Guinevere Turner Interviews Page

page by max and maddy


Lesbian filmmakers are telling stories of wit, wonder and wide-eyed romance by Rachel Abramowitz All the panache without the permanence," coos Guinevere Turner, her huge blue eyes flipping wide open with mock sincerity, her lips parting in a touch-me smile. The topic is stick-on nose rings, and the glamorous writer-star of 1994's lesbian-themed succès d'estime Go Fish is quipping the tag line from a gay catalog for which she once modeled. Surrounding Turner in a booth at the NoHo Star, a chic downtown New York restaurant, is the posse from her upcoming feature The Watermelon Woman: producer Barry Swimar (Paris Is Burning), various coproducers, and writer-director Cheryl Dunye, whose shaved head and sleek menswear make her look almost perfectly androgynous, though the killer smile tips you off that she's actually female. They're all here for lunch because Dunye has just shown her Watermelon Woman trailer at the 1995 Independent Feature Film Market, the most bare-bones of all the movie markets, which is now going full force at the Angelika Film Center only a few blocks away. Dunye has spent most of her twenties as an aspiring filmmaker, making videos that have played in major museums--the Whitney, Philadelphia's Institute of Contemporary Art--and supporting herself by teaching and lecturing on black and lesbian themes. Last year she went to the Berlin International Film Festival and Sundance with her short Greetings From Africa, an amusing piffle about an abortive romance between a Woody Allen-ish black lesbian (Dunye) and a strikingly beautiful, not exactly truthful redhead. At Sundance, Dunye quips, she and her L.A. friends were "the only black faces in a field of snow," but happily enough, she did get to shake Robert Redford's hand. Dunye hopes to make The Watermelon Woman the first feature by an out black lesbian ever to reach the theaters, and showing her trailer here is an important stop on the way. The IFFM may be to Cannes what The Watermelon Woman is to Waterworld, but it's still the passageway to money and attention for a throng of hungry, no-budget filmmakers. They get to show their works in progress in half-hour bits, with potential money people coming and going throughout the screening. Dunye shot on $60,000 scraped together from private investors--and, yes, a grant from the NEA. Now she's looking for $300,000 or so in completion funds, as well as a bit of word-of-mouth oomph. It's rare for a film to find distribution at the IFFM, but the shmoozing can heat up the buzz, which will build throughout the fall before peaking in late January at Sundance. The Watermelon Woman is the comedic tale of a poor video-store clerk (Dunye) who becomes obsessed with an obscure black 1930s actress (the titular W.W.) and also happens to fall in love with a white woman, played by Guinevere Turner. Shot in Super 8, 16mm, and video, it contains elaborate faux archival scenes from the watermelon woman's movies, as well as videotaped interviews with ersatz "experts," mostly members of what Dunye has dubbed the lavender limelight. Dunye seems to be dining on nervous optimism. After the screening, she reports, eight or ten people came up to her, including Spike Lee's head of development and representatives from October Films, as well as a number of strangers who said they had money to spend, and wanted business plans. (Tomorrow, Dunye will find out that Fine Line, Seventh Art, and Orion also came.) Joel Silver would be hard pressed to follow the lunchtime chitchat as it weaves its way through all-but-forgotten feminist performance artists; documentaries in progress; porn star turned performance artist Annie Sprinkle's new lover, "Les," who was once a woman, but now through the wonders of surgery...well, maybe you don't want to know; even Turner's upcoming deal with HBO to write and star in the story of Betty Page, the notoriously popular 1950s pinup. "It has lesbian overtones," explains Turner, "because all the people Betty was photographed with were women. She was photographed by women. She was definitely not a lesbian, but she's got girls spanking girls. I'm just dying to talk about Betty after it's done, to see how people react to me playing this heterosexual sex symbol." Then one of the producers spots someone leaving the restaurant--it's Jonathan Demme! The whole table turns and cranes their necks; it's almost a dare. Swimar knows it's his job to be shameless. Without thinking, he darts from the table, dashes out of the restaurant and down the street. A couple of minutes later he returns, panting. "No one talk to me," he says. "I have to write down the number." Swimar told Demme that he had been the producer of Paris Is Burning--which Demme liked--and was here at the IFFM with the watermelon women. "I told him we're looking for an EP [executive producer]," recounts Swimar excitedly. "He promised to look at the trailer." Watermelon Woman wasn't the only film to bestir the festival: Late Bloomers, a first feature by a pair of thirtysomething sisters from Texas, also played the IFFM and, by the end of November, had won a spot at Sundance, one of five lesbian-themed feature-length movies playing at the festival. A variety of indie distributors have been calling Julia and Gretchen Dyer to get a peek at this tale of what happens in suburbia when a high school teacher and the school's married secretary fall in love. The movie ends with a huge wedding, both brides in white satin--"a combination [of] Love Story [and] Love, American Style," says Gretchen Dyer. "They just fall in love with each other. They don't come out. It doesn't become a political action. "I don't think gay and lesbian films are part of a trend or a wave," she continues. "It's just a fact. It's like what happened with black filmmakers a couple of years ago. Black films are not going to go away." In a time when post-Eszterhasian Hollywood remains titillated by the merest whiff of woman on woman, a growing number of young female filmmakers--Cheryl Dunye, Rose Troche, Guinevere Turner, Maria Maggenti--are telling cinematic stories about girls falling in love with girls: the lifestyle instead of the sex act. These are not tortured coming-out movies but guilt-free bonbons, dewy-eyed romances heady with the rush of first love, unjaded about desire in a way that been-there, done-that, had-her Hollywood can't even imagine. One forerunner of the recent lesbian wave was the Pixelvision films made by sixteen-year-old Sadie Benning in the privacy of her Milwaukee bedroom. Part Barbara Kruger, part cable access, these black-and-white vignettes played like ransom notes from the heart, and made Benning the darling of the art world, the it girl of the baby-lesbian cognoscenti. By 1993, there was some inkling in the indie film world that the genre was potentially commercial. The full-length feature Claire of the Moon, a barely released, nothing-to-write-home-about effort, made close to a million bucks almost purely on word of mouth. Far more significant was the piquant and amusing Go Fish, made by Troche and Turner in 1994. A determinedly feel-good romantic comedy that features a community of mostly butch women living their funked-up lives with little interference from men, Go Fish