Dan & Don
All Over the Guys
by Blase DiStefano

All Over the Guy, a gay film that was originally screened at the re-cent Houston Gay & Lesbian Film Festival, is making its way back to Houston for its feature run. While its writer and star (Dan Bucatinsky) and one of its executive producers (Don Roos) were in Houston for the film festival screening, OutSmart spoke to the duo separately and found them to be two nice guys living what some might consider enviable lives. • The twosome have been boyfriends for almost nine years, and are friends with, among others, Lisa Kudrow and Christina Ricci. Bucatinsky has appeared on Will & Grace and The Opposite of Sex, and the next time you see a Southwest Airlines commercial, keep in mind that it’s his voice you’re hearing. Roos directed The Opposite of Sex, wrote Single White Female and Boys on the Side, and wrote and directed Bounce. (We feel obligated to mention that Roos worked on the trashy Nightingales, a 1989 TV series starring Queen of Mean Suzanne Pleshette. "Nightingales was famously horrible," he says. When I interject that it was horrible in a good camp way, he says, "Very, very camp. But we weren’t intending it to be campy. You can’t make camp consciously.") • The non-campy All Over the Guy is scheduled to start at Landmark’s Greenway Theater on August 31.

DAN BUCATINSKY

OutSmart: When were you born?

Dan Bucatinsky: September 22, 19 [mumbles]

Now that’s not fair . . .

As a writer, I would tell you; as an actor, I can’t. No, I’m 32.

Does it bother you to give your age?

A little bit. As an actor, people tend to pigeonhole you. The best thing you can do is to leave as much as possible to the imagination, which is what acting is all about anyway. What we’ve learned about Woody Allen in the last 10 years changed the way I viewed him. I was annoyed, just so annoyed. I was like, "Oh, God, I wish I didn’t have to know this." Look at Charlton Heston–the man is a legend . . .

The NRA thing, I can’t get it out of my head.

You can’t get it out of your head and you’re watching him in a movie and you’re thinking, "This is the man who . . . "–you’re always thinking about the reality of it. But the very nature of acting is trying to create an illusion where the audience is a third party to every relationship. You’re putting yourself in the shoes of the person, so if you want to believe that Tom Cruise is gay, then good for you, and you hope that he is. If he’s not and a woman wants to imagine that she could be in bed with him, then great.

Believe me, the lines are blurred all

the time. When you go see a painting, you don’t necessarily know the background of the painter you’re seeing–you respond to the work. People forget about that, because as an actor, who you are as a person becomes blurred with who you are as a character. It’s really bad on TV–Lisa Kudrow is a very good friend of mine, and when we’re out together and people come up to her, they expect her to be Phoebe [the character she plays in Friends] and there’s something creepy about that.

Very creepy. I imagine it’s the same with Sean Hayes.

When I did Will and Grace, we bonded a lot, and he won’t talk about his personal life for the same reason. He’s a great guy–totally laid back. But everyone has to figure out where they stand on that.

I would imagine if you’re an openly gay actor, it has to be a little rough.

It depends, I guess. The actors who choose to make that stance for themselves, it becomes a part of their persona, it becomes a part of what they do politically, it becomes a part of what they can play. Rupert Everett is a great example of somebody who crosses over into straight roles, gay roles. People know his personal life, and it doesn’t seem to make a difference. ’Cause he’s a sex object. He’s the first one who can really do that.

Harvey Fierstein, the fact that he comes out, doesn’t do anything. He’s going to play the gay best friend forever. And for me, straight or gay, I’ll always play the same kinds of roles. I’ll either play roles where the orientation doesn’t make a difference, or I’ll play gay characters–they’re the most fun to play anyway. As an artist, you’ve got all the tubes of paint in your hand and you’ve got access to all the colors. But imagine an artist who’s only been given blue and yellow–now go paint. It’s horrible.

There are plenty of gay men who don’t see how straight men can do a gay role and not be gay in real life.

Richard Ruccolo [who plays gay in All Over the Guy]–whose girlfriend is Tiffani Amber Thiessen, and is happily in love with her–is a true actor. When he came to the set on the first day, we talked about it and he really just threw himself into it. Some people gave him a hard time with it. The kind of actors who say, "Listen, I want to audition for this part, but I have a problem with the kiss"–those aren’t the actors who can get the part. Even if the script doesn’t call for a kiss, do you really want the person who says that to play the role anyway? You want to look in their eyes and think they want to kiss you anyway.

