FRAMELINE36: REVEALING MR. MAUGHAM (2012)—The Evening Class Interview With Michael House

Michael House and I last conversed when his documentary The Magnificent Tati (2009) premiered at San Francisco's Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Part of that conversation went up on SF360 with the balance appearing on The Evening Class. House has followed up his portrait of Jacques Tati with the equally informative Revealing Mr. Maugham (2012), premiering in the Bay Area as part of the 36th edition of the Frameline Film Festival.

With earnest thoroughness, House recounts W. Somerset Maugham's fascinating literary career and reveals intriguing elements of his personal life that enrichen an appreciation of Maugham's body of work. Archival materials are ample—photographs, film clips and rare interview footage with the author—and are supplemented by commentary from several talking heads who are either professed experts on Maugham or family members offering personal recollections. House's reliance on scholastic expertise backfires a bit, especially when said experts lack on-camera charisma, and one wishes all of this information could have been scripted into a narrative voiceover delivered by a recognized actor. Among his ensemble of talking heads, Pico Iyer comes across as the most energized speaking to why Maugham's work remains accessible to reading publics across the globe and it is, of course, always a pleasure to hear Armistead Maupin opine on any subject, his comments on how creativity is fueled by pain being especially noteworthy here. Maupin is the first to admit his reluctance to put words in Maugham's mouth as to how he went about writing his books.

Revealing Mr. Maugham succeeds as another entry in the queer historical canon—not so much as a homostylized fantasy of a known cinematic icon (Joshua Tree (1951): A Portrait of James Dean), or a rescue from the dustbins of memory of a nearly forgotten rock star (Jobriath, A.D.)—but as an accentuation and inclusion of someone admittedly famous and world-reknown into a brethren that—despite increased membership over the years—still comes off now and again as famished for fellowship. How insecure can a queer community be? And how important is Maugham's homosexuality to an understanding of his work?

If, as suggested by one of the film's experts, Maugham guised his sexual interests in female characters who have since become some of the most famous women of literature (and filmic adaptation), he joins the ranks of such writers as Tennessee Williams and Noel Coward in having an indelible impact on culture, albeit indirectly, for expressing what at the time was the love that simply could not speak its name. It's amusing to consider how much the foundations of culture rest upon the constraints of the closet, which—almost as much as poverty—inspire artists to be clever and circuitous in their creative self-expression.

More significantly, however, is the role that Maugham's long-time companion Gerald Haxton played in procuring access to the experiences and personalities that informed Maugham's stories. Maugham, suffering from a stammering speech impediment and characterized as introverted, might never have met the prostitute who became the template for Sadie Thompson, for example, had it not been for Haxton providing introductions. Important for capturing the mannered climate of the time, Revealing Mr. Maugham likewise recapitulates the complicated sex lives of the early 20th century, limned by impropriety, scandal and unhappy marriages of convenience.

Perhaps one of the most interesting inclusions in the documentary's commentary on Maugham is the montage of entries from Maugham's Facebook page, where videotaped testimonials from Maugham fans illustrate the author's continuing relevance to contemporary audiences.

I'm grateful to Michael House for providing streaming access to Revealing Mr. Maugham and to being amenable to answering a few questions via email.

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Michael Guillén: Taking a look at your IMDb profile this morning, I took note that you consider yourself an editor more than a director? How would you distinguish the two?

Michael House: In fact, I really don't consider myself either. I am a guitarist if I am anything. In my mind directing and editing are just another two labels applied to the complicated process of making a film. Nowadays, an individual can do nearly all the jobs on a factual film so all the little steps—such as directing or editing—are within the whole process, but for me the films are largely made in the edit so the editing is really important. Interviewing and filming (things that fall under "directing") are often sheer luck and very unpredictable so I tend to seize control and find the narrative in the edit.

I never look at IMDb. My profile is not accurate and I am not keen on IMDb because I know much of the voting for films on IMDb (at least on my films) are not real votes. They also make it hard for film makers to list things. I guess I just don't like IMDb.

Guillén: I note that Tati scholar David Bellos, who contributed to your Tati documentary, is likewise a producing credit here. Can you speak to your continuing collaboration with Bellos and the formation of SWiM Cinema?

