# Billy's Hollywood Screen Kiss (1998)

### reviewed by
David N. Butterworth

    BILLY'S HOLLYWOOD SCREEN KISS
    A film review by David N. Butterworth
    Copyright 1998 David N. Butterworth

    **1/2 (out of ****)

Sometimes a film with such a tantalizing title comes along that you're compelled to slap down your seven bucks without first seeing the trailer, reading a synopsis, or even consulting the cast list. "Billy's Hollywood Screen Kiss"--say that again?--is one of those films and by the time you've wrapped your tongue around the nomenclature, you'll realize the title is one of the better things about the movie.

"Billy's Hollywood Screen Kiss" starts out with a sequence comprised entirely of Polaroid photographs and narration that includes a bold statement: this film will help you understand some of the differences between gays and straights. The film doesn't come close to delivering on that promise. In fact, the main problem with the film is that it all too often sets up an expectation and then fails to provide the goods.

Billy is a gay, L.A.-based photographer, currently "unemployed and loveless." According to many of his friends, this puts him at his creative peak.

Encouraged to shoot a series of photographs featuring great Hollywood screen kisses, like the one exchanged by Deborah Kerr and Burt Lancaster amidst the pounding surf in "From Here to Eternity," Billy casts a handful of drag-queen acquaintances in the women's roles. But he needs a fresh face, a good-looking male model to substitute for the Clark Gables and the Jimmy Deans.

While hanging out in a coffee shop with his girl friend George (played with Barbra Streisand panache by co-producer Meredith Scott Lynn), Billy suddenly finds himself gazing into the eyes of an angel, a blond-haired, blue-eyed Brad Pitt lookalike appropriately named Gabriel. It's love at first sight, professional ethics be damned!

Figuring out if Gabriel is gay and, if so, whether he's interested in Billy, forms the core of "Billy's Hollywood Screen Kiss."

For a picture like this to succeed you have to feel some kind of empathy for the main character. Empathy, interest, understanding--all of these help. I couldn't muster up much. Not only is Billy unappealing as a character--perhaps the goatee reminds me of comedic everyman Eric Schaeffer, who ruins every project he's associated with--but Sean P. Hayes who plays Billy is a fledgling actor, which causes a further distancing.

Fortunately the film is peppered with a large collection of minor characters who *are* appealing, which makes up for a lot.

The film would have been more interesting, though perhaps not necessarily as amusing, if it spent as much time focusing on Billy's photo essay as it does his awkward mumblings and fumblings in the presence of Gabriel. Although Billy's daydreams are presented as black-and-white teasers complete with celluloid leaders, the only Hollywood screen kiss actually realized is the afore-mentioned "From Here to Eternity" embrace. I was hoping for more.

On the other hand, three very enthusiastic drag queens provide an amusing opening credits sequence plus various "intermissions." And cult filmmaker Paul Bartel ("Eating Raoul") appears as a fashion photographer who offers Gabriel an underwear gig on Catalina.

Overall "Billy's Hollywood Screen Kiss" is a mixed bag--likable, yet not without its frustrations--and a reminder that one should never judge a book by its cover.

    --
    David N. Butterworth
    dnb@mail.med.upenn.edu

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