created a frenzy when it debuted at Sundance. Released by Goldwyn (and only recently issued on videocassette), it made $2.4 million domestically--more than ten times its cost, and almost as much as Reservoir Dogs. The film community took note. "Everyone saw a good picture and thought, Hell, man, if that can do almost three million bucks, and that's black-and-white experimental shit, let's see what happens if we do one that's in color," says Go Fish co--executive producer Christine Vachon. What came next was Maria Maggenti's picture The Incredibly True Adventures of Two Girls in Love. "It's slicker, and it's in color, but it was still made for a nickel," says Vachon. "Now maybe we'll see something that's actually got Sigourney Weaver in it. I think that's how those ripple effects happen." Variations on the theme keep cropping up. The fall brought When Night Is Falling, an unabashed lipstick-lesbian fest, with women who look like goddesses, rolling around in crushed velvet. This month, Miramax brings out France's big comedy hit Gazon Maudit (French Twist), in which housewife Victoria Abril falls for a lady deejay, much to her philandering husband's chagrin; also on the way is Antonia's Line, a multigenerational Dutch drama that won the audience prize at last year's Toronto International Film Festival. Both films are their respective countries' official submissions for the Academy Award. Kevin Bacon is making his directorial debut with Losing Chase, a made-for-cable movie, in which a thwarted Helen Mirren falls for Kyra Sedgwick (Bacon's offscreen wife). Also coming is All Over Me, a gritty story set among the Kids generation from sisters Alex and Sylvia Sichel. Christine Vachon is now shepherding Kimberly Peirce's Stone, loosely based on the true story of a woman who passed herself off as a man and got killed for it, as well as bringing I Shot Andy Warhol, directed by Mary Harron (who's straight, if it matters) to Sundance. Lili Taylor plays the lesbian Valerie Solanas, a legendary Warhol groupie, who founded SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men) and popped a cap on the original King of Pop. "It's very ethereal to depict glamour on film," says Vachon. " By having a protagonist like Valerie, even though she's a lunatic, the identification [with the audience] is really solid. She's the outsider. She can't get in." Warhol bridges two countervailing forces: lesbian noir and lesbian lite. Lesbian noir focuses on "transgressive" sexuality as a general "fuck you" to society, lesbianism as hip outlaw gear; most of the upcoming killer-lesbian flicks--Butterfly Kiss, with Saskia Reeves and Amanda Plummer, and Bound, with Gina Gershon and Jennifer Tilly--are being made by men. Lesbian lite touts a kind of angst-free attitude: Be who you are by loving who you want. "What we do have in common is that all of us believe that we're okay," says Maria Maggenti. "There's no pathology to our sexuality. The stories we want to tell should be assumed to be as normal as anyone else's story. That is an extraordinary political and historical shift." Maybe, but that shift has yet to reach the MPAA. Though When Night Is Falling's love scene is no more explicit than scores of soft-core male-female bedfests, the ratings board slapped it with an NC-17. The distributor released the movie without a rating, rather than re-edit the picture. The decision seems to have had minimal impact on the theatrical release of the film, which did well in New York, and less so in L.A. It could, however, significantly dim the film's revenue from pay-cable channels and from home video, since Blockbuster as well as many mom-and-pop stores generally steer away from unrated product. The New York Times refused to run the film's advertisment, which showed two women lying in bed together. Despite lesbian chic, filmmakers who've made gay films often worry about becoming ghettoized. "I would never call myself a lesbian filmmaker," says Rozema,who made Night is Falling, as well as the well-received I've Heard the Mermaids Singing. "Although I've had relationships with women, I've had relationships with men too. But I wouldn't call myself a bisexual filmmaker, either. My sexuality is just one category about me. If I could think of one label, why does it have to do with what I do in bed?" Still, in the mainstream press, these films have often won acclaim as much for their politics as for their artistry. The politics are often part of a gay-positive world view where even happiness can be a political statement. "Oh my God, if we did our normal lives, we would never sell this movie," groans Rose Troche, who once joked that her film should have been called Leave It to Beaver. "Especially if you look at what was going on behind the scenes while Go Fish was being made--crazy shit compared to, like, what was in the movie." If there is a doyenne of lesbian film, she can be found behind a door that boasts no less than nine company names--including Valerie Pictures, Apparatus Films, Intolerance Productions--all her former production entities. "I was the queen of Queer," says Christine Vachon. A round woman in plaid J. Crew shorts and a T-shirt, Vachon's specialty is getting five things done at once. Unpretentious despite the semiotics degree from Brown, Vachon has a waggish intelligence and brightly lit eyes that seem to pop out of her face. At 34, she has become one of the film industry's gutsiest independent producers, a minimogul of the avant-garde cranking out two or three projects a year. New Queer Cinema was the media tag that affixed itself to some of Vachon's earliest efforts, notably her feature producerial debut, Poison, an aggressively gay meditation from Todd Haynes (Vachon's longtime friend from Brown) on transgression and exile, based on stories from Jean Genet. Poison won the 1991 Sundance Grand Jury Prize for dramatic film, but sparked a rampage by Reverend Donald Wildmon of the American Family Association who didn't like the fact that Poison had been made in part with NEA money. Vachon's follow-up was Swoon, Tom Kalin's study of Leopold and Loeb, who were lovers as well as murderers. Last year's efforts included Haynes's cerebral and brilliant Safe, Postcards From America, and the provocative and disturbing Kids. Vachon is now beginning pre-production on photographer Cindy Sherman's directorial debut, a horror film. Two Gen X'ers based in Chicago, Troche and Turner read about Vachon in Sight and Sound, and sent her a fifteen-minute rough cut of the unfinished Go Fish, which they had shot mostly on weekends. "At the time, I was getting criticized right and left for only doing boys' movies," says Vachon sotto voce as she strokes the office kitty. "There are some lesbians who think that Go Fish came along just at the right time." Vachon and her partner on the project Tom Kalin floated them money out of their own pocket, while Vachon tried unsuccessfully to get financing from all the independents: Miramax, Goldwyn, as well as Women Make Movies, a nonprofit distribution company, which asked her, "Why do you like this?" Vachon ultimately convinced John Pierson, then of Islet Films and a backer for She's Gotta Have It and Roger & Me, to put up the $53,000 in completion funds. For Troche, the news was initially