‘Front Runner’: Why Won’t They Make This Movie?

As the current producer charged with mounting a motion picture adaptation of the most popular gay novel of all time, I was particularly interested in Roger Kaufman’s recent Counterpunch (“It’s Time to Out Gay Stereotyping in Films,” Jan. 24). His indictment of Hollywood’s lack of courage with gay characters is never more apparent than in the long and checkered production history of “The Front Runner.”

Twenty-five years of what “The Celluloid Closet” termed

“the most celebrated failure to produce a film from fiction” would make a film in itself. Although Patricia Nell Warren’s 1974 landmark love story about an ex-Marine track coach and his male runner has sold 10 million copies in 10 languages and remains the top gay novel in America today, numerous film endeavors over a quarter century by such Hollywood icons as Paul Newman and Frank Perry have failed dismally to get past the starting line.

Why has it taken so long to put onto the silver screen what the New York Times proclaimed “the most moving, monumental story ever written about gay life”? Why are leading actors who coveted the role of the 21-year-old gay athlete now too old to play the 40-year-old coach? Why, as the thousands of “Front Runner” fans have demanded to know over the years, haven’t they made the movie?

Reasons go beyond the issues raised by Kaufman against Hollywood’s movie-making machinery--and the worst offenders may not be heterosexual.

Though Kaufman cites films such as “American Beauty” and “The Talented Mr. Ripley” as offensive, he ignores archetypes like the bitchy, predatory troll in “Gods and Monsters” (a fictional account of a nonfictional gay man) and the farcical latent homosexual schoolteacher in “In and Out.”

More astonishing than these blatant cliches is the gay community’s exaltation of such images simply because they were written, directed or produced by gay people. Moreover, I am reminded that martyrs of societal change are often dragged kicking and screaming into greatness. Few walk willingly into the valley of the shadow of death.

I have met with gay studio executives who were, one minute, wiping tears away recalling how “The Front Runner” transformed their lives and, the next minute, listing all the reasons they didn’t want to be the first to green-light a motion picture about love between two “regular” guys.

Several notable gay film directors declined this project because they didn’t want to risk making a gay love story. Gay financiers have asked me why they should gamble $8 million on a mainstream gay movie when they can make four “art house” films for the same money and risk nothing. Gay agents of gay actors have refused to show the script to their clients--or worse, lied and said they did.

It is a paradox that straight people prefer to see homosexuals flamboyant and outrageous on the screen but silent and conservative in real life. It is a greater paradox that gay people are quick to spot homophobia in others but fail to see their own self-oppression. They enable the gay Uncle Tom-ing in film because it is easier on straight sensibilities, film careers and the box office.

Gay people permeate our industry, from studio heads and production executives to camera operators and talent agents. Responsibility begins not with the activist or media watchdog but with each and every gay person in the biz who is in a position to advance and enhance positive and accurate gay portrayals in film.

You know who you are. Time to move from the back of the pack and run out in front.

Tyler St. Mark is a writer-producer who co-founded Wildcat Press, the imprint that publishes the novels of Patricia Nell Warren. He can be reached at tylerstmark@aol.com.