A Screenplay With a Different Orientation

As a fledgling screenwriter in the ‘80s, Sharon Pollack never intended to write about lesbians.

“The irony for me is that I was trying to do something mainstream originally. I wanted to sell a script and try to make a living as a writer. . . . Now there’s a new concept,” she says, laughing.

But “mainstream,” it turned out, translated into “dishonesty” for her. Even though she had an agent and her scripts generated interest, there was a common objection to her strong female characters. One producer, whom she said had followed her work, commented after reading her last script: “Why don’t you write about men?”

“Now, the lead in that screenplay was a heterosexual woman,” Pollack says with slight aggravation. “Practically all the other characters were men. So I said, ‘Well, everybody else writes about men, and I write about women.’ ”

After that, Pollack, 37, gave up on writing about men or women for Hollywood and began writing a novel and teaching writing part time at New York University. Seven months later, she started another screenplay, but this one would be different--this one would be something she really cared about.

“I thought, ‘How is it that I’ve never written a lesbian screenplay?’ My plays all had lesbian characters, but none of my screenplays did.”

“Everything Relative,” her first attempt with lesbian characters for the screen, had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival and opened at the Beverly Hills Music Hall on Friday. Pollack dubbed her script “the lesbian ‘Big Chill’ ” as a shorthand description early on, and it stuck. Based on her experiences at an East Coast college, the film begins with the reunion of seven friends and deals with current-day topics of work, relationships, children--and unresolved issues among old friends and ex-lovers.

“It was the fastest I’ve ever written anything,” the Bronx-born Pollack says. “And I had such a ball, because it was really from my heart.”

Although the main characters in “Everything Relative” are fictitious, one character is haunted by memories of an ex-love who was killed while they were in college. Pollack’s best friend in college was killed in a car accident.

“Ever since I’ve been writing, somewhere in my heart I always wanted to somehow have something that would be dedicated to her,” she says. “Of course, this story and that experience has always been there. There are some things about death in all of my writing, though not in a macabre way. I think it’s an experience that everybody deals with . . . and quite often, unfortunately, in the gay community now.”

When Pollack wrote the script, she says, part of the idea was “to in some way tip my hat” to her college friend. But the fact that this screenplay is her first to finally come full circle has had the added effect of being a “fulfilling and healing experience.”

“I often say there was a miracle involved [getting the picture made] or we had an angel,” Pollack says, smiling. “She was the angel--I’m sure of it. I’m sure of it.”

Once the screenplay was written, Pollack didn’t even consider shopping it around Hollywood. “They would’ve laughed at me,” she said. She approached independent companies and got positive feedback but no financial support.

“I had no idea that I was going to end up doing it myself,” says Pollack, who has resided with Patricia Larouziere for two years in New York’s East Village. But she did end up producing and directing the film herself, after raising $100,000. And if she would have known that, she says, she “would never in a million years” have attempted it.

“I couldn’t have gotten out of bed, I would’ve been so overwhelmed. I really believed I couldn’t do what I ended up doing.”

What she did was ask people for money. She hosted readings and tried to drum up investors at fund-raising cocktail parties.

“In the very beginning stages, when it was so far away . . . I would keep saying, ‘If this was meant to be, it will happen.’ ”

In addition to going through a cathartic experience, Pollack saw the chance to put positive images of lesbians on the screen, to show them as whole people. That is why, she says, it was important for her to include the love scenes.

“Why should I hold back?” she says. “That was the point. It’s who we are. And you can have dignity and self-respect and not be ashamed of it.”

Showing gays and lesbians living everyday lives may be an “unfashionable” thing to do, Pollack adds, but “that is happening for us.”

“Even if you’re not a lesbian, if people could get a little bit of that feeling from seeing my film, that’s the most reward in the world,” she says.

Pollack already has the support of her own family, she says. Her mother even appears briefly in the film. But the primary audience, still, is lesbian. They’re “starving” for images they can relate to, Pollack says, “especially older women, as my film deals with.”

But on her hope list for future projects, she says, is a story that has nothing to do with lesbians but probably isn’t any more commercial--that of her great-aunt and her grandmother, who was in the Yiddish theater.

So what does she think about being categorized as a “lesbian filmmaker”?

“The irony,” Pollack says, “is when I just went with total honesty and didn’t try to do anything that was not exactly who I was, that’s when I had this kind of success. So I don’t care if you call me a lesbian filmmaker,” she says, pausing thoughtfully.

“Isn’t that funny that that’s how I got where I am?”