Miss Cleo: Her Rise and Fall (Enhanced Media, Hillionaire Productions, Wonder Worthy Productions, Lifetime, 2024) and Call Me Miss Cleo (Dial Tone Films, Gunpowder & Sky, HBO Max, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, August 10) I watched a couple of movies on Lifetime about “Miss Cleo,” an oddball sort of celebrity who emerged in the early 2000’s as the public spokesperson for something called the “Psychic Readers Network.” One was a 2024 dramatization of her life called Miss Cleo: Her Rise and Fall, and one was a 2022 feature-length documentary for what was then HBO Max called Call Me Miss Cleo. I can’t remember ever hearing of her at the time, but I recall that in 1994 a man I was briefly dating expressed interest in going to work for one of the psychic phone services but didn’t pursue it, possibly because he was put off by their business model. The Psychic Readers Network and its competitors offered so-called “free” readings by phone, but when you called their 1-800 number they really put you onto a 1-900 number. The catch was that the call was “free” only for the first three minutes; if you stayed on the line longer than that, you were billed $4.95 for each additional minute –and the company trained its operators to keep customers on the phone for 18-20 minutes or even more. Many parents first found out about this when they got phone bills for hundreds of dollars, and soon discovered it was because their children had been calling the psychic hotlines, running up major charges and inadvertently costing their parents large sums of money. “Miss Cleo” (played in the movie by singer, rapper and actor Robin Yvette Allen, who’s better known by her stage name “The Lady of Rage”) was born Youree Dell Harris on August 12, 1962 in Los Angeles, California. She was African-American, though after her biological parents abandoned her she was taken in by an Afro-Caribbean family and raised by them.

As a young adult she married a man and had two daughters by him before he died, and her mother (who’s a major character in this film even though its imdb.com page doesn’t identify who plays her – probably Daphne Maxwell Reid, whose husband Tim Reid directed this) chewed her out for having married a man who was (otherwise) Gay. She settled in Seattle and worked for a Black theatre company at a space called the Langston Hughes Cultural Center, where, using the name “Ree Perris,” she produced, directed and/or starred in three plays she wrote herself: For Women Only, Summer Rhapsody and Supper Club Café. For her role in For Women Only she created a character called “Miss Cleo,” a Jamaican-born shaman, tarot card reader and devotée of the voodoo god Chango (the one invoked in Desi Arnaz’s huge hit “Babalù”). Disaster struck when Supper Club Café flopped at the box office and Harris absconded with $4,000 the theatre had been paid as a result of winning a college grant. She ultimately settled in Fort Lauderdale, Florida and out of sheer desperation to finance her own and her daughters’ lifestyle, she took a job as a phone operator with Psychic Readers Network. Psychic Readers’ Network was a shell company owned by something called Access Resource Services. Its owners were two young white men named Steven Feder (Shane Johnson) and Peter Stolz (Ian Bohen), and after having started and then being driven out of a rival phone-psychic company, Psychic Advisers’ Network – for which they recruited actor Billy Dee Williams (Diana Ross’s co-star in Lady Sings the Blues and Mahogany) as a celebrity spokesperson – they launched Psychic Readers’ Network on the same fundamentally corrupt and oppressive business model. Among their instructions to call operators were to get the names, addresses and phone numbers of every caller so they could be targeted for junk-mail ads for a wide variety of sleazy services aimed at separating their proven suckers from as much of their money as possible.

Using her Jamaican “Miss Cleo” character, Harris became by far the Psychic Readers’ Network’s most successful operator, and when Feder and Stolz realized their previous strategy of using faded Black celebrities as TV spokespeople wasn’t working, they hired “Miss Cleo” to do infomercials for their service. Miss Cleo eagerly accepted the additional income, even though she either knew or should have realized that much of what she was supposed to say on the air – notably that the calls were “free” when in fact, after the first three minutes, they weren’t – was B.S. Miss Cleo’s TV spots attracted the attention of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) as well as several state attorneys general, including Florida’s, who took the lead in prosecuting them since the operation was based in Fort Lauderdale. They indicted Feder and Poltz for fraud, and later added Miss Cleo to the indictment. Meanwhile, a Seattle Post-Intelligencer reporter named Dorothy Parvaz got a tip from some of the people she’d scammed at the Langston Hughes Cultural Center that “Miss Cleo” and “Ree Parris” were the same person. They’d recognized her from the Psychic Readers’ Network’s TV ads, and Parvaz decided to investigate. Among other items, she was able to come up with a birth certificate establishing that “Miss Cleo”’s real name was Youree Harris and she was born, not in Jamaica, but in L.A. She was also able to find out from the University of Southern California that Harris had never been a student there under any of her multiple names, despite her claims that she had been. Eventually the FTC prosecuted the Psychic Readers’ Network and indicted Feder, Stolz and Miss Cleo for fraud, and Miss Cleo was also the defendant in a civil suit for $400 million – way more money than she’d ever seen from the company.