disconcerting: She'd been making Go Fish with a crew of mostly women and gay men (most of whom were acquaintances from ACT UP) and hadn't wanted to take money from a man. "Too many men work on it and people are not going to think it's a real lesbian movie," says Troche, recalling her thinking in the beginning. Troche explains that she had only come out when she was 22: "The first time I ever had sex with a woman. So I still considered myself 'new.' It's like being a born-again Christian. My politics were more dogmatic in those days, more 'Big Sister's watching you. ' " Now 31, Troche sports a double-pierced brow and a kind of infectious, subversive wit, which serves as a useful suit of armor in dealing with the outside world. Her style is friendly East Village leprechaun: ripped-up denim shorts, combat boots, and a woolen hat smashed down over her curls, despite the fact that it's still summer on Long Island, where she's spending time with her girlfriend, Robin Vachal, a coordinator of the New York Lesbian and Gay Film Festival. At the time of Go Fish, though, Troche was dating Turner, and the movie ground to another halt when the pair broke up; Troche moved out, leaving behind most of her belongings because their Chicago apartment was still the movie's main set. Heartbroken, she couldn't work for a month. "I was, like, Fuck it. I don't want to go on with the movie, not with you. But I had to go on with Guin, because Guin was in the movie. Our working relationship at that point became very separate." The film's other star, V.S. Brodie, moved into the apartment, although Vachon had to advance them money for the "set" so they wouldn't get evicted. It can be a kind of existential hell working with your ex, but Troche and Turner managed, and didn't deal with the sticky emotional residue until almost a year later, when almost the entire Chicago Go Fish posse had moved to New York: "We got into incredible screaming matches," says Troche, friends again with Turner after spending a year traveling the world together promoting the movie. All along the way, interviewers just assumed Troche was gay, although they had a hard time believing it of Turner, who's a bombshell in grunge. "People will say, 'Guin doesn't really seem like a lesbian,' " says Troche with amazement (though the disparity in how people treated them put a wrinkle in their relationship). At the Deauville Festival of American Films, one famous action star tried to lure Turner up to his room. When she told him she didn't swing that way, he was not deterred: "That's okay," he said. "I give great head." "If a man is coming on to you, saying you're a lesbian has little effect; if anything, it's more exciting to them," chortles Turner. She would like to put to rest the myth "that a woman is a lesbian to be sexy for men. It's not in relation to men at all--which is ultimately more insulting." She giggles. With her Pre-Raphaelite beauty and the saucy look in her eye, Turner was the Go Fish girl who really whetted Hollywood's appetite. Although she considers herself primarily a writer, Turner happens to be the only publicly lesbian actress ever to grace the big screen. "I say that and then think, Who the hell do I think I am, but I can't think of anyone else." She pauses. "Amanda Beers [Married With Children] is the only other one." She pursues her acting mostly just to see how far she can get as an actress who's out. After Go Fish she was called back for the lead in Hackers, and was asked to audition for Jade for "the part of a lesbian prostitute who proclaims her lust for Jade, and twelve pages later, her head is cut off and she's thrown through a plate-glass window. "I considered it, really," she says. "Then I just pictured Joe Eszterhas sitting in some office going, 'Let's see if we can get that lesbian for this part. Wouldn't that be a hoot? Let's see if we can cut her head off!' " Turner laughs. "I just thought that maybe I wasn't that desperate for a career." Turner has been acting in a few parts for others in the New York lesbian film world, but has mostly been concentrating on her writing: a script about a pair of lesbians who run a TV show, and the pressure they get from the lesbian community to come out on the program. Truth be told, Turner says she doesn't really have the "stomach" for Hollywood. "People take one look at me and they want to brush my hair and put me in a tiny outfit and make me simper across the screen. It makes me nervous. I'm really much better in my own clothes trying to be funny, but it's something about the way I look. It makes me think of getting an eating disorder or using a new conditioner." "I don't care about anything men might have to say about me. I just don't believe them. How do they know?" So asks Maria Maggenti, the diminutive, blond writer-director of last summer's The Incredibly True Adventures of Two Girls in Love. "Just like straight people--what do they know? It's a rare straight person who really knows anything about gay people." Maggenti is slouching at the kitchen table of her East Village pad, alternately smoking Marlboros and popping vitamin C to combat a cold picked up on her recent publicity jaunt to Germany and France. The door bears a bumper sticker: THELMA AND LOUISE ON BOARD ...and it's easy to see this is no idle threat. Maggenti is alternatively outspoken and charming, self-promoting and disingenuous. A former activist with ACT UP, the 32-year-old Maggenti denies that she kicked off her filmmaking career by announcing at an ACT UP meeting that she was going to film school to make a "gay-positive movie for you," then passing the hat to solicit donations--though one eyewitness recalls precisely that happening. In any event,"Going into filmmaking was a very political impulse," recalls Maggenti. "I hated movies. [I said,] 'I'm going to master that medium. I need the means of production because I know there are other stories to tell.' " Maggenti wrote her script in '94, got a lot of positive feedback but no money, and decided to go ahead anyway, with an interest-free $35,000 loan from a guy she met at a film festival, and $25,000 out of the pocket of her producer Dolly Hall, whom Maggenti calls "one of the really great straight women in the world." Soon after, the distribution companies began calling--and Fine Line ultimately chipped in completion funds. Despite her politics, Maggenti made a movie as sweet as they come, a Juliet-meets-Juliet story of Randy, the lower-class tomboy who knows she's gay, and Evie, the straight-A, upper-middleclass Ms. Popularity who also happens to be African-American. The movie is semiautobiographical; Maggenti switched races and transmuted herself into Evie. Girls makes lesbian first love look as safe as an after-school special, and the film seems to get frequent citations as the-movie-I-wish-I-could-have-seen-in-high-school. Of course, Maggenti doesn't like it when you call her film sweet. "The sweet, charming thing is really diminutive--like I made a filmette, not a real film. Why? Because it's two girls? Because they're in high school? It was the rare and extremely smart critic who saw that I was trying to deal with class in my film." Last summer Maggenti created a ruckus in the gay film scene with an article in The Village Voice in which she revealed that the person she calls her lover was actually...a man. Her story implied that this was a strange new development, though in reality they'd been together for almost three years. Switching whom you sleep with can be as touchy for gays as for straights, with the added complication of failing the cause; Go Fish features a scene in which Daria, the sexual adventuress, goes on mock trial for having a one-night fling with a guy. Maggenti came out swinging in the article, declaring herself a lesbian "the way a French person is always French no matter where she lives. I am . . . a lesbian .... Right now I'm just not living in France." She criticized the cold reception she received from her former family of lesbian friends, and described her dilemma when she walks down the street with her boyfriend, and they run into a straight couple: " 'I'm not like you,' I want to scream. 