House: David Bellos is a professor at Princeton University. He is also one of the world's most respected and important translators. His best selling book Is That a Fish in Your Ear? is simply wonderful. David and I became friends because he wrote a book on Jacques Tati that I love. After the film on Tati, David offered to help me make more films about artists and, well, here we are.... He understands that arts education needs all the help it can get and that factual films on art are a wonderful way to introduce overlooked icons (i.e., Tati and Maugham) to people. He is a true supporter of the arts and I adore him.

SWiM cinema is a project I started in March to make films on art available to anyone on earth with the internet. Most people don't understand how a film is distributed but I can tell you it is not easy, nor practical to have a small factual film made available to a viewer in, say, Japan or Russia. Even places such as Brazil are really hard to get a film made available. It is not because there are not people who would like to buy the films in these places but because iTunes or DVD companies make it nearly impossible for the indie film maker to distribute their work there. People think that the internet has opened up the global market for indie film makers but that is not really true. One must find a distribution company such as iTunes in each market, and there are like 650+ markets, so for a small niche film the idea of selling it everywhere is still really hard.

I set up SWiM cinema to try to solve this problem and to create a global platform where I could offer my films, and other film makers' films, ("artumentaries" I call them). Obviously I have to subtitle them and find promotion methods to let people know the films are available—all of which we are doing. SWiM does PR by screening its films with non-profit organizations, museums and by other methods. For example, we team up with an organization and donate a portion of each sale to them. Revealing Mr. Maugham shares its proceeds with the British Stammering Association and Pride London. As you know, Maugham was a stammerer and gay. So SWiM is a new way for factual films to find viewers. We don't do DVDs, only downloads. DVDs are, in fact, very bad for the environment and we want to keep it as green as possible. (When I say "we", I mean "me".)

I think with specialized films on art the audience is not massive but it is certainly international. I gave all that some real thought and came up with SWiM cinema. It is slowly working. We sell the films to people all over. I think Maugham was bought first by someone in Iceland then in India, both on the day SWiM released it. That could never happen if we tried to sell with normal "traditional" sales methods. I plan on growing the catalogue to include many artumentaries from numerous countries as well as some films of stage plays and concerts, nothing super mainstream, just interesting things you won't ever find on BBC or PBS.

Guillén: Can you speak to the genesis of this project and how you went about shaping it? What is your personal engagement with Maugham?

House: I owe Maugham a lot because The Razor's Edge (1944)—which I read when I was 19—really inspired me to live my life as I wanted to and not to follow the normal path I was raised to follow. It gave me the idea to move to Europe and be an artist. After The Razor's Edge I read all of Maugham's work (and I still do read him). I love his stories. He is a true "internationalist", which is very rare in fiction. His "voice" is also one I really like, never anything but interesting and compatible to me.

I knew Maugham had gotten a bad rap in his last years and so I had (for years) wanted to make a film that looked into that. I felt it needed to be cleared up. Selina Hastings wrote her biography The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham about three or four years ago and she really unlocked all of the misunderstandings about Maugham, so she and I got together and asked the Royal Literary Fund to allow us permission to use Maugham's work. He willed them his copyrights.

I then started trying to find writers on the best seller list who were into Maugham. Armistead Maupin was the first, then Pico Iyer, Alan Furst, Alexander McCall Smith, these are all giants in the world of publishing so I asked them and they all basically said, "Yes, I'd love to talk about Maugham. He is a major inspiration to me."  To me the measure of an artist is how seminal he / she is with real artists working today and Maugham truly takes the cake on that point. So I started interviewing all these "big" writers and was pleased to find they were all "mini-Maugham-experts". I then asked Maugham's family to be in the film and they agreed, thanks to Selina Hastings. So it all came together, as these things do, because wonderful, intelligent people agreed to participate.

Guillén: In your NPR interview you made a point of correcting the description of Maugham as bisexual to assert he was homosexual. Some might argue—as the comments section heatedly reveals at Towleroad—that this is "bisexual erasure on behalf of Gay, Inc." Why is it important for you to understand Maugham as a homosexual, and not a bisexual?