It’s at this point that the stories in the fictional Miss Cleo: Her Rise and Fall (originally shot as Call Me Now: The Rise and Fall of Miss Cleo, after the “Call me now” catch phrase on her infomercials) and the documentary Call Me Miss Cleo diverge. Camara Davis, the writer of the dramatized version, has Miss Cleo take the Fifth Amendment during a deposition for her civil case, then turn state’s evidence and testify against the company in their fraud trial – neither of which happened, at least according to documentary directors Celia Aniskovich and Jennifer Brea. According to Aniskovich and Brea, the Florida D.A.’s office simply dropped Miss Cleo from the case after they realized it was bad P.R. to go after a Black woman who could make a plausible case that she’d just been an innocent victim recruited into a business that later turned out to be a fraud – even though her protestations of innocence rang hollow not only because she’d been a scam artist before at the Seattle theatre company but because how could she not have known that the Psychic Readers’ Network was a scam when the essential dishonesty of their business model was there for all to see. (It reminded me of the story about Marlene Dietrich making the film Judgment at Nuremberg, in which she played the widow of a Nazi bigwig who had died in the latter stages of World War II. She complained to the film’s director, Stanley Kramer, that she couldn’t say the lines about how she and her friends had no knowledge of the horrible, monstrous crimes against humanity the Nazis had committed. When he said, “Why not?,” she replied in her best stage whisper, “They knew!”)

It’s also unfortunate that writer Davis didn’t use any of the last 10 years of Miss Cleo’s life between the exposure of the Psychic Readers’ Network in court (in which Feder and Stolz agreed to forgive all outstanding phone bills from their operation and set up a $500 million fund to compensate their victims) in 2006 and her death from colorectal cancer on July 26, 2016 in a Palm Beach hospice at age 53. In 2006 Miss Cleo gave an interview to the Queer magazine The Advocate in which she came out as a Lesbian, and for the last 10 years she lived as such. At least two of her female lovers were interviewed, including Lou Ann LaBohn (who came out at age 61; I found myself wondering what she’d done before that) and Matt Sheridan, who presented as male during the interview because after Miss Cleo’s death he’d undergone gender confirmation surgery. She also had two young men who were identified as her godsons, and one of them acknowledged he’d always been Gay while the other one didn’t say one way or another but certainly gave off Gay vibes. The people who knew Miss Cleo during the last decade remembered her quite fondly as a woman who was only trying to help others. They also said she had a sort of “Rosebud” moment in which she recalled being molested by an adult male during her childhood, and one of the interviewees said that people who live through that experience either become bitter, hateful and exploitative or spend their lives reaching out to other people who need help. The documentary filmmakers definitely put Miss Cleo in the latter category.

Watching the two films back-to-back, one gets the impression that Miss Cleo in real life was a figure that resisted easy categorization. She may or may not have been genuinely psychic – she certainly seemed to have an intuitive grasp of other people’s consciousnesses and gave them advice based on it –and though there are parts of her life that made her look like a deliberate scam artist and crook, there are also parts that make her look genuinely noble. Miss Cleo: Her Rise and Fall was well directed by Tim Reid (whom I remember as an actor from the TV sitcom WKRP in Cincinnati in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s) and ably acted, especially by Robin Yvette Allan as Miss Cleo, Daphne Maxwell Reid as her mother and Shane Johnson and Ian Bohen as the two young white scumbags who created the Psychic Readers’ Network and exploited Miss Cleo and all the other people who worked for them. (They were able to settle the cases against them without spending even one day inside a prison cell and keeping most of their ill-gotten gains from their enterprise.) But it wasn’t the film it could have been, and for that I mostly blame Camara Davis for not using the potentially rich material available, especially from the last decade of Miss Cleo’s life.

Foyle's War: "The German Woman" (Greenlit Productions, ITV, Acorn, American Public Television, PBS, 2002)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, August 8) at 10 p.m. I watched “The German Woman,” the premiere episode from 2002 of a British TV series called Foyle’s War. It’s set during World War II (hence the title; “The German Woman” takes place in May 1940, while the Battle of Britain is still going on) and the lead character is Detective Chief Superintendent Christopher Foyle (Michael Kitchen in a nicely droll performance) of the British police in Hastings, Sussex, who at the start of this episode is having a long-running battle with his immediate superior. It seems that Foyle wants a more active role supporting the British war effort and his boss doesn’t want to give him one because the police department is short-handed enough as it is since so many younger officers either have enlisted voluntarily or been drafted. “The German Woman” deals with Greta Beaumont (Joanna Kanska), who’s really not from Germany – she’s a Sudeten refugee from Czechoslovakia who fled to Britain two months before Adolf Hitler and Neville Chamberlain cut their infamous 1938 deal at Munich which basically handed first the Sudetenland and then the whole of Czechoslovakia to the Nazis. She’s become the second wife of local aristocrat Harry Beaumont (Robert Hardy, whose career remains one of the most mysterious might-have-beens of cinematic history; after a brilliant performance as Prince Hal, later Henry V, in the 1960 BBC-TV miniseries An Age of Kings based on Shakespeare’s history plays, he faded from sight while Sean Connery, who played Hotspur, went on to play James Bond and become an international superstar), who’s pulled strings to get her exempted from the British Home Office’s decree that people of German ancestry were not allowed to live on the British coast. Greta’s ability to evade this restriction, including getting a local doctor to fake a diagnosis of her having a heart condition when she really didn’t, has evoked a lot of resentment among the British townspeople that only ratchets up when a stray German bomber drops a bomb on the town and kills barmaid Tracey Stephens (Nancy Lodder).

