SLEEPING DOGS LIE: America didn’t want to know with whom. |
Comedian Bobcat Goldthwait’s audacious premise for his 2006 feature Sleeping Dogs Lie did him in. Little matter that this was one of the sweetest, smartest American comedies of the year. Nobody bought tickets to hear fetching Amy (Melinda Page Hamilton) confess that, while in college, she fellated her pet dog. Yuck! Gross! Sleeping Dogs Lie failed so miserably in its showings in New York and Los Angeles that Samuel Goldwyn yanked it off the Boston release schedule, even though Goldthwait, who once lived gratis in an Emerson dormitory, is a Hub legend. Circa 1980 he developed his hilarious psycho riffs as the youngest stand-up comic at the Ding Ho Chinese Restaurant in Cambridge’s Inman Square.
Now the rough beast has slouched its way to DVD and Bostonians can see what they missed. Here’s what the convivial Goldthwait told me when we talked last September at the Toronto International Film Festival: “It hit me to try to write a grown-up movie where there would be something hard for people to get past, and not something to get titillated about, and yet they’d be sympathetic to this character who did this thing. That was the challenge.” Bestiality it would be! “Friends suggested, ‘Couldn’t she just give the dog a hand job?’ ‘No, I’m an artist, goddammit! She’s gonna blow that dog!’ ”
What did Goldthwait know about making features? His only prior movie had been the madly messy Shakes the Clown (1991). “I thought, if I’m going to do this thing seriously, I need to read everybody who’s done a book on screenwriting. Some of it was a little mumbo-jumbo. But since I’m usually sprawling all over the place, the biggest thing I learned from my crash course was to keep everything small. I’d just write it and make it, and I didn’t really think I’d see it in a theater. When it got into Sundance, it was crazy. The dramatic competition! [The film was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize for Independent Dramatic Feature.] I was walking across a parking lot when I found out. The blood ran to my feet, I had to lie down, I thought I’d faint.”
We got back to Shakes the Clown and to Betsy Sherman’s famous Boston Globe review where she called it “the Citizen Kane of Alcoholic Clown Movies.” Goldthwait had a funny story. Someone challenged Martin Scorsese with “Is there any movie that you wouldn’t preserve? How about Shakes the Clown?” Scorsese turned on his cynical questioner. “I like Shakes the Clown. Haven’t you heard? It’s the Citizen Kane of Alcoholic Clown Movies!”
Matthew Rettenmund is no Proust or Genet, but his 1995 Boy Culture is a tart, smoothly written gay novel, the first-person confessional of “X,” a 25-year-old male hustler with intimacy issues. Skilled at satisfying his client list of johns, X hasn’t had a real relationship since being done by his cousin in early high school. The novel jumps among X’s romantic longings, his clever ruminations on the ’90s gay scene, and a series of steaming guy-on-guy porno trysts. “You can flip to the dirty parts and jack off,” he says in his introduction.