All Over the Guy is from a play you wrote–what was the original title?

The original play was called I Know You Are, but What Am I?

I loved that that you changed the gender of your characters from the play to the movie.

It’s the same story. We used to call it When Harry Met Larry. So by changing the gender of one of the characters, it basically became that. There’s sort of a mainstream feel to the movie in the sense that it’s got all the same themes as a traditional romantic comedy complex.

Just normal everyday people.

I’m sort of a stickler about just making everybody talk the way real people talk.

When did you actually write the play?

I finished that in ’97, and the play ran all the fall of ’97 and the beginning of ’98. We got really good reviews, and once that show closed, I spent the rest of ’98 writing the screenplay. And then we spent ’99 trying to sell it.

That must be one of the roughest parts.

It is, it totally is. Honestly, it’s like being in Las Vegas and spending one year and putting your poker chip on a number and waiting for the roulette wheel to land on it. People ask, "How did you get your movie made?" We had a lot of good people involved. Don [Roos] attached himself as executive producer, that helped. My manager Susan Landau, who produced Get Bruce and An Ideal Husband, and many other movies, that helped.

Person after person after person loved the script, loved the writing–and didn’t want to make it. Because films with gay characters as the lead have a cap [on how much they can make]–which, by the way, they only have a cap until we bust through that. Jeffrey made $4 million, The Opposite of Sex made $6 million domestically, but Trick made $1.8. Billy’s Hollywood Screen Kiss made $2. Broken Hearts Club made $1.8. Until these movies bust pass the $2 million mark, no one is gonna want to spend the money.

So the only thing we could do is try to find the money ourselves. Make it for half a million, and get somebody to buy it. We screened the movie in January of this year and got two offers right away . . . the night that we screened it. They weren’t high-paying offers, but they were offers to distribute the film, and to give us money to complete post-production, which is incredible. In this day and age, just getting a company to put this movie in theaters is huge.

So it was a victory for us. The big goal now is to get enough people to come see the movie, both straight and gay, that we can bust past the $2 million mark. Not just for our own sake, but for the sake of movies to come. Because if the only movies that are going to get made are the movies that people think are going to make a $100 million, then no one is going to make any good movies.

Speaking of good movies, if you’re stranded on a desert island, and you can have only one movie with you, what would it be?

Some Like It Hot. It really holds up. Let’s be honest. I can watch Postcards from the Edge every time it’s on cable. And there are very few movies like that. But it’s tiring and it’s inside and show-bizzy, but Some Like It Hot stands up on so many levels, it’s one of my all-time favorites. And All About Eve, Planet of the Apes, but Some Like It Hot would be my first choice. The ending is one of the best endings of all times. "Nobody’s perfect," the last two words of the movie: It’s just perfect.

Somebody asked me recently, "What is the one thing you wanted to get across in All Over the Guy, in one sentence?" I want them to laugh, obviously. But I think ultimately, and this is really true: "You’re not alone." Those three words–or two if you consider the contraction. It’s three words for the contraction. You. Are. Not. Alone. Those are four words. I’m so neurotic.

Okay, your neurotic self is still stranded on that island and you can have only one person with you and it can’t be a lover or a family member, so who would it be?

Only one person? It can’t be a party?

[Laughs] No.

That’s really tough. It’s a toss-up between
William Shakespeare and Oprah Winfrey.
Ideally the three of us could have coffee, that would be fabulous. Me and Oprah and Shakespeare.

DON ROOS

OutSmart: I went to see The Opposite of Sex in a packed theater, and there was so much laughter, I missed so many lines, I had to go see it again.

Don Roos: Good. When we were making the movie, we forgot it was a comedy, because a lot of the comedy comes out of [Christina Ricci’s] voiceover, which was part of the script but not part of the scenes we were shooting. It was directed very intensely; everybody really believed who they were, so nobody was trying to do any comedy. But [the finished film] is funny. Lisa Kudrow is hysterical.