Greta Beaumont was anxious to keep her stepdaughter Sarah (Rosamund Pike) from marrying attorney Michael Turner (Dominic Mafham), whom she met on a trip to London to settle affairs concerning the Beaumont estate. Michael, it turns out, was also carrying on a secret affair with Tracy Stephens even though she was underage (just 17) at the time. The show, directed by Jeremy Silberston and written by Anthony Horowitz (also co-creator of the much more engaging Midsomer Murders series), is very slow-going; it takes about half of the 100-minute running time for Greta to get murdered. The crime is committed by an assailant who strung a long piece of piano wire across two trees on the path on which Greta usually took her morning bicycle ride, which lets Foyle know that despite the sheer number of people in town who expressed hatred for Greta just because of her German origins, the killer had to be someone from her household who would know her routine. Along the way Foyle busts Bob Keegan (Robert Goodale), a corrupt civil servant who’s making illegal money offering to “lose” the draft notices of anyone whose family can pay him to keep their son out of the service, and later on there’s another murder victim: Ian Judd (Philip Whitchurch), who was blackmailing Michael Turner over the secret of his illegal affair with an underage woman. Eventually Michael turns out to be Greta’s murderer – not to anyone’s particular surprise, since his pattern of having sexual affairs with at least two women at once has already marked him as a rotter and Greta’s suspicions that he was only interested in Sarah to get his grubby little hands on the Beaumont family fortune turn out to be correct. Foyle’s War aired on the British commercial TV network ITV, formed in 1955 when the Conservative government then in power authorized it as a limited incursion into the BBC’s monopoly, and it was a popular enough show that when ITV’s then-head of programming Simon Shaps canceled it in 2007, five years into its run, pressure from fans forced ITV to reinstate it in 2008 and Shaps lost his job as a result. But it turned out to be an awfully sluggish and rather dull program, despite some interesting quirks – including the shock when Foyle requests a driver (since he doesn’t know how to drive) and a woman, Samantha “Sam” Stewart (Honeysuckle Weeks), is assigned to him; and his eventual hiring as his assistant disabled war veteran Paul Milner (Anthony Howell) – and though I’m glad it lasted as long as it did (five seasons in its first incarnation and three in its second), it’s not really all that interesting and it’s hard to believe it attracted the fan attention and support it did.

A Neighbor's Vendetta (Headlong Entertainment, Benattar/Thomas Productions, Vendetta Films, MarVista Entertainment, Lifetime, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, August 4) my husband Charles and I watched a three-film marathon on Lifetime beginning with one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen them do. It was called A Neighbor’s Vendetta and it dealt with Sonja Richards (Chelsea Gilligan), her estranged husband Jason Turcott (Stephen Good, who for once in a Lifetime movie is drop-dead gorgeous without being a villain!), and Mia Wilson (Sydney Cole Alexander). Mia and her late husband Robert (Austen Jaye) are African-American, Jason is white and Sonja is racially ambiguous. The backstory is that Sonja turned off of having sex with Jason when they lost their daughter Eve either to a miscarriage or a stillbirth (writer/director Rainy Kerwin doesn’t make it clear which) at a time when they’d already prepared a bedroom for her, put her name in block letters on their wall and knitted a pair of yellow booties for her, which Sonja presented to Jason as her way of telling him she was pregnant. Now they’ve separated, though they have enough residual affection for each other that they’ve both declined to sign the divorce papers, and on the advice of her therapist (whom we hear a lot of on Sonja’s cell phone but we never see), Sonja has begun dating again. Unfortunately, the man she’s dating is Robert Wilson, head of a large company doing something or other (Kerwin never tells us what), who hired Sonja to design a remodel of their offices and never bothered to tell her he was married. It’s also not clear from Kerwin’s script whether Sonja and Robert actually had a physical relationship or just did phone sex, but he met his demise when as part of a phone-sex scene he tied a belt around his neck and died from auto-erotic asphyxiation. Mia is determined to run her late husband’s company herself, though how she can do that is unclear when it seems her main preoccupation is to get revenge against Sonja for having been responsible for her husband’s death.

