DVD Review: Billy’s Hollywood Screen Kiss (1998)

Strictly speaking, films about homosexuality are no longer about an ‘alternative’ lifestyle. This isn’t a recent demarcation, off the back of say, Kissing Jessica Stein or Brokeback Mountain. Homosexuality hasn’t been illegal in most countries, and certainly Western democracies, for decades, and so films that deal in sexuality should no longer be taboo. Romantic comedies should deal in both sides of the argument.
   
But strangely, they don’t. This has less to do with social acceptance and more to do with the prudish attitudes of cinema audiences. I mean, think about it: homosexuals of both genders are responsible for some of the most brilliant, awe-inspiring and inventive entries into the artistic canon as any heterosexual, but because of a biological imperative and centuries of social conditioning, we have to distinguish between the two sexualities, especially in the fields of film and literature.

It sucks. Just because someone prefers to get up to something ‘other’ in the bedroom, it must be made clear that their art is different because they themselves are. Gender politics are too complicated an argument to place into a film review, but I will say this – if you can enjoy Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, you can easily sit through this “trifle” by director Tommy O’Haver.

Billy (Sean Hayes of Will & Grace fame) is a photographer based in LA who comes from small-town Indiana, and because of lack of opportunity is considering moving back despite its repressed attitude to his way of thinking. He’s the ‘other woman’ in a crap relationship and going nowhere fast, until a close friend gives him a photographic commission – a series of gay shots based on famous Hollywood moments.
   
Billy searches for a model until he happens on Gabriel (Brad Rowe) in a coffee house, although the attraction is more than professional on Billy’s part. Although initially reluctant, Gabriel agrees to model for Billy and they grow closer, and although Billy isn’t sure if Gabriel is that way inclined, he still presses on trying to find out the truth. Problem is, Gabriel isn’t sure himself, and Billy grows ever more tortured and unhappy.
   
In the manner of all puff-pieces (pardon the pun), everything turns out okay in the end; Gabriel doesn’t go for Billy but the titular protagonist does get his Hollywood kiss after imagining his own kiss with Gabriel in all those fantasy film scenes.
   
There could have been lots to impartially criticise Billy’s Hollywood Screen Kiss about. Parts of it certainly drag and for a film with sexual issues at its core it’s all very innocent despite the proliferation of outrageous characters on offer. Throughout the film you can see that maybe it was adapted from a theatre script; a lot of the location shooting is unnecessary and it could sit quite happily on a minimal stage and still entertain audiences.
   
So is it worth the bother, then? A heartening yes. One thing that homosexual art can sometimes be accused of is deliberately alienating a straight audience because liberation, especially in the 1960’s, sometimes came with an actively hostile edge. It equates to “this is me, and you’d better get used to it ‘cos I’m pushing it in your face.” Billy’s Hollywood Screen Kiss isn’t like that. It’s not a mould-breaker but it’s just a film about a complicated relationship, rather than hanging its peg on being about a complicated gay relationship. Sean Hayes shows what a fine actor he is (forget the camp stereotype from that crappy sitcom) as Billy, and although there are a few cardboard characters, they remain largely in the background and for scene-setting only.
   
For a film that appears by its cover-art and blurb to be firmly in the pink (as it were), Billy’s Hollywood Screen Kiss is surprisingly mature. It just shows that because of the great feeling of liberalism in art gifted to the wider world after years of fear and repression can make us realise that underneath it all, we’re all as neurotic as one another, and if that’s the best we can do while the world’s doing its best to blow itself up, then at least it’s a start. Well worth a watch.

Extras: Only a trailer.

Chris Stanley