'I'm a dyke even if I am the new girlfriend. Can't you see that?' " she wrote. Afterward she tells her boyfriend, "I hate straight people, and I especially hate the kind that flaunt it by getting married." Her own woman-man relationship "exists outside conventional heterosexuality." A couple of weeks later, the Voice ran some angry letters, including one from Christine Vachon. "I guess all of us square, politically correct dykes who still like to fuck other women are suppressing the expressive freedom of the real radicals--straight people who are gay but look and act like straight people. It's wonderful that Maggenti has found true love but...her article underlines the same tedious clichés: We lesbians disallow diversity and are so threatened by men that we cannot handle their intrusion into our [utterly sexless] existence." Vachon's vaguely embarrassed that she rose to the "bait" at all--in person, her response to Maggenti is more heartfelt than militant: "I just felt that it was really naive. Before I hooked up with the woman I'm with now, I had boyfriends. But you don't really know what it is to be this or that or the other thing until you commit yourself to a person of the same sex and you negotiate the mundane. Meeting someone's parents, getting a hotel room, being publicly affectionate--the day-to-day, which can be rough. Are we in a safe place? Should we mess up that other bed in the hotel so they think that we didn't sleep with each other? At least when you're with a man you get public affirmation all the time. "To read an article that said, 'How dare people assume I'm straight because I'm walking down the street holding hands with my boyfriend,' I was, like, This is the wrong place to start. She's complaining about being denied the lesbian--cool privilege that's part of lesbian life, just because she's got a man on her arm. There's a wonderful discussion about gender identity to be had, but don't start there. I'd love to walk down the street holding hands with my girlfriend." Patricia Rozema had thought her final love scene for When Night Is Falling had gone well. It was to be the big bang, the final crescendo after a good hour of yearning, guilty fretting, and furtive kisses. Rozema, the Canadian director of I've Heard the Mermaids Singing and White Rooms, had cleared everyone save the cinematographer and focus puller from the set of the consummation bed, an enormous mass of red crushed-velvet swirl. She had cranked up the music, a reorchestration of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah." There was already chemistry between the two women, the lithe Pascale Bussières, a popular starlet in her native Quebec (whose tv character had spawned a toy doll), and Rachael Crawford, a doe-eyed Afro-Canadian with preternaturally pouty lips. Yet as the next setup was prepped, Rozema thought Crawford looked disturbed. Was she gearing up for her upcoming crying scene...or not? Was she feeling bad about the love scene, exploited or not respected? "Tell me you're preparing for the next scene," Rozema said, "and don't feel bad about the last one." "I don't feel bad," chuckled Crawford. "I just got laid!" The 37-year-old director calls When Night Is Falling her attempt to "romanticize the images of women together, to give them the cinematic glow that heterosexual relationships have enjoyed for years." Indeed, When Night Is Falling is a throwback: a coming-out story about a gorgeous straight woman who's seduced by the wild, magical enchantress. It compares lesbian love to hang gliding and a two-person trapeze act, and has generally played better in Europe, where viewers reveled in the glowing naked bodies and the unabashed love-conquers-all finale. Some American critics--particularly those on the West Coast--have found Night to be nothing more than a pretentious Zalman King movie. Although Rozema generally radiates a kind of ethereal politeness, the MPAA ruling is one thing that can get her going. "It's clearly because it's two women. It's a very overt case of homophobia to me," she says, certain that her biggest sin has been depicting sex without shame or violence. "It's not even a fear of sexuality in the U.S. It's fear of loving sexuality. I think if it were a violent rape it would be more okay. It would seem to be reflecting reality in some brutal, honest way." Rozema had wanted to reclaim lesbian love from where it usually resides in the mass market's imagination: porn. When Rozema was in Berlin for the film festival, she caught a glimpse of the porn channel at her hotel. "It was so different, these two women together. You can almost see them looking and smiling and waving at the camera. The whole body position is kind of arched back--real hokey behavior that was clearly designed for the male gaze. It felt like a different activity. I found it seriously unappealing." On a Saturday last June, Turner went to reshoot the poster art for Go Fish; Hallmark--of Hallmark cards--had picked up all the video rights to Goldwyn projects, and was planning to launch the movie on video last November on its Evergreen Entertainment label, about a year after it should have been in stores. "What they got is me lying in a bed with sheets wrapped around me in full makeup looking nothing like I look in the movie," she says, "with some ambiguous Swedish model behind me who's supposed to be the other person in the movie, but is so clearly not." The Swedish model is playing V.S. Brodie--who's lanky, plain, and has a redhead buzz cut. "I said to them right when I got there, 'Whose decision was this that Valerie wasn't attractive enough to be on this cover art?' " recounts Turner. "They're, like, 'We just see you as the star and when you're doing video, you're competing with a lot more cover art, so you have to be as mainstream as possible.' I decided not to put up the daisy dukes and leave it at that." "It looks like one of those [soft-core] nurse videos," says Troche, "where there's a soldier in the background and he's got a woody and he's sitting there waiting for her to come and change his bandage. I am, like, Who are you targeting this to?" Turner quotes the box copy with glee: "Sexy this. Sexy that. Fun. Sexy, sexy, sexy." She giggles. "Now there's this huge poster in the video store on Avenue A of me in my shame. I know so many people are going to look at that and say, 'God, did she sell out fast.' "