Mia leases a mountain cabin next to the one Sonja and Jason have repaired to thinking that getting away from the big, bad city will help them rekindle their joint sex life, and, calling herself “Claire,” she seizes on Jason and tries to seduce him. After a long, dreary running time – Charles joked that virtually the whole movie was people arguing with each other – the show lurches to a final confrontation in which Mia confronts both Sonja and Jason, shoots Jason – wounding him seriously enough that it’s touch and go whether he’s going to survive – then drops the gun. Sonja grabs it and tries to kill Mia, but the gun has run out of bullets, and in the end the incident proves to be an elaborate frame in which Mia has contrived to make it look like Sonja shot Jason in a jealous rage over his affair with Mia. Sonja points out that Mia’s fingerprints will be on the gun, and Mia smiles and says, “No, my fingerprints won’t be on the gun – yours will.” Then she pulls off the skin-tight gloves she was wearing when she shot Jason. The cops actually arrest Sonja while Mia gets away in a car with Louisiana license plates which she rented in Shreveport as part of an elaborate alibi she faked – she was ostensibly at a business convention there. The film ends with Sonja in prison for Jason’s murder – she was denied power of attorney because she was officially his killer and the state went ahead and pulled the plug on him – though Kerwin drops a hint that Mia just might meet her comeuppance after all when the someone at the rental-car company notes that she returned the car in which she fled with 452 miles on it, way out of line for something that was supposedly just a local rental. I really don’t like mystery stories that end with the villain getting away with it – as Raymond Chandler put it, it’s part of the logic of the form that the criminal has to be punished in some way; if he or she isn’t, “it leaves a sense of irritation” – and I liked this ending even less since Kerwin tried to have it both ways. There are a lot of ways in which a Lifetime movie can go wrong, and A Neighbor’s Vendetta seemed to hit virtually all of them!

The Neighbor Who Saw Too Much (Johnson Production Group, Lifetime, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The movie Lifetime showed right after A Neighbor’s Vendetta, The Neighbor Who Saw Too Much, was a 2024 “premiere” and was a good deal better, though its quality was only relative. It had a quite good central performance by the young actress in the lead, Sage Moore, who’s billed on her imdb.com page as both Queer and Black; the latter is obvious on screen but we have to take the former on faith because in this film, at least, her character is strictly heterosexual. She’s playing Hayley Robinson, younger sister of Diane Robinson (Kia Dorsey), who’s taken over custody of Hayley because their mom has just died of cancer and their dad died some years before. Diane works as a flight attendant and when she’s out of town on an international flight, Hayley invites her school friends, including her “bestie” Chrissy (Kyla Nova), over for a secret party. The moment I saw red plastic Dixie cups at the party I feared for the worst, and indeed the worst happens when a nosy neighbor calls the police and Hayley’s party gets busted for all the illegal drinking that’s going on. Diane comes back and announces that she’s going to cut back her work schedule and do regional flights only, even though that will mean a nose-dive in her income, because she doesn’t trust Hayley and doesn’t want to leave her alone that long. She also installs a GPS tracker on Hayley’s cell phone and grounds her, telling her she’s allowed to be at home and at school but nowhere else.

Hayley relieves her boredom by spying on their drop-dead gorgeous neighbor, Jason Parker (Devante Winfrey; his imdb.com page doesn’t mention any connection with Oprah, but he’s the sort of performer who lets his pecs do his acting for him), whom she suspects is a murderer because one night she sees him bring home a blonde white woman named Layla Taylor. Hayley spies from her home as Jason takes Layla to her bedroom, she starts screaming as if her life is in danger, and then there’s an ominous silence and Hayley is convinced that Jason murdered Layla. She’s even more convinced of that when a local TV news show carries a story about Layla’s disappearance and she recognizes the photo in the story as the girl Jason brought home that night. From then on the film turns into a clever reworking of The Window, the 1949 film in which a child (Bobby Driscoll) becomes convinced that a neighbor couple (Paul Stewart and Ruth Roman) murdered a sailor they lured to their apartment with the apparent intent of rolling him for his bankroll, and of Rear Window (with Raymond Burr as the killer a home-bound man, played by James Stewart, exposes) as well. Hayley enlists her friend Chrissy to be her driver because Chrissy has a car and Hayley doesn’t, and the two get into all kinds of difficult scrapes from Hayley’s determination to expose Jason as not only a killer, but a serial killer. Hayley’s antics include asking Chrissy to flirt with Jason so Hayley can sneak into his house, grab his keys and open the ominous-looking shed in his backyard, which turns out to contain a collection of postcards from various cities, each with a woman’s kiss in lipstick on the back (only the “lipstick” is really blood he drained from their bodies and used to make a print of their lips on the card) and each dated with the date in which a woman went missing in that city.

