Not only does the subject matter open the minds of so many gay AND straight viewers, but the groundbreaking nature of the documentary has given its creators a greater position of leadership within the industry with their subsequent projects. The directors, Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, release their films under their own company, Telling Pictures. With the accolades that they received from The Celluloid Closet and their other documentary work, including earlier films Common Threads - Stories from the Quilt (1989), The Times of Harvey Milk (1984), and 2000's Paragraph 175, the filmmakers have been able to make their first feature length narrative film with the support of outstanding actors and Hollywood-quality production (Howl opens in SF at The Kabuki on 9/24). The longing for relatable onscreen characters that so many of The Celluloid Closet's talking heads spoke about is almost passé at this point because there are now wildly successful relatable gay characters not only onscreen, but running the show behind the camera as well.
Queer filmmaker Cheryl Dunye (who now, incidentally, teaches in Epstein's film department at SF's California College of the Arts) is another great storyteller of the LGBT community. She did, in fact, make her debut with just a video camera and a personal story. Her short film Janine (1990) gave her entrance into an academic arena that supported her work in digital cin
ema, which gave way to her feature film, The Watermelon Woman (1996). This was the first feature film directed by a black lesbian and, like The Celluloid Closet, it uses stereotypes in old movies to support a story of oppression.Dunye (pictured above in a scene from The Watermelon Woman) and other non-mainstream filmmakers are able to tell their stories on a shoestring budget because of cinema's digital evolution. Every storyteller these days has the means to make a movie. We have HD video on cell phones and editing software comes standard on every Apple computer (can't speak for PCs). YouTube invites the world to "broadcast yourself." It appears that the story behind The Celluloid Closet got outed when celluloid itself got outed, too. And what perfect timing for a community to grab hold of the opportunity and run with it.
Find more indie LGBT directors and their films at Frameline. Also, almost every major U.S. city has its own (easily searchable) LGBT film festival.
A trailer for Howl:
I don't know why they opened Howl at Sundance instead of honoring our city. I don't really think Celluloid Closet had anything to do with making cinema more accessible for gay characters. I think it is good documentation, I especially like the older clips. I think that Rock Hudson dying of AIDs was a big thing. I also think that film, and literature helped the gay community form community among themselves in a time before even today's levels of acceptance.
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