Lesbian filmmakers are telling stories of wit, wonder and wide-eyed romance
by Rachel Abramowitz
All the panache without the permanence," coos Guinevere Turner, her huge blue eyes flipping wide open with mock sincerity, her lips parting in a touch-me smile. The topic is stick-on nose rings, and the glamorous writer-star of 1994's lesbian-themed succès d'estime Go Fish is quipping the tag line from a gay catalog for which she once modeled. Surrounding Turner in a booth at the NoHo Star, a chic downtown New York restaurant, is the posse from her upcoming feature The Watermelon Woman: producer Barry Swimar (Paris Is Burning), various coproducers, and writer-director Cheryl Dunye, whose shaved head and sleek menswear make her look almost perfectly androgynous, though the killer smile tips you off that she's actually female. They're all here for lunch because Dunye has just shown her Watermelon Woman trailer at the 1995 Independent Feature Film Market, the most bare-bones of all the movie markets, which is now going full force at the Angelika Film Center only a few blocks away. Dunye has spent most of her twenties as an aspiring filmmaker, making videos that have played in major museums--the Whitney, Philadelphia's Institute of Contemporary Art--and supporting herself by teaching and lecturing on black and lesbian themes. Last year she went to the Berlin International Film Festival and Sundance with her short Greetings From Africa, an amusing piffle about an abortive romance between a Woody Allen-ish black lesbian (Dunye) and a strikingly beautiful, not exactly truthful redhead. At Sundance, Dunye quips, she and her L.A. friends were "the only black faces in a field of snow," but happily enough, she did get to shake Robert Redford's hand. Dunye hopes to make The Watermelon Woman the first feature by an out black lesbian ever to reach the theaters, and showing her trailer here is an important stop on the way. The IFFM may be to Cannes what The Watermelon Woman is to Waterworld, but it's still the passageway to money and attention for a throng of hungry, no-budget filmmakers. They get to show their works in progress in half-hour bits, with potential money people coming and going throughout the screening. Dunye shot on $60,000 scraped together from private investors--and, yes, a grant from the NEA. Now she's looking for $300,000 or so in completion funds, as well as a bit of word-of-mouth oomph. It's rare for a film to find distribution at the IFFM, but the shmoozing can heat up the buzz, which will build throughout the fall before peaking in late January at Sundance. The Watermelon Woman is the comedic tale of a poor video-store clerk (Dunye) who becomes obsessed with an obscure black 1930s actress (the titular W.W.) and also happens to fall in love with a white woman, played by Guinevere Turner. Shot in Super 8, 16mm, and video, it contains elaborate faux archival scenes from the watermelon woman's movies, as well as videotaped interviews with ersatz "experts," mostly members of what Dunye has dubbed the lavender limelight. Dunye seems to be dining on nervous optimism. After the screening, she reports, eight or ten people came up to her, including Spike Lee's head of development and representatives from October Films, as well as a number of strangers who said they had money to spend, and wanted business plans. (Tomorrow, Dunye will find out that Fine Line, Seventh Art, and Orion also came.) Joel Silver would be hard pressed to follow the lunchtime chitchat as it weaves its way through all-but-forgotten feminist performance artists; documentaries in progress; porn star turned performance artist Annie Sprinkle's new lover, "Les," who was once a woman, but now through the wonders of surgery...well, maybe you don't want to know; even Turner's upcoming deal with HBO to write and star in the story of Betty Page, the notoriously popular 1950s pinup. "It has lesbian overtones," explains Turner, "because all the people Betty was photographed with were women. She was photographed by women. She was definitely not a lesbian, but she's got girls spanking girls. I'm just dying to talk about Betty after it's done, to see how people react to me playing this heterosexual sex symbol." Then one of the producers spots someone leaving the restaurant--it's Jonathan Demme! The whole table turns and cranes their necks; it's almost a dare. Swimar knows it's his job to be shameless. Without thinking, he darts from the table, dashes out of the restaurant and down the street. A couple of minutes later he returns, panting. "No one talk to me," he says. "I have to write down the number." Swimar told Demme that he had been the producer of Paris Is Burning--which Demme liked--and was here at the IFFM with the watermelon women. "I told him we're looking for an EP [executive producer]," recounts Swimar excitedly. "He promised to look at the trailer." Watermelon Woman wasn't the only film to bestir the festival: Late Bloomers, a first feature by a pair of thirtysomething sisters from Texas, also played the IFFM and, by the end of November, had won a spot at Sundance, one of five lesbian-themed feature-length movies playing at the festival. A variety of indie distributors have been calling Julia and Gretchen Dyer to get a peek at this tale of what happens in suburbia when a high school teacher and the school's married secretary fall in love. The movie ends with a huge wedding, both brides in white satin--"a combination [of] Love Story [and] Love, American Style," says Gretchen Dyer. "They just fall in love with each other. They don't come out. It doesn't become a political action. "I don't think gay and lesbian films are part of a trend or a wave," she continues. "It's just a fact. It's like what happened with black filmmakers a couple of years ago. Black films are not going to go away." In a time when post-Eszterhasian Hollywood remains titillated by the merest whiff of woman on woman, a growing number of young female filmmakers--Cheryl Dunye, Rose Troche, Guinevere Turner, Maria Maggenti--are telling cinematic stories about girls falling in love with girls: the lifestyle instead of the sex act. These are not tortured coming-out movies but guilt-free bonbons, dewy-eyed romances heady with the rush of first love, unjaded about desire in a way that been-there, done-that, had-her Hollywood can't even imagine. One forerunner of the recent lesbian wave was the Pixelvision films made by sixteen-year-old Sadie Benning in the privacy of her Milwaukee bedroom. Part Barbara Kruger, part cable access, these black-and-white vignettes played like ransom notes from the heart, and made Benning the darling of the art world, the it girl of the baby-lesbian cognoscenti. By 1993, there was some inkling in the indie film world that the genre was potentially commercial. The full-length feature Claire of the Moon, a barely released, nothing-to-write-home-about effort, made close to a million bucks almost purely on word of mouth. Far more significant was the piquant and amusing Go Fish, made by Troche and Turner in 1994. A determinedly feel-good romantic comedy that features a community of mostly butch women living their funked-up lives with little interference from men, Go Fish created a frenzy when it debuted at Sundance. Released