HBO Cancels Shooting of Gay Series at The Pines After One Letter
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After just two weekends of filming, HBO has pulled the plug on a planned documentary about five gay men sharing a summer house in Fire Island’s Pines community. According to the subjects of the film, HBO executive vice president of original programming Sheila Nevins halted production on the project-which was being helmed by the Emmy-winning directors of The Celluloid Closet -because she felt that negative community reaction to the project had prevented the filmmakers from getting access to Fire Island’s “real” gay social scene.
The summer-house residents said they had also been told that Ms. Nevins received a disconcerting letter from a University of Pennsylvania law-school dean who vacations on Fire Island.. Though they hadn’t seen the letter, the documentary subjects said they were told the dean had expressed concern that the documentary might accidentally “out” gay residents who were not open about their sexuality. Several of the men said they were told the letter had threatened the network and its publicly traded parent company, AOL Time Warner-already being scrutinized by shareholders, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the financial press-with lawsuits.
The letter in question was written by Gary Clinton, dean of students at Penn’s Law School, and his partner Don Millinger, who is the special counsel for the Guggenheim Museum. The Transom obtained a copy of the letter, in which Mr. Clinton and Mr. Millinger expressed their concern that the film crew was not properly notifying residents that they were being filmed. “Showing up in this project could result in an ‘outing’ which in turn could lead to job termination, family rejection, loss of child custody or other serious repercussions,” the letter read in part. It did not include any threats of legal action, and both Mr. Clinton and Mr. Millinger said that by the second weekend of filming, the situation had been rectified. Signs were posted all over areas where the cameras were filming ,and all parties were satisfied.
A spokeswoman for HBO confirmed that the Fire Island documentary had been canceled out of respect for the privacy of the community. She also confirmed that Mr. Clinton’s and Mr. Millinger’s letter was part of the community response that led to the network’s decision.
The decision to cut short a project, which sources estimated was budgeted for $1 million, only one-third of the way through filming is unusual-and despite the pay-cable network’s official explanation, the housemates harbor at least one other theory about the show’s demise. Ms. Nevins has earned a reputation as an executive with a taste for the salacious (see Real Sex and Taxicab Confessions ). as well as a nose for quality reality programming, and at a time when the envelope-pushing Queer as Folk continues to earn attention for rival Showtime and ABC’s “reality miniseries” The Hamptons seemed to prove only that Long Island’s East End is as vacuous as Christie Brinkley, some of the documentary subjects wonder whether it was actually a lack of sensational material that was at the root of HBO’s decision.
“There’s a question about whether they wanted something less wholesome than what we were giving them,” said Robert Kushner, who was one of the aborted documentary’s subjects. “HBO is saying ‘not enough access,’ but that might be a thinly veiled way of saying that they didn’t get the red meat they wanted, that it wasn’t sensational enough to justify a million dollars. So much for the thinking man’s channel.” The HBO spokeswoman denied that this was the case.
The documentary, which was still referred to only as the “Fire Island Project,” was directed and produced by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman of San Francisco’s Telling Pictures. Messrs. Epstein and Friedman had worked with HBO and Ms. Nevins in the past on the Oscar-winning Common Threads : Stories from the Quilt . They also directed the 1984 critical hit The Times Of Harvey Milk , which chronicled the career and murder of San Francisco’s first openly gay elected official, and 1995′s The Celluloid Closet , which tracked the history of Hollywood’s on-screen treatment of homosexuality. A spokesman for Messrs. Epstein and Friedman said the directors were traveling and could not be reached by press time.
The housemates first heard of the Fire Island Project through its producer, Jeffrey Dupre, at the beginning of 2002. Mr. Dupre was friends with Trevor Yoder, a 35-year-old attorney and chief executive of software company Connectrix Systems, who had been sharing a house in Fire Island with Mr. Kushner, his 37-year-old writer boyfriend and six other friends for the past four years.
“It was clear from the beginning who we were,” said Mr. Kushner. “We are not a drug house. We don’t do that. And we’re in our mid-30′s, so it’s not like we’re a sexually promiscuous bunch. And two of us have been in a relationship for eight years.”
Despite their relatively tame habits, the housemates were initially nervous about the exploitation potential of the documentary. “It was our understanding that HBO had control over final editing,” said Mr. Kushner. “Even if we trusted the filmmakers, we knew what could happen in editing. They could have shot something that didn’t have to do with us, and put a shot of us alongside someone doing drugs or shots of the Meat Rack.” The Meat Rack is an area of dunes between the Pines and the Cherry Grove area of Fire Island where, Mr. Kushner said, “sex has been known to happen.”
Four of the original eight housemates were apprehensive enough that they dropped out of the project before contracts were signed. Sources said that one, a senior official at AOL Time Warner, the company that owns HBO, refused to consider the project. An attorney, an investment banker and a developer at one of Manhattan’s largest real-estate firms also dropped out.
