Fabulous!: A Loving, Luscious, and Lighthearted Look at Film From the Gay Perspective
by Donald F. Reuter
Broadway Books, 192 pp., $16.95 (paper)
Upon first glance, Fabulous! appeared to be the kind of book I would wish I’d written myself. The cover, with Gloria Swanson performing her mad scene as Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard with the book’s title splashed across it, conveyed my sentiments exactly: fabulous! But a quick glance at the rather wordy introduction proves that Mr. Reuter has written a very different book about films with “gay interest” than I had imagined. There are no “gay films” included (movies about being gay or those particularly targeted to a gay audience), but the book is chock-full of the legendary screen performances that have made gay audiences howl for decades. Skipping past the intro, which tries very hard to explain exactly what the book is about, we come to the meat of the subject, done in an easy-to-read and easy-to-reference format of one film per page. Each page lists the credits for the films, as well as a plot summary, a paragraph or two about why the film is of interest to gays, a list of very gay moments in the film, and a “May we suggest …” sort of list of other films in a similar vein.
All of the films we expect to see are in there: such camp classics as Sunset Boulevard, Valley of the Dolls, All About Eve, and The Women. But among the 150 or so titles are some that would be hard to consider as “gay interest” without weighty explanations and stretches of the imagination. Risky Business, for example – apparently, aside from Tom Cruise dancing in his underwear, Mr. Reuter makes a shallow case paralleling the plot with a typical gay “coming of age” scenario. But this is not a book that demands too much of the reader: It is exactly what the title says, a lighthearted look and a riot to read.
Ghouls, Gimmicks, and Gold: Horror Films and the American Movie Business, 1953-1968 by Kevin Heffernan (Duke University Press, $22.95, paper)
The Southern Methodist University professor and screenwriter’s measured socioeconomic history takes us from House of Wax to Night of the Living Dead.
It Don’t Worry Me: The Revolutionary American Films of the Seventies
by Ryan Gilbey (Faber & Faber, $14, paper)The latest in a long line of ruminations on that most fertile of American film eras is also one of the best.
Karoo
by Steve Tesich (Open City, $14, paper)Originally – and posthumously – published in 1998, the Breaking Away screenwriter’s medium-melding novel tells the story of a lamentable script doctor bumbling his way through the late-Eighties NYC scene.
This article appears in May 28 • 2004.