House: We know Maugham only involved himself with women after he was the age of 40. More importantly, he only involved himself with women after he was London's most famous playwright. Up to that point—when he was a mere struggling writer—he was only involved romantically with men. Fame was the reason he got involved with Syrie and other women. Remember, Maugham became famous only 10 years after Oscar Wilde was imprisoned for being queer.

Maugham lived his whole life with men as lovers. Gerald Haxton was his main lover for 30 years but—before Gerald—Maugham was deeply in love with a man named Harry Phillips. They left England together to live as a couple in Paris around 1905, in fact. I am certain that marriage, women lovers and fatherhood would have never entered Somerset Maugham's life if he had not become the world's most famous playwright by 1912. Being gay and famous was not possible back then and a "conventional marriage" was your cover. It is hard to understand how famous Maugham was in the 1910s. We are talking mega-star of his time so public image was a real consideration.

I also think one has a serious obligation to be fully honest when you make a "factual" film and I found no evidence while making this film that Maugham ever felt sexual love towards a woman—men, yes, over and again—but never towards a woman. So to me he was homosexual, not bisexual.

Guillén: How important is Maugham's homosexuality to an understanding of his work?

House: I think Maugham was an outsider and his writing is from that perspective. His being gay was one of those elements. Armistead Maupin says being gay helps one live like a "spy"—growing up keeping secrets, observing people's reactions very closely, things like that. I think this all added to Maugham's perspective and helped him observe better, which made him a better writer. But to be honest, I think Maugham's work is for anyone who in their heart is an outsider—gay or straight.

Guillén: I note the documentary is already available for purchase online. Does this mean that—other than for a festival presence—a theatrical release is not in the works? In terms of festivals, where is it booked next?

House: Revealing Mr. Maugham is for the festivals only. I haven't really had any thoughts beyond that. It will be in festivals in Greece, Ireland, South Africa and loads of others. Every week a new one asks to screen it. It was at the BFI in March and will show at the very cool Chichester Festival in August, also in Germany, Russia and Japan. Although I have festivals asking for it, I don't think Revealing Mr. Maugham is a film for general theatrical release, but what do I know?

FRAMELINE36—FOUR (2012)

It seems anymore that an American independent doesn't have sufficient credibility unless it's mounted one or two successful crowd sourcing campaigns. Joshua Sanchez's performance-driven feature debut Four (2012) [Official site / Facebook] has managed to achieve just that, securing its requisite $5,000 in Kickstarter funds for the film to traffic to its world premiere at the recent Los Angeles Film Festival. I usually suffer from compassion fatigue when it comes to Kickstarter campaigns—as a film writer I'm hit up by every project imaginable—but, supporting Four was a no-brainer. This film—adapted from the play by Pulitzer Prize finalist and Obie winner Christopher Shinn—brightens the cinematic landscape with its eschewal of lazy softcore porn for an authentic and complex treatment of gay characters.

Initial reviews from L.A. have been stellar. At Variety—though couched in staged reservations—Andrew Barker notes that Four spotlights "a quartet of furiously committed performances, ...burnished by vivid, atmospheric lensing." At indieWire, Emma Bernstein characterizes Four as "a quiet and poetic meditation on the solitude of the human condition." At Ioncinema, Nicholas Bell states that Four "manages to create a brooding atmosphere that slowly tightens its grip, sloughing off familiar tropes concerning race and sexuality and hitting enough subtle notes to become more intense the more quiet it becomes."

In the Bay Area, where Four is featured in the 36th edition of San Francisco's Frameline Film Festival, Jackson Scarlett observes in his festival capsule that Four "upends typical expectations of race and gender, reading Shinn's drama with an intensity that invariably invites comparison to the early films of Neil LaBute for its candor, carnality, and explicit focus on the mechanics of longing." LaBute, in fact, serves as Four's Executive Producer. At the SF Bay Times, Gary Kramer writes: "An outstanding character study, Four boasts a quartet of brilliant performances—with [Wendell] Pierce in particular a standout—and a seductive rhythm that will rivet viewers as the characters come to terms with themselves and each other."

