay person as (an) index of some psychosis. And I don’t even have to name the movies.”

We do: Last year, four major films--”JFK,” “Basic Instinct,” “The Prince of Tides” and “The Silence of the Lambs”--came under intense heat for what were seen as one-sided and distorted portrayals of gay characters and issues, and polarized the studios and the gay audience. And to deny that the new gay films are a reaction to Hollywood is not only to deny the way their directors are playing off Hollywood constructions, but to deny history.

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Gays are hardly new to the movies, but Hollywood’s record on homosexuality has been dubious. Gay subject matter, especially after the establishment of the code in 1930, was taboo (even if, as in something like “The Maltese Falcon,” for example, opaque references occasionally slipped in).

That George Cukor, for instance, director of such films as “The Philadelphia Story,” “Adam’s Rib” and “My Fair Lady,” was homosexual was no secret in the industry, but as Patrick McGilligan shows in his recent biography “George Cukor: A Double Life,” every effort was made to keep it from the public.

Well-intentioned but flaccid efforts to be sensitive about gay men and women--remember “Personal Best” and “Making Love”?--have done little but reinforce the idea that gay filmmakers have to create their own cinema. England’s Derek Jarman, for instance, has been doing it on a low-budget basis for years. And with AIDS generating as much anger as sadness, and veiled--and not so veiled--references to “family values” indicating new political offensives against homosexuality, gay filmmakers, like gays everywhere, have been energized.

“It would be difficult to be like George Cukor in the ‘90s,” said Araki, a 32-year-old Los Angeles filmmaker, “if only because there’s a sense that the issues have become so charged that you have to take a stand one way or another. And in that way there’s this sort of generation of queers not just in film but all over who feel that being gay is a very big part of their identity and are much more vocal and much more expressive about it. And when they happen to be filmmakers as well, it results in these new queer films.”

“There’s been so much discussion about this new queer cinema, whatever that means,” said New Yorker Kalin, 30. “I don’t think ‘The Living End’ or ‘Swoon’ or ‘The Hours and Times’ (Christopher Munch’s speculative film about Brian Epstein, John Lennon and their weekend in Barcelona in 1963) are ‘spokesperson’ films, but the whole issue raises questions about being a spokesperson, about a community, the debate over presenting ‘positive images’ . . . what’s the inside and outside of queer? And how is this explosion kind of a market thing?”

In a bombed-out looking storefront on Hudson Street one night last week, James Schamus was thinking about the same thing. “It might sound cynical,” Schamus said, “but the only way you can really define the new gay cinema is define the films that have been successful reaching out initially to a gay market and building from there. That’s really it.”

Around the corner, shooting was under way on “The Wedding Banquet,” a cooperative Taiwanese-American project directed by NYU film school graduate Ang Lee (of last year’s “Pushing Hands”). Schamus and Ted Hope, his partner in the production company Good Machine, are producing the film, which sounds like classic screwball comedy: A young, upwardly mobile Chinese man, living with his Caucasian lover, is under pressure from his very traditional parents to marry. A Chinese woman artist living in his building needs a green card, so the young man decides to help her, and get his parents off his back, by marrying the woman. Then the parents decide to come to America, throw a wedding for hundreds of people, and one crazy thing leads to another. It all sounds perfectly Hollywood, except for the fact that the Caucasian lover is a man.

Schamus was an executive producer on Todd Haynes’ “Poison” and “Swoon.” Hope is, among other things, Hal Hartley’s producer (“Trust,” “Simple Men”). Good Machine is distributing “The Hours and Times”; “Swoon’s” producer, Christine Vachon, was the producer of “Poison.” It’s rather an incestuous arrangement--Araki says there’s no real L.A. equivalent--but it provides a particular perspective.

“The most interesting stuff (being made), the greatest proportion of it, is gay-themed,” Schamus said, while rifling through applications for an independent TV project he’s producing for PBS. “What you’ve been able to see over time is a development and articulation of a highly organized market that’s easy to get a hold of, that loves movies and wants to see movies with themes and characters and ideas that are of interest to them. The gay market is upscale, has lots of disposable income and had gotten itself together politically and socially over the last 10 years; it’s concentrated in a few key metropolitan areas, it has a press of its own and its own kind of buzz network that’s easy and inexpensive to reach out to and it has a lot of highly articulate people who have finally seized the means of production and have a lot to say. And that’s what makes a good film.”

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Recent movies that have crossed over include “Paris Is Burning”; Haynes’ “Poison,” a triptych of alarming riffs on documentaries, B-horror films and crime cinema that won the top prize at the ’91 Sundance Film Festival; Gus Van Sant’s “My Own Private Idaho,” sort of a “Henry V” that starred Keanu Reeves and River Phoenix, and “Tongues Untied,” Marlon Riggs’ film about black gay males that brought PBS so much grief. There was also Derek Jarman’s gorgeously provocative version of Marlowe’s “Edward II” and Munch’s “The Hours and Times.”

But despite the relative commercial success--and compared to Hollywood movies, both the budgets and the profits are minuscule--the concept of a new gay cinema worries some, and for a variety of reasons.

“Last year, ‘Poison’ and ‘Paris Is Burning’ came out and made their money back as solid art-house hits,” said Vachon. “I think that paved the way among many for certain mini-major distributors to take chances they wouldn’t have taken before. Suddenly, there was a hip quotient they could take advantage of, and articles get written and it becomes very fashionable and you don’t want it to be a flavor-of-the-month kind of thing.

