At the movies,
there are the lovelorn sheep ranchers of Brokeback
Mountain. On television, there's Ellen, Rosie, and
Will & Grace. Now cult movie director
John Waters has a televised film series he hopes will cross
over from gay viewers to a broader straight audience.
Drawing heterosexuals to movies or TV shows with gay
themes or characters has never been easy for
Hollywood, which for years depicted married straight couples
as sleeping in separate twin beds. Experts say
Brokeback Mountain is the first film with
an overtly gay love story to achieve mainstream
success and Oscar recognition, having garnered a leading
eight Oscar nominations on Tuesday, including one for
best picture.
Waters's series
John Waters Presents: Movies That Will Corrupt
You debuts on Friday as a programming centerpiece on
Here TV, the fledgling gay-oriented cable network. But
marketing and advertising executives say connecting
with heterosexuals will require a quality program and
a cultural buzz among gay audiences that spreads to
their straight brethren. That one-two punch worked well with
Brokeback Mountain and made Will &
Grace an award-winning TV sensation as gay culture
has increasingly come out of the closet in the United
States.
"John is our kind
of guy--provocative, interesting, comfortable with
his sexuality," said Here chief executive officer Paul
Colichman. "He not only appeals to gay audiences, but
to some very good, cool, straight people too." For his
part, Waters told Reuters he does not like "100% gay
anything," and Here never asked him to program movies
that are only for gay audiences. They wanted him to bring
his own sense of the offbeat and outrageous to their
network in a low-budget TV movie series.
Waters, 59, is a
film provocateur whose work includes the gender-bending
Pink Flamingos and Polyester, with its
scratch-n-sniff aroma cards, and he has built a cult
following among art-house and independent film lovers.
In the late 1980s, he registered a bona fide hit with the
film Hairspray. With Movies That Will
Corrupt You, Waters acts as a sort of curator of
campy films that will air on Here TV. He introduces
each film from his Baltimore home and follows each one
with his own personal commentary.
The movies
include 1994's Clean, Shaven, about a
schizophrenic who interrupts a murder investigation, and
1996's Freeway, in which a then-unknown Reese
Witherspoon played a teen runaway picked up by the "I-5
killer." "They are like no other movies, and I mean
that in a good way," Waters said.
Marketing
executives say any media product with a gay theme--and
by extension Here TV--that wants to lure
crossover audiences must appeal to viewers in a way
that transcends homosexuality. Commercial success also
hinges on positive word-of-mouth publicity within the gay
community that spreads to culturally aware straight
consumers. That happened with Midnight Cowboy and
Philadelphia. But by contrast, TV stars Ellen
DeGeneres and Rosie O'Donnell built mainstream fan bases
before going public as lesbians, while Will &
Grace quickly developed a mass audience because
what happens on the weekly sitcom can happen to
anyone, not just gays.
Bob Witeck of
Washington, D.C.-based Witeck-Combs Communications,
whose clients include gay TV network Logo, said he
believes U.S. cultural acceptance of gay life and
lifestyles has moved ahead much more rapidly than
political acceptance. "We know it because of the arts," he
said. "The public has voted with TV dials and with motion
picture dollars.... They are saying, 'If it's original
and quality, I want to see it."' (Bob Tourtellotte,
Reuters)