Hit and Runway
With Michael Parducci, Peter Jacobson, Judy Prescott, Kerr Smith, Hoyt Richards, John Fiore, and J.K. Simmons.
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The compulsion of market analysts to divide audiences by race, ethnicity, nationality, age, gender, and sexual preference before they even set foot in a movie theater has had some grim and infuriating consequences. For example, DVDs are made to be sold in different “regions” or “territories” that are defined according to nationality, and as a result we can’t play many French or English DVDs in this country–even if they’re DVDs of American movies in their original language, as they most often are–without a special player. (For the record, you can order one of these players fairly cheaply–try www.raite715.com or eBay.) When I was programming the one I bought to play DVDs from other regions, my screen informed me, “You shouldn’t to be here”–though of course the pleasure of doing something “forbidden” only added to the allure. I should add that Europeans don’t face the same nonsense when playing American DVDs.
Insulting decisions of this kind are made on our behalf remarkably often, though they’re invisible to most of the public–as they’re supposed to be. And they’re often made just to simplify ad campaigns and bookkeeping–based on the assumption that different categories of viewers require separate ads and that publicists are capable of “defining” us and our tastes in the first place. While I was watching Hit and Runway I began to wonder what would happen if “gay” and “straight” movies on DVD were assigned to separate regions, and I decided that if they were, movies like Hit and Runway would never get financed. So I guess I shouldn’t complain about having had to wait a couple of years to see it.
Cohen, a comedy writer and performer, is identified in the press book as “the first openly gay male stand-up comedian to appear on national television in the United States.” His one-man show The King of Kings and I was reworked as a book; he also cowrote a book called Growing Up Gay: From Left Out to Coming Out and is identified as “a flamboyant party guest in James L. Brooks’s As Good as It Gets.” This appears to make him more self-consciously gay than Elliot, though Elliot’s play–submitted by Alex as his own writing sample–is called Chicken of the Sea. Could this be a pun relating to Elliot’s crush on a younger man? Maybe. It does happen to be the title of the thesis film Livingston made when he was at New York University’s Graduate Film School, a film that won him several awards. All of which suggests that the connections between reality and screen writing are probably much more complicated than we generally assume.
