Based on a Truly Gay Story

Based on a Truly Gay Story

http://www.advocate.com/issue_story_ektid103464.asp

Forty years ago this summer, two momentous events happened just 100
miles apart, but they might as well have been on different planets.
Now the Brokeback Mountain filmmakers have adapted Elliot Tiber's
memoir, Taking Woodstock, and imbued Woodstock with the spirit of
Stonewall in a controversial new film -- and it's a comedy.

By David Colman
From The Advocate September 2009

In 1969 a pamphlet called the "Gay Scene Guide" bluntly warned
visitors of a potential hazard of looking for love in Manhattan's
Greenwich Village. "Do not confuse the 'hippy set' with the 'gay
set,' " it warned. "There are many hippies in this area, who while
they may dress in a 'gay' fashion, are actually quite opposed to any
gay advances."

That spring Elliot Tiber needed no such warning. Though the
then­34-year-old decorator was a Greenwich Village habitué, he had
almost no interaction with or interest in hippies -- their values,
their clothes, their music. The only fragment of culture shared by
the two factions was, he recalls, "maybe a Janis Joplin song on a
jukebox in a gay bar."

Then summer rolled around. Its first real weekend began innocently
enough with drinks at the Stonewall Inn, his favorite Christopher
Street bar, he says. But when the police showed up for a routine
raid, Tiber says, he and the other patrons started to rebel, sparking
a riot that brought hundreds of young gay men into Sheridan Square,
throwing bottles and overturning police cars. The night changed his
life forever.

By contrast, the other happening that summer that Tiber also helped
bring to life -- the three-day congregation of hippiedom known as
Woodstock -- seemed to change the world before it even began. The
panicked weeks and mounting insanity leading up to the concert,
during which Tiber -- through a series of stranger-than-fiction
circumstances -- came to the festival's rescue by offering a
last-minute venue and permit, were the subject of his charming if
scattered 2007 memoir, Taking Woodstock. Now, with a script by Focus
Features CEO James Schamus, the tale has been adapted into an
intriguing new film of the same name directed by Ang Lee. Cutting out
Stonewall and Tiber's gay city life but reframing the hippie
free-love credo to include gays, the film melds the spirit of the two
disparate events into one moving tale. Starring breakout comic actor
and writer Demetri Martin as Tiber, the film opens August 28.

The film completes a kind of gay trilogy for Lee and Schamus, both of
whom, incidentally, are happily married to women. Lee directed The
Wedding Banquet and Brokeback Mountain; Schamus's Focus Features
produced Brokeback and Milk. But it wasn't the memoir's gay main
character that first drew Lee to the project, it was Tiber himself,
whom Lee first encountered on an early-morning news show.

"I had done six tragedies in a row," Lee says. "The last straw was
Lust, Caution -- that took a lot of out of me. For years I had been
wanting to do something more warmhearted, a comedy, and it just
happened that when I was promoting Lust, Caution in San Francisco,
Elliot Tiber was the next guest, and he gave me this two-minute pitch
and gave me the book."

The director didn't bite right away, though -- and he lost the book.
And when Tiber didn't hear back from him, he tracked down Schamus
instead and won him over.

Tiber's tenaciousness is easy to imagine. Though he spent a good deal
of the past 40 years living alternately in New York and Belgium with
André Ernotte, a Belgian playwright and director who died in 1999,
Tiber, now 74, still comes across as both a born-in-Bensonhurst New
Yorker and a curious hybrid of Mae West and Mel Brooks. His outsize
life and personality jump off the pages of his book as well, with
tales of studying painting with Hans Hofmann, S/M sex with Robert
Mapplethorpe, and an ambiguously amorous evening with Marlon Brando,
all cropping up before his story even gets upstate. The book
contains, as Schamus dryly says, "enough for 20 movies."

But Schamus and Lee decided to focus only on the central thread,
dispensing with many of the most blatantly Jewish and gay facets of
Tiber's story. (Imagine what the MPAA would have done with a scene of
Elliot, who is Jewish, going home with Mapplethorpe from a leather
bar to find a mammoth Nazi banner hanging in the photographer's
loft­and then still staying the night.)