“It seems we’re in a dangerous position, because it makes me think of the independent film scene in the early ‘80s, when ‘Stranger Than Paradise’ and ‘Liquid Sky’ did such great business,” she said. “And then all of a sudden a lot of people were making these films and most were falling on their asses. And then suddenly there weren’t so many films being picked up and distributed. I’m worried that will happen again, since it is so market driven. And the fact is, some straight films are going to do better than others, and some so-called queer films will do better than others.”

“There’s also all this press about these Hollywood pictures being made about AIDS,” Kalin said. “My favorite is Francis Ford Coppola’s ‘The Cure.’ I’m so afraid”--he quakes in mock terror--”I’m deeply frightened. I mean, if one of those movies does terribly, and I don’t think they’ll be more than $10-$15-million movies, it’s not that big a deal. But if they were $30-million movies and crashed there’d be a problem.”

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Kalin said the bigger problem is what he deemed the “paradox” around how independent film gets financed. “There’s no base established by the distributors,” he said. “There’s not enough ‘American Playhouse’ or whatever money, to substantiate work continuing.”

“That’s the thing that’s frustrating to me as a producer,” Vachon said. “The problem with the Goldwyns, the Fine Lines or whoever is that their real flavor comes from those first films, the ones people really sell everything to make--’Poison’ and ‘Swoon’ and ‘Straight Out of Brooklyn’--because they’re so innovative and new. But there’s no mechanism in place to nurture these filmmakers into their second film. So what they’re often faced with is either a development deal where everything that made them interesting is taken away--like who’s going to be in their pictures, how long the film is going to be--or they’re forced to go to Europe for money. If they’re lucky. I mean, I don’t think Tom’s next film should be a $10-million film. Maybe a $1- or $2-million film, depending on the subject matter.”

“Swoon” cost under a million dollars, but it doesn’t much matter, since so much of the funding on which independents have relied has dried up. Not only is the economy bad--and most of those interviewed stressed that was the biggest problem--but budget cuts combined with political pressure on such traditionally reliable funders as “American Playhouse” has caused the bucks to evaporate.

To illustrate: Livingston said that despite her success with “Paris,” financing her next movie--titled “Not for Profit,” a satire about the private fund-raising scene including “images of violence against women in the movies, an interracial lesbian love story and a witchcraft subplot”--has been as difficult as funding her first. “Poison’s” Haynes said his next movie, “Safe”--which, he says, “isn’t even gay-themed, it’s about environmental illness”--hasn’t found much backing either. There’s a fear that even if there is something to call a new gay cinema, we may already have seen its crest, because there are so few healthy financial sources to be tapped. And even if there were money, Haynes, for one, has other concerns as well.

“Not only is it a media construction,” he said of the new gay cinema, “but it’s also about this sad reduction of what film has become in this country, i.e ‘only the feature.’ There aren’t any other options for filmmakers today, if you want a career. And it’s a movement that’s defined after the market has been established, like the art world in New York in the ‘80s. All of a sudden people were investing in art. It was lucrative. So this art movement of the ‘80s followed because all of a sudden there was disposable income and people could invest in art. Can you believe we were so excited about Julian Schnabel? Today it’s kind of shocking because so few of those artists have really survived. It’s sort of sad that way. It’s not like it was with Op Art, where you had a thematic and stylistic attack on Abstract Expressionism and the market followed the movement.”

Besides, Haynes said, “to overemphasize the new gay cinema is to overlook the gay cinema that’s existed since Kenneth Anger, in experimental circles.

“At times, the market even caught up with it--what year was ‘Chelsea Girls’? “ Haynes asks of the 1966 Andy Warhol movie shown simultaneously on two different screens with two different images. “That was an amazing moment, where independent cinema and the market kind of intersected at this weird point and people were flocking to the theater to see 4 1/2 hours of what? A double-screened extravaganza with no real narrative and one of the most amazing films to come out of independent cinema. And there’s no real way today of that happening. We’re losing something, as much as we’re gaining something.”

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The current crop of independent films really do come out of a Hollywood tradition, even if their strategy is to fracture the very constructions that make up that tradition. And since gay cinema and independent cinema are inseparable, the experimental gay cinema of the past has been all but abandoned. Despite the financial crunch, adventurous gay work is both being distributed--Jochen Hick’s “Via Appia,” about an HIV-positive man’s search for the hustler who infected him, opens Wednesday in New York, a year after its Los Angeles theatrical release--and made. L.A.’s Juliet Bashmore, whose “Kamikaze Hearts” is a midnight hit in New York, has just completed a film on “radical drag queens living in East Berlin” for “Out,” a weekly program on Britain’s Channel 4. Schamus is high on the work of Columbia University grads Nicole Holofcener and Mark Christopher, as well as Sadie Benning, a video artist from Wisconsin.

But do we even want a new gay cinema? Kalin and Araki echo each other when they say they don’t consider their new movies gay films. In a perfect world, of course, they would be considered film like any other; finding a comfortable niche in which to file these films is easier than asking ourselves why we feel the need to do exactly that. It’s a lot to expect that the current crop of gay-made films is going to change attitudes in this country, especially considering the script for last week’s extravaganza in Houston.

The most profound change effected by a new gay cinema may have been noted by Todd Haynes. “At least,” he said, “Hollywood is discovering that money isn’t homophobic.”