# Billy's Hollywood Screen Kiss (1998)

### reviewed by
Harvey S. Karten

    BILLY'S HOLLWOOD SCREEN KISS

     Reviewed by Harvey Karten, Ph.D.
     Trimark Pictures
     Director: Tommy O'Haver
     Writer: Tommy O'Haver
     Cast:Sean P. Hayes, Brad Rowe, Richard Ganoung,
    Meredith Scott Lynn, Matthew Ashford, Armando Valdes-
    Kennedy, Paul Bartel, Carmine D. Giovinazzo, Holly
    Woodlawn

Sometimes large ambitions can be realized with inconsequential admonitions. In the case of "Billy's Hollywood Screen Kiss," the writer-director ends the movie with the caption, "A Tommy O'Haver trifle," yet he opens the scenario with his lead character's pronouncement that he intends to bring straights and gays closer together. I think that the title person, Billy (Sean P. Hayes), understands the straight world well enough; he wants to get heterosexuals to fathom where homosexuals are coming from a little more. And the principal stereotype held by heteros that he aspires to explode is that gays are largely promiscuous: that their pairings-off have nothing to do with discrimination but are designed simply to afford them sexual release. To O'Haver's credit, that very large pigeonholing is discredited without the slightest pinch of pretentiousness or weighty plotting. "Billy's Hollywood Screen Kiss" features likable characters whose flaws may include opportunism and confusion but who are otherwise delightful beings with whom to spend an hour and a half.

O'Haver uses a cute distancing device throughout the film, a series of Polaroid snapshots which Billy has allegedly taken behind the viewfinder of the camera he carries around at all times. He is unemployed but hopes that his photography will get him noticed, preferably via a gallery exhibition set up by an established lenser. He is not confused by his sexual identity but he is baffled by his inability to find someone to commit himself to, another soul who could likewise find him attractive. In this longing he precisely mirrors the folks in straight society, thereby showing the audience that gays and straights are really the same.

In a series of episodes divided by a display of Polaroids, Billy first presents exhibit A, that of himself in bed with Fernando (Armando Valdes-Kennedy), who likes him but is committed to someone else. When he runs into a staggeringly handsome coffee-shop waiter, Gabriel (Brad Rowe), he's in love. Though Gabriel repeatedly speaks of a girl friend he left behind in San Francisco when he went to L.A. for fame and fortune, he sends out mixed signals. Billy is hopeful that the girl friend is a fabrication and, against the advice of his roommate Georgiana (Meredith Scott Lynn) and his well-to-do friend Perry (Richard Ganoung), he pursues the 26-year-old man.

The movie gets its title from the way that our current romantic imagination is fueled by the old Hollywood pictures like "From Here to Eternity." In fact, Billy gets Gabriel a job modeling for master photographer Rex Webster (Paul Bartel) simulating a scene at Catalina Island from that famous Burt Lancaster-Deborah Kerr sizzler. In the film's most tender scene, painstakingly milked for poignancy by director O'Haven, Billy gets Gabriel to share his bed and slowly, like any straight man seeking to get somewhere with the object of his devotion, cautiously and "accidentally" touches him on his bare torso to observe a reaction. What results fashions the movie's climax--so to speak--and leads Billy to go ahead with a Polaroid show in which Hollywood romantic scenes are re- created.

In a clever subplot, Billy's roommate Georgiana becomes involved in a one-night stand with a drugged hippie (Carmine Giovinazzo) who sings a ridiculous love song to her which he composed on his guitar. The movie has a bittersweet ending, but most of all this light and airy fiction conjures up dream worlds with which Shakespeare himself was not unfamiliar.

    Rated R.  Running time: 92 minutes.  (C) Harvey Karten
    1998

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