Later Hayley hides in the back of Jason’s red pickup truck convinced that he’s got Layla’s body in there, only the “body” turns out to be a mannequin and Jason tells the police it’s a CPR dummy he uses in trainings he teaches. Hayley also starts a fire outside Jason’s home just as he’s taken a woman named Samantha home with him, and the police and fire departments cause such a commotion that Samantha bails and thus, unbeknownst to her, avoids becoming Jason’s latest victim. Though Diane is disgusted when Hayley returns home in the custody of police, and an officious woman from the county’s child protective services department threatens to take Hayley away from Diane and put her in a group home until she’s 18, ultimately Hayley deduces that Jason is the notorious “Kiss of Death Killer.” There’s a final scene in which Jason and Hayley confront each other, Jason confesses and says it all started when his parents died unexpectedly, and his first victim was the aunt who took custody of him but made no secret of the fact that she regarded him as a burden she’d just as soon be rid of. Jason threatens to murder both Hayley and Diane (whom he previously dated, non-homicidally) and make it look like one killed the other and then herself, but eventually the two women fight back and Hayley finally dispatches Jason by using a fireplace poker as a harpoon. (I’m not making this up, you know!) Directed by Kaila York from a script by Brandi Sperry, The Neighbor Who Saw Too Much is actually a pretty good thriller, though York can only do so much given the outrageous improbabilities of Sperry’s script and the frequency with which the writer switches back and forth, having Hayley act intelligently in some scenes and utterly stupidly in others!

Obsessed (Screen Gems, Rainforest Films, 2009)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Afterwards Lifetime showed yet another movie cut to their formula, even though it was made for theatrical release and wasn’t the product of one of the minor companies that “feed” Lifetime its usual material. It was called Obsessed and was made in 2009 by Screen Gems, the subsidiary of Columbia that originally was their shorts department in the 1930’s and 1940’s (the Three Stooges made most of their famous two-reelers for them). With the advent of television and the decision of the major studios in the mid-1950’s to stop resisting it and start selling to it, Columbia made Screen Gems their TV label. Just how a movie with at least semi-major stars like Idris Elba and Beyoncé (who in 2009 wasn’t quite the icon she became later but was already a major draw in both music and films; this was three years after her stunning performance in Bill Condon’s Dreamgirls, which was overshadowed only by Jennifer Hudson’s even more incandescent one in a showier role!) got put out on Columbia’s TV label is a mystery. But the plot (the writer was David Loughery and the director was Steve Shill, which sounds like a bad joke waiting to be told) was more or less pure Lifetime. Derek Charles (Idris Elba) is a hot-shot young executive at a Los Angeles-based investment firm called Gage Bendix. Significantly, he’s also the only Black person we see at their office. Derek has been married for over three years to Sharon (Beyoncé, still using both her names and billed as Beyoncé Knowles) and they’ve had a son named Kyle (played, in a common casting dodge to avoid working a child illegally, by identical twins Nathan and Nicolas Myers), but Sharon worked as his assistant at Gage Bendix before they got married and the implication is they started dating while they were still colleagues at work.

A newly hired office temp, Lisa Sheridan (Ali Larter), is bound and determined from the moment she shows up to make history repeat itself and seduce Derek away from Sharon. At the office Christmas party – at which, by the firm’s long-standing policy, spouses are prohibited – Lisa corners Derek in the men’s room and literally tries to rape him. He fends her off but she tries again, sneaking into his car as he tries to leave after work and throwing off her coat to reveal herself clad only in sexy underwear underneath. Later at a New Year’s corporate retreat (these executives have so many wild parties and retreats one wonders when they get any work done!) she books a room in the hotel and tells everyone she, not Sharon, is Derek’s wife. Derek finds her in his bed, primed and ready for sexual action, but once again he’s successfully able to rebuff her. Only Lisa’s antics reach the top echelons of Gage Bendix and Derek realizes she’s potentially going to cost him both his marriage and his job. Derek tries to explain everything to Sharon but she won’t listen. There’s a bizarre scene in which a woman police detective named Reese (Christine Lahti, whose name I long made fun of as “Christine Lah-ti-dah”) is interrogating Derek about Lisa, and Sharon is right there in the room. Reese offers to question Derek out of the presence of his wife, but Derek insists he has nothing to hide, though as Reese continues her questioning Sharon is shocked at how far the affair went (even though both he and we know that there wasn’t one, at least in terms of actual extra-relational sexual activity) and so strongly overreacts she literally throws him out of their house. Once Lisa finally understands that she doesn’t have a chance with Derek because he isn’t going to break up with his wife over her, she sneaks into the Charles’s home and tricks their babysitter into letting her be alone with Kyle. Like so many Lifetime villainesses before and since, her intent seems to be to kidnap Kyle, though in the end she only moves Kyle from one part of the house to another and scares the shit out of Sharon until Sharon finally finds him.