Wendell Pierce—familiar to fans of HBO programming The Wire and Treme—bravely tackles the role of Joe, a closeted black, middle-aged, married man out on an internet sex date with young white teenager June (Emory Cohen). indieWire asserts that "Pierce steals the show with his multi-layered performance that is often best at its quietest: small facial movements and seemingly inarticulate grunts illustrate everything the character is unable to say aloud." Variety adds that Pierce manages "to convey Joe's warm, big-brotherly qualities alongside his sexual menace" and argues that—as "the film's most pronounced relationship"—its illegality is neither judged nor whitewashed and "might almost seem an argument for old-school Athenian pederasty."

That argument wouldn't have any credence were it not for the hungry reciprocity of June in a knockout performance by Emory Cohen, familiar to fans as the troubled son on Smash. Brooding, petulant, indecisive but anxious for experience, Cohen tempers longing with self-loathing in one of the most accurate portrayals of teenage sexuality this reviewer has seen in some time. June's shift from cagey indecision to seductive certainty is one of the film's most sensual moments, even as its hidden truth is painfully accentuated by the expressions of fear and disgust flickering over June's face during his uncomfortable sex with Joe. That truth—that a young man must do whatever he has to do to gain experience and find himself—is both sad and sobering.

Consummate performances are also achieved by E.J. Bonilla as the thoroughly charismatic and wisecracking Dexter striving to find an identity past the fading glory of his high school basketball years. In a brilliant stroke of sound design, Michael McMenomy layers in the sound of a dribbling basketball when Dexter and Abigayle first kiss. Aja Naomi King delivers a tortured performance as Abigayle, Dexter's love interest and Joe's daughter who—with considerable less back story than the other characters—beautifully suggests the damage inflicted by her father's not-so-secret indiscretions.

Shinn's script and Sanchez's adaptation offer insights riddled with conflicted American values. Offering to buy June some fireworks to celebrate the Fourth of July (the quintessential American holiday), June protests that fireworks are illegal in their town, to which Joe responds that breaking the law is a core American quality. This scofflaw attitude concerns not only their sexual liaison, but suggests that the rules that need to be broken are those that demand people desire in certain ways, when in truth they must desire elsewise. At film's end, Joe offers June a gift of condoms and sparklers: a transgressive blessing that confirms that rules must be broken in order to discover an authentic self.

Four plays Framline36 on Thursday, June 21, 7:00PM at the Castro Theatre. Expected guest: director Joshua Sanchez.

FRAMELINE36—JOBRIATH A.D. (2011)

It's difficult for a young person in their teens or early 20s to have a conscious sense of how they are an active part of cultural history; its living embodiment, in fact. More often than not this is an insight privileged from the vantage of distance, decades later, when one looks back nostalgically from the reflective comfort of the armchair. This week I've had two flights back to the late '60-early '70s. First, Sheila Weller's welcome reassessment of 1967's Summer of Love ("Suddenly That Summer") published in the July 2012 issue of Vanity Fair, and secondly Kieran Turner's Jobriath A.D. (2011), screening this evening at the 36th edition of San Francisco's Frameline Film Festival.

Queer history applies different research methods in its practice. Familiar facts are either recontextualized through a queer perspective so that they accommodate the reclamatory fantasy of the queer historical project (as in Matthew Mishory's Joshua Tree, 1951: A Portrait of James Dean, 2012), or personages are recovered from the margins and ellipses of history, redeemed from inference and resituated into subject significance, as in the case of Jobriath Boone, né Bruce Wayne Campbell who was—as Michael Hawley notes in his capsule—"a handsome and talented former Hair cast member who became the first openly gay rock musician signed by a major record label. Jobriath was hyped as the 'new David Bowie' by svengali music promoter Jerry Brandt, with thousands of bus ads and a billboard on Times Square, all before a single note was recorded."

Turner's documentary is as much about Jerry Brandt's promotional excesses as it is about the unfortunate media disaster known as Jobriath. Ample screen time is given Brandt to justify his failed executive decisions, which in retrospect don't seem so off mark, even for being admitted gambles. Just as Hair was a successful reaction to the Summer of Love detailed by Weller in her Vanity Fair piece, Brandt was convinced Jobriath would do well as they "rode the wave in" to New York on the coattails of the Gay and Lesbian movement of the early '70s. Perhaps one of the most poignant points made in Turner's documentary is the lack of support Jobriath received from the gay press during his bid for fame and how—all these decades later—Jobriath might just receive his long overdue recognition and perhaps (as Brandt enthuses in a chilling bit of irony) a Broadway treatment. I don't know whether to say everything old is new again or a prophet has no honor in his own country.