by Goldwyn (and only recently issued on videocassette), it made $2.4 million domestically--more than ten times its cost, and almost as much as Reservoir Dogs. The film community took note. "Everyone saw a good picture and thought, Hell, man, if that can do almost three million bucks, and that's black-and-white experimental shit, let's see what happens if we do one that's in color," says Go Fish co--executive producer Christine Vachon. What came next was Maria Maggenti's picture The Incredibly True Adventures of Two Girls in Love. "It's slicker, and it's in color, but it was still made for a nickel," says Vachon. "Now maybe we'll see something that's actually got Sigourney Weaver in it. I think that's how those ripple effects happen." Variations on the theme keep cropping up. The fall brought When Night Is Falling, an unabashed lipstick-lesbian fest, with women who look like goddesses, rolling around in crushed velvet. This month, Miramax brings out France's big comedy hit Gazon Maudit (French Twist), in which housewife Victoria Abril falls for a lady deejay, much to her philandering husband's chagrin; also on the way is Antonia's Line, a multigenerational Dutch drama that won the audience prize at last year's Toronto International Film Festival. Both films are their respective countries' official submissions for the Academy Award. Kevin Bacon is making his directorial debut with Losing Chase, a made-for-cable movie, in which a thwarted Helen Mirren falls for Kyra Sedgwick (Bacon's offscreen wife). Also coming is All Over Me, a gritty story set among the Kids generation from sisters Alex and Sylvia Sichel. Christine Vachon is now shepherding Kimberly Peirce's Stone, loosely based on the true story of a woman who passed herself off as a man and got killed for it, as well as bringing I Shot Andy Warhol, directed by Mary Harron (who's straight, if it matters) to Sundance. Lili Taylor plays the lesbian Valerie Solanas, a legendary Warhol groupie, who founded SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men) and popped a cap on the original King of Pop. "It's very ethereal to depict glamour on film," says Vachon. " By having a protagonist like Valerie, even though she's a lunatic, the identification [with the audience] is really solid. She's the outsider. She can't get in." Warhol bridges two countervailing forces: lesbian noir and lesbian lite. Lesbian noir focuses on "transgressive" sexuality as a general "fuck you" to society, lesbianism as hip outlaw gear; most of the upcoming killer-lesbian flicks--Butterfly Kiss, with Saskia Reeves and Amanda Plummer, and Bound, with Gina Gershon and Jennifer Tilly--are being made by men. Lesbian lite touts a kind of angst-free attitude: Be who you are by loving who you want. "What we do have in common is that all of us believe that we're okay," says Maria Maggenti. "There's no pathology to our sexuality. The stories we want to tell should be assumed to be as normal as anyone else's story. That is an extraordinary political and historical shift." Maybe, but that shift has yet to reach the MPAA. Though When Night Is Falling's love scene is no more explicit than scores of soft-core male-female bedfests, the ratings board slapped it with an NC-17. The distributor released the movie without a rating, rather than re-edit the picture. The decision seems to have had minimal impact on the theatrical release of the film, which did well in New York, and less so in L.A. It could, however, significantly dim the film's revenue from pay-cable channels and from home video, since Blockbuster as well as many mom-and-pop stores generally steer away from unrated product. The New York Times refused to run the film's advertisment, which showed two women lying in bed together. Despite lesbian chic, filmmakers who've made gay films often worry about becoming ghettoized. "I would never call myself a lesbian filmmaker," says Rozema,who made Night is Falling, as well as the well-received I've Heard the Mermaids Singing. "Although I've had relationships with women, I've had relationships with men too. But I wouldn't call myself a bisexual filmmaker, either. My sexuality is just one category about me. If I could think of one label, why does it have to do with what I do in bed?" Still, in the mainstream press, these films have often won acclaim as much for their politics as for their artistry. The politics are often part of a gay-positive world view where even happiness can be a political statement. "Oh my God, if we did our normal lives, we would never sell this movie," groans Rose Troche, who once joked that her film should have been called Leave It to Beaver. "Especially if you look at what was going on behind the scenes while Go Fish was being made--crazy shit compared to, like, what was in the movie." If there is a doyenne of lesbian film, she can be found behind a door that boasts no less than nine company names--including Valerie Pictures, Apparatus Films, Intolerance Productions--all her former production entities. "I was the queen of Queer," says Christine Vachon. A round woman in plaid J. Crew shorts and a T-shirt, Vachon's specialty is getting five things done at once. Unpretentious despite the semiotics degree from Brown, Vachon has a waggish intelligence and brightly lit eyes that seem to pop out of her face. At 34, she has become one of the film industry's gutsiest independent producers, a minimogul of the avant-garde cranking out two or three projects a year. New Queer Cinema was the media tag that affixed itself to some of Vachon's earliest efforts, notably her feature producerial debut, Poison, an aggressively gay meditation from Todd Haynes (Vachon's longtime friend from Brown) on transgression and exile, based on stories from Jean Genet. Poison won the 1991 Sundance Grand Jury Prize for dramatic film, but sparked a rampage by Reverend Donald Wildmon of the American Family Association who didn't like the fact that Poison had been made in part with NEA money. Vachon's follow-up was Swoon, Tom Kalin's study of Leopold and Loeb, who were lovers as well as murderers. Last year's efforts included Haynes's cerebral and brilliant Safe, Postcards From America, and the provocative and disturbing Kids. Vachon is now beginning pre-production on photographer Cindy Sherman's directorial debut, a horror film. Two Gen X'ers based in Chicago, Troche and Turner read about Vachon in Sight and Sound, and sent her a fifteen-minute rough cut of the unfinished Go Fish, which they had shot mostly on weekends. "At the time, I was getting criticized right and left for only doing boys' movies," says Vachon sotto voce as she strokes the office kitty. "There are some lesbians who think that Go Fish came along just at the right time." Vachon and her partner on the project Tom Kalin floated them money out of their own pocket, while Vachon tried unsuccessfully to get financing from all the independents: Miramax, Goldwyn, as well as Women Make Movies, a nonprofit distribution company, which asked her, "Why do you like this?" Vachon ultimately convinced John Pierson, then of Islet Films and a backer for She's Gotta Have It and Roger & Me, to put up the $53,000 in completion funds. For Troche, the news was initially disconcerting: She'd been making Go Fish with a crew of