LA Daily News: Gay film a test for industry

(helps if I post the title)

Gay film a test for industry

By Greg Hernandez, Staff Writer
LA Daily News

With Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal as its stars and Ang Lee as the director, "Brokeback Mountain" is generating the kind of Oscar buzz and media exposure that studios typically expect will translate into strong box office numbers.

But in "Brokeback," distributor Focus Features - the specialty film unit of Universal Pictures - has on its hands a movie that will put to the test whether the moviegoing public at large is ready to embrace an unabashedly gay love story that includes physical intimacy between its two leading men.

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Focus is limiting the first week to five theaters totaling about a dozen screens. One of the New York theaters is in the heavily gay-populated Chelsea neighborhood while the Los Angeles engagement will be at The Grove multiplex. Those engagements plus the San Francisco booking were designed to get a strong per-screen gross opening weekend and to generate positive word of mouth "so when we expand, it will sort of be a grass-roots front-runner to build even more excitement about the film," said Foley. On Dec. 16, "Brokeback" will face its real box office test when it opens in 21 more big cities, including Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Houston, Miami, San Diego, Seattle and Washington, D.C. and a trio of smaller markets where the film is expected to be well-received: Austin, Texas; Palm Springs; and Santa Barbara.

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"Birdcage," "In & Out" and the 1993 drama "Philadelphia," which won an Oscar for Tom Hanks as a gay lawyer with AIDS and grossed $77.3 million, all had one thing in common: They featured major stars in gay roles that required little or no physical intimacy. That was not the case more than a decade earlier when 20th Century Fox released "Making Love," with love scenes between Harry Hamlin and Michael Ontkean. The story about a seemingly happy married young doctor who finally confronts his long-repressed attraction to other men grossed just under $12 million at the box office and was considered groundbreaking for its time. But "Making Love" did not lead to more gay films from the studios. Even last year's expensive epic "Alexander," directed by Oliver Stone and distributed by Warner Bros., shied away from any graphic love scenes between Colin Farrell's Alexander the Great and Jared Leto's character of Hephaestion.

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Greg Hernandez, (818) 713-3758 greg.hernandez@dailynews.com!dtpost

http://dailynews.com/business/ci_3285122