Multilayered ‘Beefcake’ Recalls Mizer’s Life

Thom Fitzgerald’s “Beefcake” is an illuminating and engrossing look at the life and times of pioneer Los Angeles physique photographer Bob Mizer (1922-1992) that combines clips from Mizer’s films, a fictional story and interviews with people who knew or worked with Mizer. Inspired by Valentin Hooven’s book of the same name, Fitzgerald has succeeded in making his ambitious film work on several levels.

First, there’s an exploration of the relationship between Mizer (Daniel MacIvor, who actually resembles the large, unprepossessing Mizer) and his mother (Carroll Godsman), who is depicted as disapproving of her son’s work but was supportive of him to the end of her life. MacIvor’s Mizer was a shy, secretive gay man who loved photographing beautiful young men and in 1945 formed the Athletic Model Agency, which soon became a cottage industry, with Mizer’s brother handling the books and working as a handyman, his mother making the posing straps worn by her son’s models--they were also sold via mail order, as were AMG photos and films.

Mother and son lived for decades in a large Edwardian house on 11th Street near Alvarado, to which had been added a studio and an outdoor roof pool, the site of a zillion photo shoots and kitschy short movies involving near-naked Roman soldiers, wrestlers, sailors and cowboys.

Fitzgerald’s take on Mizer is that he was a romantic who could be vulnerable to the overtures of the young men who passed through his portals, but who was not a pimp. Unfortunately, Mizer’s era coincided with that of Joseph McCarthy with its intense, witch-hunting homophobia. It was perhaps inevitable that in those repressive times Mizer would run afoul of the law, accused of being a pornographer and of being involved in prostitution. Sometimes, it seems, Mizer referred his models to other photographers, who sometimes had sex with them; there may have been more to it than that, for Mizer could be a shadowy man.

In any event, Mizer was always at risk because so many of the young men who posed for him were also hustlers or had criminal records.

Mizer did away with posing straps when frontal nudity became legal but never made hard-core films. Seen today, his work seems innocent, a celebration of young male beauty. (Back in the ‘50s Mizer would have had to defend his work as art and not admit, at least publicly, that such art could also be homoerotic in impact.) As Hooven remarks, those who bought his long-running magazine/catalog Physique Pictorial knew what they were buying and why. He adds that purchasing such a magazine was an “adventure, an act of courage in 1955,” especially for a teenage boy confronting his homosexuality, as Hooven was at the time.

In order to tie the film together Fitzgerald has come up with the fictional story of a young man, Neil O’Hara (Josh Peace), who ditches Nova Scotia farm life for the bright lights of 1950s Hollywood and dreams of movie stardom . Neil is the archetypal boy-next-door Mizer model, nice-looking and well-built, but not so handsome and buffed out that, as Mizer puts it, his customers couldn’t “imagine themselves in your shoes.” Naive and well-mannered, Neil surely must have been like many of Mizer’s models, who are seen in the many clips from Mizer films that Fitzgerald deftly integrates into “Beefcake.”

Among the interviewees are Mizer contemporaries and fellow physique photographers Russ Warner (a bodybuilder himself) and Dave Martin, who relate their own run-ins with the law. There are also reminiscences from Mizer models Joe Leitel (who went on to an acting career), Jim Lassiter and most famously, Joe Dallesandro, who is quite candid about mixing in hustling with modeling and who became one of the most famous of the Andy Warhol stars. Nowadays, a beefy, middle-aged character actor, Dallesandro says that he never thought much about the photos he posed for or the films he appeared in but today appreciates them as a record of his youth.

The most unexpected participant in the film is none other than fitness legend Jack Lalanne, who apparently never posed for Mizer but did so frequently for Warner, whose work was a staple of the bodybuilding magazines of the era. Philosophical about Mizer’s life and career, Lalanne says of hustling, “I would never do that,” but mischievously asks the off-screen Fitzgerald, “Why [are you asking?] You want a date?”

Without a doubt there could be a deeper, more polished film about Mizer than “Beefcake,” but who could say for certain that it would ever get made? In the meantime Fitzgerald, whose autobiographical debut feature was “The Hanging Garden,” has actually covered all the key bases in Mizer’s life and done so with insight, compassion and humor. Culminating as a courtroom drama, the well-researched “Beefcake” gives younger audiences a clear idea of just how hypocritical and unjust institutionalized homophobia could be back in the ‘50s.

* Unrated. Times guidelines: some male frontal nudity, some sex and scenes of drug use.

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‘Beefcake’

Daniel MacIvor: Bob Mizer

Josh Peace: Neil O’Hara

Carroll Godsman: Mrs. Mizer

Jonathan Torrens: David

A Strand Releasing presentation of an Alliance/Atlantis production. Writer-director Thom Fitzgerald. Producers Shandi Mitchell, Fitzgerald. Cinematographer Thomas M. Harting. Editors Susan Shanks, Michael Weir. Music John Roby. Production designer D’Arcy Poultney. Running time: 1 hour, 33 minutes.

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