by Mark Gabrish Conlan – Copyright (c) 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan – All rights reserved
Last night Charles and I attended the FilmOut San Diego
screening of Hot Guys with Guns, a
special event at the Birch North Park Theatre advertised as an action movie for
the Gay male audience, a sort of spoof of the James Bond mythos that judging from the advance publicity was going to be a
film about a super-spy attempting to foil some horrendous international crime
scheme and – this being aimed at a Gay male audience – in the process bedding
an assortment of “Bond boys” instead of “Bond girls.” Actually the film turned
out to be considerably better than that, owing quite a bit less to James Bond
and more to the 1960’s TV series I Spy,
particularly in the pairing of a white and a Black character as the leads and
the rather diffident relationship between the two – the white guy more
impulsive and daring, the Black guy more reasoned and “cool.” Three of the key
creative personnel – writer/director Doug Spearman, composer Mervyn Warren (a
five-time Grammy Award winner and friend of Spearman’s; the director asked him
to pick some songs for the source music on the soundtrack and Warren was so
enthused about the project he agreed to compose the background music and also
write and perform a theme song), and actor Trey McCurley (who turned in a
beautiful performance as Robin, the airheaded second lead, perfectly portraying
the mythic figure of the young hot blond guy who comes to Hollywood with
ambitions to be an actor, with the right combination of beauty and vacuity) –
were present at the screening, and when Spearman was briefly introduced in the
audience and turned out to be African-American my hopes went up. “At least,” I
thought, “this isn’t going to be another fantasy about incredibly hot and
incredibly stupid Gay white men.”
As things turned out, this was a much better
film than the advance publicity made it seem; after a marvelous credits
sequence using Warren’s song under a set of visuals cribbed from the 1960’s
Bond movies, the original I Spy
credits and just about every other 1960’s film in the genre, the opening scene turned out to be a decent-looking but
decidedly not hot middle-aged man awakening from a drugged stupor with a lot of
younger and hotter but similarly indisposed bodies draped across his bed. It
turns out his stupor wasn’t his idea; he threw a sex party but it was crashed
by two interlopers, one dressed in a black hoodie and a death’s-head mask and
the other more or less au naturel,
who entered it and set off an aerosol bomb containing a mixture of party drugs
and anesthetics to put the entire crowd under so they could rob them. The
principals turn out to be Danny Lohman (Marc Anthony Samuel), a Black Gay actor
who’s taking a course on how to be a private detective – not because he wants
to do that for a living but because he’s up for a part as a P.I. in a TV series
called Crime and Punishment
(incidentally there was recently an actual series called Crime and Punishment but it wasn’t on the air long and was one of Law and Order producer Dick Wolf’s less
successful efforts); and his ex-partner Patrick “Pip” Armstrong (Brian McArdle,
whose other main credit on imdb.com is a voiceover narration for a documentary
called It Is No Dream about Theodor
Herzl, founder of Zionism), a spoiled rich white kid who lives with his mother
Patricia (a wonderful bitch-goddess performance by Joan Ryan) and dumped Danny
for another aspiring actor, Robin (Trey McCurley), who’s hot-looking but is enough
of an airhead we in the audience definitely get the impression he’s trading
down. When Pip is a guest at the next sex party that gets hit by the mystery
bandits with their drug bomb, and his Rolex watch (important to him because it’s
the only legacy left to him by his father, who abandoned the family for reasons
we’re never told) and his car are stolen (and the car is recovered, stripped
and covered with anti-Gay graffiti), Danny decides they should use the skills
he’s learning in detective class and solve the crime themselves. Despite
saddling it with the silly title that makes it sound like a hard-core porn film
(which it isn’t, though we get a nice amount of soft-core sex even though
Spearman never goes full-frontal on any of his actors, darnit), Spearman
manages to pull off something that’s eluded a lot of more prestigious and
better-known directors: he manages to fuse comedy and drama so the mystery and
the satire reinforce each other instead of clashing.