In early May, Mr. Yoder, Mr. Kushner and the two remaining housemates-35-year-old online pharmaceutical-manufacturing consultant Matthew Betmaleck and 29-year-old e-commerce technology expert Matthew Kelleher-attempted to quell some of their fears by insisting on a clause in their contracts that dealt with the sexual content of the show.
Though the men declined to show The Transom copies of these contracts, they all agreed that the clause specified what kinds of sexual acts the cameras would have access to. They insisted that no full erections could be featured in the documentary, and that cameras could not shoot specific sexual acts.
“Not that we were planning on doing any of that anyway,” explained Mr. Yoder. “But we just wanted it in there as a protective measure, because we didn’t want anything to be sensationalized.
“Quite honestly,” he continued, “this is where Sheila Nevins started to get nervous. They said that they had never had to negotiate a clause like that before.”
Mr. Kushner added, “HBO was very grumpy about it. The filmmakers had a fight with them at that point about whether to keep the project going.” The pay-cable network’s reaction at this point is what led the housemates to suspect that HBO wanted less talk and more action.
HBO eventually caved in on the clause, and the four men-along with Joshua Glazer, a 25-year-old fund-raiser recruited to fill out the now-anemic house-signed their contracts and went for a dinner at Nobu with the directors and producers.
But when filming began on Memorial Day weekend, the cast and directors found that the Pines community was not in favor of the project. Cameras were banned from the Pavilion, the most heavily trafficked gay club in the Pines, as well as the site of the weekend-afternoon “Low Tea” and daily evening “High Tea” cocktail parties that are mainstays of the Fire Island gay social scene.
“John Whyte, who owns the Pavilion, said he didn’t want the publicity,” said Mr. Kushner. “He said he didn’t need any more business. And I guess the idea of having cameras in there was troubling. Like they could pick up on whatever was happening inside.”
Messrs. Epstein and Friedman were left to shoot a cocktail party thrown at the summer house’s pool, a night out in the neighboring community of Cherry Grove, and the annual July 4 “Invasion of the Pines,” in which hundreds of drag queens arrive via ferry on the Pines boardwalk and proudly introduce themselves to spectators. The filmmakers also shot more footage of group meals and walks on the beach.
“They focused a lot on me and [my boyfriend] Eric,” said Mr. Glazer. Eric Hyett, who has dated Mr. Glazer for one year, was not a member of the share house but visited on the first weekend of filming. “I guess it was interesting that we were a loving gay couple,” Mr. Glazer continued. “They shot us going to the grocery store and at a cocktail party. Even Eric at some point was like, ‘We’re kind of boring.’”
But the negative reaction of the Pines community was bothering the housemates.
“There was resentment about this project coming from everywhere,” said Mr. Glazer, who explained that suspicions about the project were especially high after the Bravo network aired a British-produced documentary about a gay share house on Fire Island which depicted the community as salacious, promiscuous and drug-addled.
“People just immediately assumed that this would be about drugs and sex and debauchery. They weren’t assuming that it could have a higher purpose,” Mr. Yoder said. “This was an opportunity to show how special our summers are: great friends, the family environment of our house-maybe it could be a chance for people to see something to aspire to.”
But then there’s also the possibility that HBO wasn’t looking for aspiration, but ass. “Fire Island has a pretty radical reputation from the past,” said Mr. Yoder. “And possibly they were salivating over the concept of getting this wild stuff. But we were very, very clear with them that that’s not who we are.”
Whatever HBO’s feelings about the documentary, all of the housemates were expecting to see Messrs. Epstein and Friedman on Friday, July 19, when they were scheduled to arrive for their third weekend of filming. They never showed.
The next morning, Messrs. Epstein and Friedman did show up at the house-to explain why the project had been unceremoniously dumped. According to the men, they said that they had been very pleased with the material they had, but that Ms. Nevins simply didn’t feel that it was “inside” enough. They also told the house about the impact of Mr. Clinton and Mr. Millinger’s letter to Ms. Nevins.
When contacted by The Transom, Mr. Clinton was surprised to hear that his letter had been cited in HBO’s decision to cancel the show. He said that the last time Mr. Millinger saw Mr. Dupre on the beach, the two men had embraced, and added, “What’s heartbreaking about this is that this was a potentially a very good documentary. I would hate to think that anything I did had something to do with its demise. We just wanted them to give people the chance to walk away.” Reached by phone, Mr. Millinger said the implication that the letter had anything to do with the snuffing of the project was “totally spurious,” adding that “maybe there wasn’t enough ‘access.’ Or maybe there wasn’t enough sex and drugs, and they couldn’t say that in public.”
Since Mr. Epstein and Mr. Friedman visited, the housemates said they haven’t heard a word from HBO. Clearly, they are disappointed that their 15 minutes of fame have been dashed. “I went through five months of negotiations and time and effort and money, and I think they pulled the plug way too early,” said Mr. Yoder.
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