Without question, Jobriath was an artist ahead of his time and—true to mythologist Joseph Campbell's assertion that misunderstood artists are the martyred saints of modern times—there's a Catholic impulse to light a candle for Jobriath's failed artistic experiment sacrificed to the fickle malcontents of the public imaginary. Turner's documentary addresses the way that gay men have had to reinvent themselves in order to survive social persecution, relying on the masks of persona to both conceal and reveal themselves. This "acting out" is conceived as both creative agency and a desperate cry for acceptance. Ambivalent gender as masquerade becomes performance art subject to uncertain reception.

Some of the film's most difficult subjects are tackled through animation (left curiously uncredited at both film's end and IMDb). How Jobriath's advertising campaign is homophobically defaced, how heterosexist imagery trumps gay erotic expression in the commercial games where "sex sells everything", and how Jobriath's chance to successfully reinvent himself as cabaret singer Cole Berlin becomes a warped record that ushers in the AIDS years, are all simply but effectively presented.



Jobriath A.D. plays Framline36 on Tuesday, June 19, 9:30PM at the Victoria Theatre. Expected guest: director Kieran Turner.

FRAMELINE36—JOSHUA TREE, 1951: A PORTRAIT OF JAMES DEAN (2012)

Arthur Rimbaud and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry are the twin literary spirits guiding Matthew Mishory's debut feature Joshua Tree, 1951: A Portrait of James Dean (2012) [official site / Facebook]—Rimbaud as an introduction to fire, and Saint-Exupéry as the patron saint of puers. Like Saint-Exupéry's Little Prince appearing and disappearing in the desert, Mishory's homostylized take on Hollywood icon James Dean queers the archetype of Dean's eternal youth, as imagined through his formative years at UCLA.

With much style and adequate substance, Joshua Tree, 1951: A Portrait of James Dean is more bio-fantasy than bio-pic, glorifying Dean's bisexuality and shrugging it down the runway like a fashion shoot this side of softcore gay porn. The film's narrative emphasis appears to be that life can "hurt so good" and—true to Rimbaud—Dean is frequently shown suffering for his art while those around him, each in turn, suffer longingly for some kind of commitment out of him. As Dean, James Preston (previously seen on ABC's The Gates) broods beautifully, there's no question about that, and his experience modeling for Abercombie & Fitch serves the film's surface appeal and compensates for some uneven acting. When he's on, however, Preston is undeniably mesmerizing. His hypnotic on-screen seductions sizzle around their edges, especially when he admits to a young man he's picked up on the beach "I'm passive" and then sets out to prove his versatility.

With regard to surface appeal, cinematographer Michael Marius Pessah's talents are on evident display with lustrous B&W compositions of Joshua Tree's stark beauty contrasted against L.A.'s martini poolside parties, sumptuously lit, briefly suggesting the raw style of '50s juvenile delinquency films before relying almost exclusively on glossy center spread aesthetics, and interjected now and again with grainy color sequences that telegraph (a bit too artily perhaps?) the color Dean brings into the life of those who love him, especially Dean's never-specifically-identified "Roommate" (Dan Glenn). Suggestion and insinuation hold court.

Unfortunately, languorous pacing sometimes breathes the life right out of some of the dialogue (thin enough as it is), forcing the film's visuals to sustain interest. My favorite scene was an acting class where a young actress is instructed to recite the Star Spangled Banner inside her head so as to generate enough intensity to have an audience believe she is waiting for a train. Despite myself, I kept wondering how often this was being done within the film? Another particular standout is Jeff Harnar's moody performance of "I Fall In Love Too Easily", and choice selections of Jo Stafford, Kay Starr and Doris Day to add pop accents to this timepiece.

Joshua Tree, 1951: A Portrait of James Dean plays Frameline36 on Thursday, June 21, 4:30PM at the Castro Theatre. Expected guests: director Matthew Mishory, actors Robert Gant, James Preston, and Edward Singletary, Jr.