The story that emerged is like that of Norman Bates with a happy
ending: Miserable, eccentric gay man with a crippling sexual
self-hatred is saddled with a domineering mother -- and her bankrupt
hotel -- but still ends up saving the day. The similarity to real
life ends there. In 1969, Tiber worked in New York City as a
decorator and painter and spent his weekends in White Lake, N.Y., in
an effort to keep his parents' failing motel afloat with various
schemes -- a pool! An amateur theater troupe! An annual music
festival! All flopped. The motel was on the verge of foreclosure in
July, when Tiber happened to read that an actual music festival had
just lost its permit in Wallkill, N.Y. So Tiber, who already had a
permit for festival he was planning, picked up the phone and offered
his help. That first phone call set off a chain of occurrences: His
neighbor's farm became the venue, and his parents' motel was taken
over (and the mortgage cares erased) by the event's planners, who
made it their headquarters. So too did VW busloads of free spirits,
who started arriving in White Lake weeks before the festival's
kickoff. The film is essentially a 1930s-style screwball comedy about
a drowning man who called for help -- and Woodstock showed up.

"The Elliot Tiber in the movie, played by Demetri, was something I
think I created with [Schamus]," Lee says, explaining how Tiber's
campy persona was transformed for the film version into what
comedians call the "straight man." Not a hetero, mind you, but an
average guy the audience can identify with as the madness of
Woodstock mounts. "We love the idea that our hero is a kind of
everyman," Schamus says. "Can't gay men be everymen too?" Lee found a
familiar character in the source material, one with whom he is
well-acquainted: the passionate but ambivalent person forced by
circumstance to make a move or a stand or a choice he doesn't want
to, like Bruce Banner filled with radioactive rage in Hulk or the
conflicted cowboy lovers in Brokeback Mountain.

"Americans like heroes," he says. "Americans like people who take
sides. That's not so true for me. I identify with these characters
trying to keep an absolute balance, who tolerate a lot to keep things
safe and all right. These characters cannot make decisions. They're
unable to offend anyone. That's their charm and their weakness."

The idea of the music festival as a comedic and miraculous deus ex
machina appealed to Lee, who had first started seriously researching
Woodstock and the culture that sparked it when he made his 1997 film
The Ice Storm, which, set among jaded liberals in a Connecticut
suburb in 1973, he came to think of as "kind of a hangover from 1969."

But reading about Tiber's experience made him want to explore the
idealism that the event represented. In the summer of 1969, Lee was
14 and living in the highly repressive culture of Taiwan. He recalls
kids with long hair being forced off the street to have it shorn. In
this world Lee was only dimly aware of hippies and Woodstock, but he
had his own growing feelings of being trapped inside and outside of
tradition. These feelings only intensified when he decided to be a
filmmaker, which won him no approval from his scholarly family. "It
was kind of a disgrace," he says. The unfairness and hypocrisy of the
system were what he took square aim at with his early comedy The
Wedding Banquet.

Now, having re-created the festival (on a limited budget and with the
help of computer animation that turned 6,000 extras into 500,000),
Lee says he still feels the infectious hippie optimism, even more
than before he started the film. "They planted the seeds for many
good things and pointed out a lot of issues that we take more
seriously today," he says. "The fact that half a million people were
there and there was no violence is amazing. Something like that will
probably never happen again. The idea that the world can be changed
overnight, that's the naive part. But the heart and the intention
that held it together was quite incredible."

Still, for all of the festival's good points, and for its
coincidental timing with the Stonewall rebellion, Lee says he's aware
that the demographics and values of Woodstock's attendees had very
little overlap with those of the gay rights movement. Only this year,
in the revival of the 1967 free-love Broadway hit Hair, has the
character of Woof been rewritten to be clearly gay. And only recently
did the musical's cocreator James Rado reveal that he and his writing
partner for the show, Gerome Ragni, were lovers in the 1960s.

Over breakfast in a posh West Village café the morning after Gay
Pride, Tiber recalls that when the film was completed, Lee and
Schamus organized a screening for him. Schamus and Lee waited outside
the screening room for Tiber, and after he exited with his face wet
with tears, they asked, "Don't you like it?" Tiber remembers. "I
said, 'Are you kidding? It's so beautiful and so moving and so
touching.' That's when they told me that they were grateful to tell
this story of this gay man with all these problems who not only
survived but came out on top and changed the world.'"

At the end of the film, Elliot, played with wonderful restraint and
subdued eccentricity by Martin, bids adieu to his parents and heads
off to San Francisco, the land of Harvey Milk and the future of the
gay rights movement. In real life Tiber bought a Cadillac and moved
to Los Angeles to get a job in the movies. The film's rendering of
him is certainly less flamboyant than the true-life man. Sure, the
truth is more real -- it always is. Though the anger of Stonewall and
its bricks and bottles are not in the film, its spirit of liberation
is very much felt. As if answering a call, the anarchic joy of
Woodstock swoops down to bestow a kiss on a lonely gay frog prince,
and it sets him free. However you slice it, it's an awfully nice fairy tale.

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