Van Sant’s Seeds of Success

“Getting this award from Outfest is like--I mean, the whole basis of my career comes from this festival,” enthuses Gus Van Sant, who will receive the Outfest Achievement Award at Thursday’s opening-night gala at the Pantages Theatre. “You were there. You remember. I mean, you were one of the three guys who created me!”

Well, not exactly. True, this reporter first became aware of Van Sant when he saw the writer-director’s first feature, “Mala Noche,” at the 1987 Los Angeles International Gay and Lesbian Film/Video Festival, as Outfest was called at the time. This tale of the unrequited love of a skid row liquor store clerk for a Mexican immigrant street hustler was unprecedented in its offbeat humor and matter-of-fact treatment of same-sex love. And, serving on a subcommittee of the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn., I recommended “Mala Noche” (which is being revived at Outfest ’99 with a special screening Friday) for the critics’ 1987 Douglas Edwards Award for independent/experimental filmmaking.

And because of that award, the way was smoothed for Van Sant to make his breakthrough feature, “Drugstore Cowboy,” in 1989. An equally gritty/funny story of a band of pharmacy-robbing drug addicts, it launched a career that has taken the Portland-based filmmaker from the gay avant-garde to the heart of the “mainstream.”

“Drugstore Cowboy” revived the career of its star, Matt Dillon, and introduced the currently “shagelicious” Austin Powers playmate Heather Graham to movie audiences. Likewise Nicole Kidman’s acting skills were amply showcased in “To Die For,” Van Sant’s 1995, Buck Henry-scripted black comedy about a media-mad murderess. And then there’s the “blue-collar” math genius saga, “Good Will Hunting,” the biggest hit for Miramax Films to date, winning the 1997 screenwriting Oscar for its creator-stars Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, plus a best supporting actor award to their co-star Robin Williams.

“It’s funny,” says Van Sant, musing over lunch at Hugo’s in West Hollywood with his latest protege--rising martial-arts youth-film star T.J. Roberts (“Saban’s Masked Rider” and “Magic Kid I and II”).

“That award was the edge I needed for Avenue Pictures to let me make ‘Drugstore Cowboy.’ The L.A. Film Critics gave me that extra push. And [Outfest is] still giving it! You give the one award to the filmmakers who can actually benefit from it. I think that’s one area where you guys are playing your own game, using your own power.”

Critics’ Support Minimal on ‘Psycho’

But that game, as Van Sant well knows, can be played in two different ways. Many of the very critics who had supported his earlier efforts allowed him to--in that superbly Nixonian phrase--”twist slowly in the wind” when it came to his color, virtual shot-by-shot remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho.”

“Boy, that really taught me a lot, that film!” Van Sant declares of his experience with the little-seen, scathingly reviewed conceptual-art-piece-cum-thriller starring Anne Heche and Vince Vaughn in the roles that Janet Leigh and Anthony Perkins made famous. “It didn’t teach me anything about Hitchcock. But it taught me a lot about the press. Because when you work long enough you see all sides of it. And I’ve seen the bad side and the great side. My film of ‘Even Cowgirls Get the Blues’ got bad reviews, too, but that was more ordinary. The critics saw it, and simply didn’t like it. This was different. With ‘Psycho’ critics had it [in] for me from before the beginning!

“The lesson that I learned is that the press is very conservative. I wasn’t aware of that. They had always been the ones who had paved the way for me. In this case the pavement totally ended. . . . It really hurt.”

Van Sant says he is currently considering several possible projects. “I’ve been working on doing ‘Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot’ with Robin Williams as the paraplegic cartoonist John Callahan. There’s a group of short films I may do with Harmony Korine called ‘Jokes.’ He’ll do one, I’ll do one and another filmmaker will do a third. I want to do a film of ‘Wit,’ which is a stage play in New York. I don’t know if it will actually happen but it’s something we’ve talked about. There’s a project called ‘Satyricon,’ which is sort of an evening in a punk rock club. There’s a project about a commune in the Northern California or Oregon area. Then there’s ‘Street Zen,’ about that guy Issan Dorsey who was a San Francisco transvestite hustler and performance artist who later became a Zen teacher.