In the final scenes, Sharon and Lisa confront each other in the house and we get the Chekhovian payoff of an early scene in which Derek warned Sharon of loose floorboards in the attic. Sure enough, while Sharon and Lisa are having their bitch fight in the attic, Lisa falls through the loose floorboards and Sharon actually tries to rescue her. But Lisa doesn’t trust her and fails to grab Sharon’s hand, and ultimately in a series of scenes director Shill stretches out to absurd lengths, Lisa gets impaled by a chandelier à la The Phantom of the Opera and then falls headlong through the glass surface of the Charles’s coffee table. (I suspect writer Loughery had seen the 1989 dark comedy The War of the Roses, in which Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner played a divorcing couple whose conflict becomes so intense they literally kill themselves on a falling chandelier in their former home. It’s the movie in which Danny DeVito, playing the divorce lawyer for one of them, is actually the voice of reason for a change!) Obsessed is an O.K. movie, better acted than some on the Lifetime network – I particularly liked the character of Patrick (Matthew Humphries), a more-or-less “out” Gay man at the Gage Malone office who laments on one occasion, “All the good ones are either married or straight” (an interesting rewrite of the famous old joke, “All the good ones are either married or Gay,” which in the era of same-sex marriage became, “All the good ones are either married, Gay or both”) – and Charles and I both had some interesting reactions to Beyoncé’s performance. We both placed her midway on the scale of women singers trying to be actresses, from the heights of Barbra Streisand to the depths of Whitney Houston (who in The Bodyguard showed she couldn’t even play herself convincingly), though since this was three years after Dreamgirls (in which Beyoncé had proven she could act), it’s clear that what was holding her back this time was a clichéd script that had her turn against her husband way too quickly and completely and offered her precious little with which to work.

The Mallorca Files: "The Outlaw José Rey" (Cosmopolitan Pictures, Clerkenwell Films, BBC Studios, Britbox, France Télévisions, ZDFNeo, Baleares Film Commission, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, August 1) KPBS ran a couple of episodes of the intriguing if sometimes rather arch British crime show The Mallorca Files, about a British woman, Miranda Blake (Elen Rhys), and a German man, Max Winter (Julian Looman), who end up reluctant police partners as detectives on the police force of Mallorca, an island off the coast of Spain. One of last night’s episodes, “The Blue Feather,” was a quite good one I’d seen before (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2023/12/the-mallorca-files-blue-feather-2021.html); the other, which I watched last night with my husband Charles, was called “The Outlaw José Rey,” an obvious pun on the title of Clint Eastwood’s film The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976). It wasn’t one of the better The Mallorca Files episodes, mainly because there were so few characters there weren’t enough suspects to make it a particularly compelling whodunit. The action centers around Rancho del Rey, a riding compound on Mallorca owned by cranky old grandfather Xisco Rey (Antonio Valero). He’s planning to retire and turn the reins, so to speak, over to his grandson José Rey (the drop-dead gorgeous Ben Cura) even though José wants to turn the place into a dude ranch for well-heeled tourists. To do that, José wants to borrow a lot of money, and Xisco has an old-school fear of taking on any debt. Added to the mix are an irascible stable manager, Javier Santos (José Luis García Pérez), whom we see in the opening scene throw a knife into a hay bale to express his displeasure at his daughter Belia (Lou Cosette) becoming engaged to José. At first Max and Miranda are sent to Rancho del Rey by their boss, Inéz Villegas (María Fernández Ache), to investigate credit-card fraud being perpetrated with a “skimmer,” a device inserted into the card reader to record the credit-card information of customers so it can later be used to run up unauthorized charges on their accounts.

José has been billing himself as recently returned to Mallorca following graduation from the London School of Economics, but it turns out he was really serving a sentence for fraud in a British prison. He attributes his crimes to surviving a particularly nasty divorce between his parents – his dad is dead but his mom, Pia (Paulina Galvéz), is alive and still living at Rancho del Rey – and insists he’s learned his lesson and reformed. It’s obvious writer Liz Lake (working from characters created by Dan Sefton) is setting up both José Rey and Javier Santos as red herrings. Midway through the episode grandfather Xisco is found fatally stabbed, and José flees into the surrounding countryside. Javier organizes a search party consisting of himself, Miranda and Max to look for him the next morning, explaining that he taught José the geography of the area and therefore he knows all José’s likely hiding places. There’s an amusing sequence in which Miranda shows that she knows how to ride a horse and Max shows that he doesn’t (yet another instance in which the writers of The Mallorca Files delight in exposing Max’s pretensions to butchness). Ultimately Javier finds José and rescues him from falling into a ravine despite their mutual hatred and José’s own insistence that he’d be better off dead (not that we believe him!). To no one’s particular surprise, it turns out to be Pia who killed Xisco in a drunken stupor – given that she’s the only other possible killer besides Javier and José, it wasn’t that hard to figure out – after Xisco turns out to have been behind the credit-card fraud, having known a lot more about computers than he let on. This show was reasonably entertaining and offered a lot of spectacular shots of the Mallorcan scenery (though, as with some previous The Mallorca Files episodes, no cinematographer is credited, and he or she definitely should have been). It also offered a lot of the cheesiest musical cues I’ve heard on an episode of anything, notably the Magnificent Seven-like theme as Javier, Miranda and Max ride through the Mallorcan countryside looking for the fugitive José. As with the cinematography, imdb.com doesn’t list any credit for the music, but it seems as if director Christiana Ebohon-Green contacted whatever stock music library they were using and said, “Give me all your most hackneyed ‘Western’ cues.”