There are technical
problems that reflect the film’s low ($200,000) budget – at one point Spearman
ran out of money and had to stop shooting and reorganize his production before
he could resume and finish it – notably some scenes in which the sound is
over-recorded and key words of dialogue become unintelligible (though that may
be a flaw, not of the film itself, but of the Birch North Park Theatre’s lousy
sound system) – but for the most part Hot
Guys with Guns is a nicely wrought comedy-thriller that owes as much to the
comedy-mysteries of the 1930’s as the film
noir masterpieces of the 1940’s Spearman cited as his models (he called his
film a Gay remake of Double Indemnity
– though I didn’t see any resemblance – and said if he gets to produce the
sequel he has in mind, it will be based on Sunset
Boulevard), and particularly the 1936 film The Ex-Mrs. Bradford. This was an engaging offshoot of the Thin Man series produced at RKO with
William Powell (the Thin Man series
lead, on loan from MGM) and Jean Arthur as a divorced couple who join forces to
solve a mystery and in the process realize they’re meant for each other and
reconcile – as do Danny and Pip in Hot
Guys with Guns. Spearman said he particularly wanted to build the film
around two contrasting Gay male couples, one good and one evil, and though he
didn’t stress the point in his commentary both are interracial. He’s also a
good enough writer to make his characters relatively complex and morally
ambiguous, and when Danny and Pip finally confront the villains they learn that
they have a motive for their crimes – revenge against Hollywood’s Gay “A”-list
for having been drugged and gang-raped at an earlier party – and one of the bad
guys gives a nicely written speech denouncing the superficial materialism of
the people he robbed and saying they burned most of the loot because they weren’t
really interested in it, just in stealing it as part of their revenge against
its possessors. There's also a quirky similarity between the relationship of the two guys in the "bad" couple and Lawrence Tierney and Elisha Cook, Jr. in the surprisingly homoerotic sequences of an otherwise forgettable 1947 RKO noir called Born to Kill, particularly when one of the baddies wants to kill people for no reason except he hates them and the other tries to talk him out of it and, echoing the advice Tierney got in his star-making film Dillinger, tells him never to kill anybody without a reason.
The film also has a core of Spearman’s anguish over being yet
another Hollywood aspirant trying to make a career for himself in a town that’s
stacked against him; he got as far as a role in a Gay-themed TV series called Noah’s Arc, where he met a lot of the
creative personnel he used in this film, but it was on the short-lived Logo
ultra-premium cable channel for Queer-themed programming that never got
available on enough cable systems to turn a profit. (I guess there’s not much
room after the plethora of sports channels we’re inundated with whether we want
them or not – and which we pay for in high cable bills whether we ever watch them or not.) Much of the
background of this film rings true, including the sheer number of people who
come to Hollywood hoping to grasp the brass ring of stardom, and the
desperation that afflicts them and leaves them willing to do almost anything for a part. Not surprisingly,
the film features casting couches both straight and Gay – at one point,
dragooned into serving as butler for a party Pip is throwing for a West
Hollywood City Council candidate, Danny is told bluntly by Pip that the guests
are the power brokers in the industry he’s trying to crash and he ought to take
advantage of his presence there and suck up to them, in more ways than one –
and Danny eventually loses the role he was up for in Crime and Punishment after the series’ Black female lead decides he’s
either not hot enough or too Gay to be a suitable playmate for her off-screen.
There’s also a marvelously funny sequence in which, staking out the home of one
of the victims, Danny starts delivering a voiceover narration in the persona of
the P.I. character he’s auditioning to play on TV – and the dialogue is a perfectly
turned parody of Raymond Chandler’s prose, particularly his penchant for
blender-mixed metaphors.
Hot Guys with
Guns is a quite capably produced and written mystery, well acted by a
strong ensemble cast, though Marc Anthony Samuel in the lead stands out. With
Denzel Washington already having aged out of the Black juvenile category and
Will Smith rapidly following suit, Samuel, playing a part Spearman wrote for
himself but at the last minute realized he was too old for, looks like a good
candidate to take over these parts. I also enjoyed the work of Alan Blumenfeld
as Jimmy Peppucelli, the teacher of Danny’s P.I. class, though it did seem odd
for Spearman to give the character an Italian last name when both the actor
himself and the characterization are both so obviously and stereotypically
Jewish. Though driven by his own sexual desires, notably for the tall woman with big breasts who’s a
student in his class (and whom he’s grading, shall we say, on the curves), for
the most part Jimmy comes off as a welcome voice of reason much the way Dann
Florek does as the captain on Law and
Order: Special Victims Unit. Doug Spearman said that so far the prime
audience for the film, or at least the people who’ve enjoyed it the most, has
been, surprise, straight men. He thinks it’s because they respond to the film’s
dramatization of what straight men think Gay men’s sex lives are like,
particularly the old joke that Gay men have the sort of sex lives straight men
would have if straight women would let them. Spearman admits he’s well aware it’s
not like that in real life, though the kinds of Hollywood players who represent
the 1 percent in his movie are the kinds of people who by controlling access to
the brass ring of celebrity do have
the power to get anybody they want to have sex with them, male, female or
anything in between, but nonetheless he thinks the straight men who are fans of
his movie are responding to just that fantasy that straight men have to take
their prospective sex partners to dinner and romance them and then maybe they
actually get them sexually, and maybe they don’t, while Gay men just express
mutual glances of interest and then drop their pants for each other.