mostly women and gay men (most of whom were acquaintances from ACT UP) and hadn't wanted to take money from a man. "Too many men work on it and people are not going to think it's a real lesbian movie," says Troche, recalling her thinking in the beginning. Troche explains that she had only come out when she was 22: "The first time I ever had sex with a woman. So I still considered myself 'new.' It's like being a born-again Christian. My politics were more dogmatic in those days, more 'Big Sister's watching you. ' " Now 31, Troche sports a double-pierced brow and a kind of infectious, subversive wit, which serves as a useful suit of armor in dealing with the outside world. Her style is friendly East Village leprechaun: ripped-up denim shorts, combat boots, and a woolen hat smashed down over her curls, despite the fact that it's still summer on Long Island, where she's spending time with her girlfriend, Robin Vachal, a coordinator of the New York Lesbian and Gay Film Festival. At the time of Go Fish, though, Troche was dating Turner, and the movie ground to another halt when the pair broke up; Troche moved out, leaving behind most of her belongings because their Chicago apartment was still the movie's main set. Heartbroken, she couldn't work for a month. "I was, like, Fuck it. I don't want to go on with the movie, not with you. But I had to go on with Guin, because Guin was in the movie. Our working relationship at that point became very separate." The film's other star, V.S. Brodie, moved into the apartment, although Vachon had to advance them money for the "set" so they wouldn't get evicted. It can be a kind of existential hell working with your ex, but Troche and Turner managed, and didn't deal with the sticky emotional residue until almost a year later, when almost the entire Chicago Go Fish posse had moved to New York: "We got into incredible screaming matches," says Troche, friends again with Turner after spending a year traveling the world together promoting the movie. All along the way, interviewers just assumed Troche was gay, although they had a hard time believing it of Turner, who's a bombshell in grunge. "People will say, 'Guin doesn't really seem like a lesbian,' " says Troche with amazement (though the disparity in how people treated them put a wrinkle in their relationship). At the Deauville Festival of American Films, one famous action star tried to lure Turner up to his room. When she told him she didn't swing that way, he was not deterred: "That's okay," he said. "I give great head." "If a man is coming on to you, saying you're a lesbian has little effect; if anything, it's more exciting to them," chortles Turner. She would like to put to rest the myth "that a woman is a lesbian to be sexy for men. It's not in relation to men at all--which is ultimately more insulting." She giggles. With her Pre-Raphaelite beauty and the saucy look in her eye, Turner was the Go Fish girl who really whetted Hollywood's appetite. Although she considers herself primarily a writer, Turner happens to be the only publicly lesbian actress ever to grace the big screen. "I say that and then think, Who the hell do I think I am, but I can't think of anyone else." She pauses. "Amanda Beers [Married With Children] is the only other one." She pursues her acting mostly just to see how far she can get as an actress who's out. After Go Fish she was called back for the lead in Hackers, and was asked to audition for Jade for "the part of a lesbian prostitute who proclaims her lust for Jade, and twelve pages later, her head is cut off and she's thrown through a plate-glass window. "I considered it, really," she says. "Then I just pictured Joe Eszterhas sitting in some office going, 'Let's see if we can get that lesbian for this part. Wouldn't that be a hoot? Let's see if we can cut her head off!' " Turner laughs. "I just thought that maybe I wasn't that desperate for a career." Turner has been acting in a few parts for others in the New York lesbian film world, but has mostly been concentrating on her writing: a script about a pair of lesbians who run a TV show, and the pressure they get from the lesbian community to come out on the program. Truth be told, Turner says she doesn't really have the "stomach" for Hollywood. "People take one look at me and they want to brush my hair and put me in a tiny outfit and make me simper across the screen. It makes me nervous. I'm really much better in my own clothes trying to be funny, but it's something about the way I look. It makes me think of getting an eating disorder or using a new conditioner." "I don't care about anything men might have to say about me. I just don't believe them. How do they know?" So asks Maria Maggenti, the diminutive, blond writer-director of last summer's The Incredibly True Adventures of Two Girls in Love. "Just like straight people--what do they know? It's a rare straight person who really knows anything about gay people." Maggenti is slouching at the kitchen table of her East Village pad, alternately smoking Marlboros and popping vitamin C to combat a cold picked up on her recent publicity jaunt to Germany and France. The door bears a bumper sticker: THELMA AND LOUISE ON BOARD ...and it's easy to see this is no idle threat. Maggenti is alternatively outspoken and charming, self-promoting and disingenuous. A former activist with ACT UP, the 32-year-old Maggenti denies that she kicked off her filmmaking career by announcing at an ACT UP meeting that she was going to film school to make a "gay-positive movie for you," then passing the hat to solicit donations--though one eyewitness recalls precisely that happening. In any event,"Going into filmmaking was a very political impulse," recalls Maggenti. "I hated movies. [I said,] 'I'm going to master that medium. I need the means of production because I know there are other stories to tell.' " Maggenti wrote her script in '94, got a lot of positive feedback but no money, and decided to go ahead anyway, with an interest-free $35,000 loan from a guy she met at a film festival, and $25,000 out of the pocket of her producer Dolly Hall, whom Maggenti calls "one of the really great straight women in the world." Soon after, the distribution companies began calling--and Fine Line ultimately chipped in completion funds. Despite her politics, Maggenti made a movie as sweet as they come, a Juliet-meets-Juliet story of Randy, the lower-class tomboy who knows she's gay, and Evie, the straight-A, upper-middleclass Ms. Popularity who also happens to be African-American. The movie is semiautobiographical; Maggenti switched races and transmuted herself into Evie. Girls makes lesbian first love look as safe as an after-school special, and the film seems to get frequent citations as the-movie-I-wish-I-could-have-seen-in-high-school. Of course, Maggenti doesn't like it when you call her film sweet. "The sweet, charming thing is really diminutive--like I made a filmette, not a real film. Why? Because it's two girls? Because they're in high school? It was the rare and extremely smart critic who saw that I was trying to deal with class in my film." Last summer Maggenti created a ruckus in the gay film scene with an article in The Village Voice in which she revealed that the person she calls her lover was actually...a man. Her story implied that this was a strange new development, though in reality they'd been together for almost three years. Switching whom you sleep with can be as touchy for gays as for straights, with the added complication of failing the cause; Go Fish features a scene in which Daria, the sexual adventuress, goes on mock trial for having a one-night fling with a guy. Maggenti came out swinging in the article, declaring herself a lesbian "the way a French person is always French no matter where she lives. I am . . . a lesbian .... Right now I'm just not living in France." She criticized the cold reception she received from her former family of lesbian friends, and described her dilemma when she walks down the street with her boyfriend, and they run into a straight couple: " 'I'm not like you,' I want to scream. 