L.A.: A Queer History (Film Bliss Studios, L.A.: A Queer History, PBS, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, July 31) my husband Charles and I watched “Protests and Parades,” the second half of the two-part 2021 PBS program L.A.: A Queer History. Charles and I had already seen the first half, “Culture and Criminalization,” over the week we were staying with his mother Edi in Martinez, California. She’d recorded it on her digital video recorder (a piece of technology I’ve avoided because it would only add to our already astronomical cable bill) and we watched the first half there, then streamed the second half on our own computer last night. L.A.: A Queer History was at least an indirect challenge to what’s become the “print the legend” version of the history of U.S. Queer activism, which that it all began overnight when New York police raided an unlicensed dive bar called the Stonewall Inn in June 1969 and, instead of meekly submitting to police abuse, fought back. Only this wasn’t the first time Queers had fought back against a police raid on a Gay bar; it had happened in Los Angeles at the Black Cat on Sunset Boulevard on New Year’s 1966/1967.

One of my pet peeves over the years has been the way in which New York City has arrogantly and entirely falsely proclaimed itself as the epicenter of the Queer rights movement, when as I once testily pointed out in a leaflet, virtually every milestone in American Queer history happened in California. California was the site of the first ongoing Gay rights organization, the Mattachine Society, founded by Harry Hay and four others (including Dale Jennings and future fashion designer Rudi Gernreich) in L.A. in 1950. California was the site of the first ongoing Lesblan organization as well: the Daughters of Bilitis, founded by Lesbian couple Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon in San Francisco in 1955. California was the founding ground for the first ongoing Gay publication, One (which won a key court case in 1954 against the U.S. Post Office, which had banned the publication as “obscene” because it presented Gay life and culture positively), and the first ongoing Lesbian publication, The Ladder. And something I hadn’t known about until I watched this program was that the use of the word “PRIDE” in connection with Queer activism in the U.S. was also from California. “PRIDE” was originally an acronym for “Personal Rights In Defense and Education,” a Queer resistance organization founded in L.A. in 1966, which came into its own as a support group for the Black Cat rioters when they were prosecuted by the police. Even before that, California could claim some other major “firsts” in the history of American Queer activism, including the first openly Queer candidate for elective office in U.S. history. His name was José Saria, and in 1963 he was a drag performer and MC at a Gay bar in San Francisco that, like its L.A. namesake, was called the Black Cat. When the Black Cat was targeted for police raids, Saria not only organized his patrons to fight back, he announced his candidacy for the Board of Supervisors (San Francisco’s equivalent to a city council) and somehow got enough people to sign his petition to be on the ballot, despite the fact that merely signing your name and address would get you targeted for enforcement and potential arrest by the police. Saria lost, but along the way he founded the Imperial Court (a sort of Gay equivalent of a charitable lodge) and made his mark on the history of Queer activism.

Indeed, I would argue that virtually all the most important historical milestones for Queer community activism in American history came from California. The only ones that didn’t were the very first Gay rights organization in U.S. history, the Society for Human Rights, founded in Chicago in 1924 by German immigrant Henry Gerber; Frank Kameny’s pickets against the federal government for anti-Queer discrimination starting in 1965 in Washington, D.C.; and the Stonewall riots themselves. San Francisco also saw the first pickets against a private employer for anti-Queer discrimination when my late friend and associate Leo Laurence and his friend (not his partner, though that was widely reported then) Gale Whittington, organized protests against the States Steamship Lines when they fired Whittington for appearing with Laurence in a photo illustrating an article about Gay militancy. The analysis of Gay history presented in L.A.: A Queer History, directed by Gregorio Davila, argues that a number of factors combined to make L.A. a Gay hotbed in the 1930’s and 1940’s. Among them were the prominence of the movie industry, which attracted many more or less openly Gay men including costume designers Gilbert Adrian and Orry-Kelly; and the U.S. involvement in World War II, which pulled a lot of young Gay men out of their repressive small towns and plunged them into a big city where there were plenty of available partners for Gay sex. Starting in 1943, the U.S. government, deciding that the war was pretty much won, gradually became less tolerant of Gays in the ranks, and after the war there was a full-blown campaign of repression against not only “Communists” (defined as anyone markedly Left in their politics, whether they had any use for the Communists’ insane levels of discipline or not) but Queers. Articles about the “Lavender Menace” began to appear, and thousands of Gay men were dishonorably discharged from the military and thereby given “bad papers” that made it harder for them to find civilian jobs as well.