“And I’m planning to do a film of Francine du Plessix Gray’s book ‘A Home With the Marquis de Sade.’ I think Ryan Phillippe would be perfect for that. So there are about 12 projects. But right now what I’ve been doing is just not doing anything, so I can actually figure things out. And that’s hard because of the [John] Travolta project.”

That project, “Standing Room Only,” a biopic of singer Jimmy Roselli and his relationship with the Mafia, was until about a month ago going to be Van Sant’s next project. Put together by a company called Interlight, and set to be released by Disney, the $70-million musical drama was to have starred Travolta and his wife, Kelly Preston. The question buzzing around Hollywood was why did Travolta want Van Sant rather than say . . . Martin Scorsese?

“He saw me as an original choice I suppose,” Van Sant says with a slight shrug. “Either they asked Marty and he had another project, or maybe they just thought . . .,” Van Sant pauses. “If I were them, I would have asked Marty. But they asked me. So it was me doing a genre I’d never done. And [Disney] said, ‘Let’s go.’ And so we went ahead because we didn’t have any time not to. And then all of a sudden it’s like ‘We’re not really going anymore.’ They wanted to get it made real fast because John was going to do the L. Ron Hubbard project, ‘Battleship Earth.’ ”

Van Sant ascribes Disney’s pullout to the lack of another partner to co-finance the production.

“We were trying to raise money at the same time we were actually spending it. And it came to a point that there was no money to pay our people who were working on it. One of the reasons I imagine that Disney wasn’t able to continue was they had all sorts of canceled projects.

“They had a disappointing year, and they decided that they would do some trimming. And we were one of those trims.

“The movies have become a different game. A film that has singing and dancing and great sellable John Travolta moments was for some reason not computing in their computers.”

Fluctuating Success Seen in Gay Cinema

Meanwhile, the gay and lesbian film movement Van Sant helped jump-start has been computing on a different track.

“I think that there’s been a real advance in gay cinema,” Van Sant says. “Somewhere around 1992 or [1993] after I came along, there was this emergence of Todd Haynes, Greg Araki. . . . Derek Jarman was very active, and then there were Chris Munch and Tom Kalin. One year at Sundance it was like ‘The Gay Year.’ There was a party, and there were panels and stuff like that. Two years later it kind of like disappeared.

“The filmmakers were still working, but it was a different atmosphere because people thought what that whole thing was about was ‘black filmmakers have arrived--now it’s the gay filmmakers.’ But it didn’t quite work out that way. But then three or four years later you’ve got ‘The Opposite of Sex,’ ‘Broadway Damage’ and ‘Billy’s Hollywood Screen Kiss.’ These kind of gay B-movies for the Sunset 5. A marketing niche had been found. But those guys from ’92 weren’t about the Sunset 5. Now there are these gay teen films, like ‘Edge of Seventeen.’ I saw the one from England, which was just great--’Get Real.’ I thought that was really amazing. To me that’s the upper crust.”

Van Sant hopes to mine that crust with yet another project, “Brokeback Mountain”--a film version for Sony Picture Entertainment of E. Annie Proulx’s modern western of two otherwise heterosexual cowboys and their lifelong love affair, for which Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana have written a script.

“The script brings in more about them than the story. It has the guys’ wives and families. There’s more of a feeling of a whole world. I think casting on this is going to be a hard one. You can go high profile or you can go unknown. And I’m very, very torn about who the characters are and how to cast them. The actors have to play from about 19 to 36 or 37.

“It’s tricky. It’s tempting to use unknowns, although we started out thinking it would be the best thing to use very high profile. Or maybe ‘medium profile’ like T.J.--if he can ride a horse.

“A horse?” the young actor asks, startled. “No, I’ve never ridden a horse.”

“Aw, come on, T.J.,” Van Sant admonishes. “Ya gotta say, ‘Yep!’ You know that trick, right? Then you get on the horse and call for a stunt double. That’s how you make it in the movies!”