'I'm a dyke even if I am the new girlfriend. Can't you see that?' " she wrote. Afterward she tells her boyfriend, "I hate straight people, and I especially hate the kind that flaunt it by getting married." Her own woman-man relationship "exists outside conventional heterosexuality." A couple of weeks later, the Voice ran some angry letters, including one from Christine Vachon. "I guess all of us square, politically correct dykes who still like to fuck other women are suppressing the expressive freedom of the real radicals--straight people who are gay but look and act like straight people. It's wonderful that Maggenti has found true love but...her article underlines the same tedious clichés: We lesbians disallow diversity and are so threatened by men that we cannot handle their intrusion into our [utterly sexless] existence." Vachon's vaguely embarrassed that she rose to the "bait" at all--in person, her response to Maggenti is more heartfelt than militant: "I just felt that it was really naive. Before I hooked up with the woman I'm with now, I had boyfriends. But you don't really know what it is to be this or that or the other thing until you commit yourself to a person of the same sex and you negotiate the mundane. Meeting someone's parents, getting a hotel room, being publicly affectionate--the day-to-day, which can be rough. Are we in a safe place? Should we mess up that other bed in the hotel so they think that we didn't sleep with each other? At least when you're with a man you get public affirmation all the time. "To read an article that said, 'How dare people assume I'm straight because I'm walking down the street holding hands with my boyfriend,' I was, like, This is the wrong place to start. She's complaining about being denied the lesbian--cool privilege that's part of lesbian life, just because she's got a man on her arm. There's a wonderful discussion about gender identity to be had, but don't start there. I'd love to walk down the street holding hands with my girlfriend." Patricia Rozema had thought her final love scene for When Night Is Falling had gone well. It was to be the big bang, the final crescendo after a good hour of yearning, guilty fretting, and furtive kisses. Rozema, the Canadian director of I've Heard the Mermaids Singing and White Rooms, had cleared everyone save the cinematographer and focus puller from the set of the consummation bed, an enormous mass of red crushed-velvet swirl. She had cranked up the music, a reorchestration of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah." There was already chemistry between the two women, the lithe Pascale Bussières, a popular starlet in her native Quebec (whose tv character had spawned a toy doll), and Rachael Crawford, a doe-eyed Afro-Canadian with preternaturally pouty lips. Yet as the next setup was prepped, Rozema thought Crawford looked disturbed. Was she gearing up for her upcoming crying scene...or not? Was she feeling bad about the love scene, exploited or not respected? "Tell me you're preparing for the next scene," Rozema said, "and don't feel bad about the last one." "I don't feel bad," chuckled Crawford. "I just got laid!" The 37-year-old director calls When Night Is Falling her attempt to "romanticize the images of women together, to give them the cinematic glow that heterosexual relationships have enjoyed for years." Indeed, When Night Is Falling is a throwback: a coming-out story about a gorgeous straight woman who's seduced by the wild, magical enchantress. It compares lesbian love to hang gliding and a two-person trapeze act, and has generally played better in Europe, where viewers reveled in the glowing naked bodies and the unabashed love-conquers-all finale. Some American critics--particularly those on the West Coast--have found Night to be nothing more than a pretentious Zalman King movie. Although Rozema generally radiates a kind of ethereal politeness, the MPAA ruling is one thing that can get her going. "It's clearly because it's two women. It's a very overt case of homophobia to me," she says, certain that her biggest sin has been depicting sex without shame or violence. "It's not even a fear of sexuality in the U.S. It's fear of loving sexuality. I think if it were a violent rape it would be more okay. It would seem to be reflecting reality in some brutal, honest way." Rozema had wanted to reclaim lesbian love from where it usually resides in the mass market's imagination: porn. When Rozema was in Berlin for the film festival, she caught a glimpse of the porn channel at her hotel. "It was so different, these two women together. You can almost see them looking and smiling and waving at the camera. The whole body position is kind of arched back--real hokey behavior that was clearly designed for the male gaze. It felt like a different activity. I found it seriously unappealing." On a Saturday last June, Turner went to reshoot the poster art for Go Fish; Hallmark--of Hallmark cards--had picked up all the video rights to Goldwyn projects, and was planning to launch the movie on video last November on its Evergreen Entertainment label, about a year after it should have been in stores. "What they got is me lying in a bed with sheets wrapped around me in full makeup looking nothing like I look in the movie," she says, "with some ambiguous Swedish model behind me who's supposed to be the other person in the movie, but is so clearly not." The Swedish model is playing V.S. Brodie--who's lanky, plain, and has a redhead buzz cut. "I said to them right when I got there, 'Whose decision was this that Valerie wasn't attractive enough to be on this cover art?' " recounts Turner. "They're, like, 'We just see you as the star and when you're doing video, you're competing with a lot more cover art, so you have to be as mainstream as possible.' I decided not to put up the daisy dukes and leave it at that." "It looks like one of those [soft-core] nurse videos," says Troche, "where there's a soldier in the background and he's got a woody and he's sitting there waiting for her to come and change his bandage. I am, like, Who are you targeting this to?" Turner quotes the box copy with glee: "Sexy this. Sexy that. Fun. Sexy, sexy, sexy." She giggles. "Now there's this huge poster in the video store on Avenue A of me in my shame. I know so many people are going to look at that and say, 'God, did she sell out fast.' "

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