By far the most important and influential Gay leader that emerged from this period was Harry Hay, one of my personal heroes (when I launched my own Queer paper, Zenger’s Newsmagazine, in 1994 Harry Hay was my first cover boy). He was the son of a mining engineer who’d spent a lot of his boyhood with his father in Chile, and in the late 1940’s he joined the Henry Wallace Presidential campaign (Wallace was an independent candidate who had been Franklin Roosevelt’s designated successor, but he turned against the Democratic Party over the Cold War and ran for President, ostensibly as the candidate of the Progressive Party but with a lot of support from the Communists). Hay organized a support committee called “Bachelors for Wallace” and ultimately got kicked out of the Communist Party for being Gay. (At the time the Communists regarded homosexuality as a form of “bourgeois social decadence” that would automatically disappear when the Communists won the world revolution.) In 1950 Hay and four others organized the Mattachine Society, named after a sect of medieval court jesters whom Hay believed had been Gay, only three years later he was thrown out of the group by more conservative members because, in order to protect the group against law-enforcement infiltration, he’d adopted the secretive organizational structure of the Communist Party. For the rest of his life – he lived until 2002 – Hay hung around on the outskirts of the Queer movement, at times resurfacing, as he did in the late 1980’s (when I first met him). Reacting to the way Pride organizations were barring the North American Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) from marching in Pride parades, Hay started showing up at parades carrying triangle-shaped signs saying, “I march with NAMBLA.”

If San Francisco Gay politician and martyr Harvey Milk was the Martin Luther King, Jr. of the Queer movement, Hay was its Frederick Douglass. It was Hay who first conceived of the idea of Gays and Lesbians as an oppressed minority, at a time when most Queer activists bought into the idea that being Queer was “a sickness” and tried to frame the movement as comparable to the one to counter discrimination against people with disabilities. It was also the early Mattachine Society which organized the first successful resistance to a police arrest of one of its founding members, Dale Jennings (extensively interviewed in this film), for “lewd conduct.” Hay and others were able to fundraise to hire him an attorney, who caught the arresting officer in a lie on the witness stand and led the judge to dismiss the case, calling it the worst-presented case on anything he’d ever heard. The second half of L.A.: A Queer History tells a more familiar part of the story, including an extensive set of interviews and profiles with Rev. Troy Perry. After he was excommunicated from the Baptist Church as a minister for being Gay, he decided to start his own, the Metropolitan Community Church, as an outreach for people who identified both as Christian and Gay and wanted a space to worship where they would not be shunned for being Queer. Rev. Perry was also instrumental in planning the first Christopher Street West parade – whose organizers named it after the Greenwich Village location of the Stonewall Inn and thus helped perpetuate the myth that the Queer movement had started in New York City – and making sure it was a parade rather than a protest march. He and the other organizers had the predictable trouble getting permits for the event after Ed Davis, then the chief of the Los Angeles Police Department, denounced them and their plans for a parade before the L.A. City Council. (Two decades later, as an elected official in California, Davis did an abrupt about-face on the issue and became one of the few Queer-friendly politicians in the Republican Party.)

The show also zips through controversies that emerged as the movement grew and matured in the 1970’s, including the insistence of women activists on being called “Lesbian” instead of “Gay” (which ignores the fact that a number of women at the time actually disliked the term “Lesbian” and preferred to be called “Gay women”); the racism that afflicted prime Gay bars and discos against people of color, including the requirement that Gay men who looked Black or Latino show two or three ID’s while white-presenting Gay men could get in with just one; and the galvanic shock of the advent of AIDS in 1981. Suddenly huge numbers of Gay and Bisexual men were coming down with unusual cancers and other diseases and rapidly dying from them. Rev. Perry recalled that the number of funerals he was officiating at swelled from one a week to one a day to tens a day, and the obituaries in Gay papers grew until they covered several pages in each issue. Ironically, one effect of AIDS on the Queer community was it broke down the institutionalized sexism that had hampered Lesbians within the movement; all of a sudden organizations began hiring women for key leadership positions because they were likely to be around quite a while longer than their male counterparts. L.A.: A Queer History ends with the formation of ACT UP (the “AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power”) in 1987 and the quickly dashed hopes of many Queer activists that the replacement of Republican Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush with Democrat Bill Clinton in 1992 would end federal hostility against Queers and promote an aggressive response to the AIDS epidemic. Instead, as more than one interviewee on this program pointed out, it was Clinton who signed the two most openly anti-Queer laws ever passed by Congress, the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” “compromise” restricting Queers in the military in 1993 and the so-called “Defense of Marriage Act” of 1996 which defined marriage, for purposes of federal law, as only between one man and one woman. Though there’s a certain “print the legend” aspect to L.A.: A Queer History (including its use of the terms “HIV” and “AIDS” interchangeably), for the most part it’s not only a necessary correction to the “Stonewall” myth that the Queer movement started in New York City in 1969 but a compelling history in its own right.