Lisa and Christina are the first two actors I’ve ever directed in a film. They’re both very, very strong. Actresses need to have strong opinions in this business; otherwise we’d run over them. I told Christina, "Your character says some very hard things, but we should always let the audience know that you are kind of hurt underneath it all. You have a wink and a twinkle in your eye." And she said, "I don’t do that s--t. If I say something hard, I do it hard; I don’t give the audience an inch off. I’ll play it my way, and if they like me, fine, and if they don’t like me, f--k ’em, I don’t care." She was so much stronger than I was, thank God. She wasn’t cutesy-pie in that role at all. At the very end of the film, she turns nervous a little bit, but she’s still tough. And Lisa, too–smart, very, very smart. Impossible to manipulate.

If you could pick only one person you worked with who really stood out, who would it be?

Gwyneth [Paltrow] was really an amazing person to watch [in Bounce]. As a director there wasn’t much for me to do but to create a warm set for her and make her comfortable and respect her, to keep my eyes right at the lens and watch her, because she is an instinctive, very smart, honest actress. It was a joy to see that happening. And Ben [Affleck] in Bounce was a joy to work with because he does enjoy that dialogue with the actor and director.

On to All Over the Guy. Since it’s a gay film, how are you going to get a lot of people to see it?

That’s the hard thing with a gay film. The good thing about gay films is there is always a certain audience that will show up, because we’re starved for a reasonable, good gay story. But getting beyond that is difficult.

Dan was saying that it needs to reach $2 million in order for anybody to think it’s going to go further.

That’s right–it’s all a numbers game and they know all the numbers. But we just wanted to do a small movie and have it be honest and with people that we recognized in our lives. We all know people like those two guys, so that’s what we wanted to do. And it was cheaper than The Opposite of Sex, which had 10 times the budget that we had on this picture. But sometimes it’s more fun when it’s on a shoestring, because everybody wants to do it–that’s the only reason for them to be there. You can’t have an ego if there’s no money. Everybody really pitched in. Actually, the most fun of making a movie are the days you are making the movie–it’s exciting, you’re fanatic, and you’re making these scenes come to life that you’ve written. All the other stuff around it–like preparing for the film and finishing the film–is exhausting.

Who is involved after the shoot is finished?

The director and the editor are pretty much in control of that process. And in our picture, because Dan wrote the script, he was very, very involved in the editing. Then the other producers like myself would come in and kind of advise or be the audience for them, look at their work, ask questions, and make suggestions.

In Movieline magazine, you were quoted as saying, "To me, a good sex scene is Rhett Butler carrying Scarlett up a staircase. I did like the scene in The Way We Were with a drunken Robert Redford and an all-too-willing Barbra Streisand. He was the sex object, so maybe that’s why I remember it. As a gay man, you always imagine yourself as Barbra Streisand."

There are very few memorable sex scenes. You always have to do a little translating. We came to Bounce and we had to direct this love scene between Ben and Gwyneth. I don’t like a lot of love scenes. It’s a very big challenge to direct. There’s no way to do it that hasn’t been done before. It’s also distracting to the audience in a way–you’re suddenly watching for the bodies instead of watching for the characters. So we just relied on the faces of the actors and did it that way.

If you’re stranded on a desert island and you can have only one person with you and it can’t be a lover, a family member, or a friend, who would it be?

Only one person, and I can’t get any points with my boyfriend by saying him?

No, because you can’t take him.

I’d like it to be Jesus, just in case he’s right. Just in case he’s God, I might as well have him . . . but only if he was in a good mood.

Now you can have one movie.

Gone with the Wind. I love that movie. I love so many movies, but Gone with the Wind has it all. It has romance and history and sweep and passion and love and everything. Unfortunately, it has a huge dollop of racism, too. But the black characters in Gone with the Wind are the most decent characters in the movie.

It’s important to see that kind of thing.

It is, to remember what it was like. Hollywood is still a very racist place. I wrote the script for Love Field, in which Michelle Pfeiffer falls in love with a black man. A star who turned the script down said she wouldn’t do it because her fans wouldn’t accept her in a love relationship with a black man. That was 10 years ago. It’s getting better, but . . .

So on my island is Jesus, and I would be watching Gone with the Wind. And I’d make him make them get back together at the end of it. He could raise Margaret Mitchell from the dead–she could write the real sequel.

All Over the Guy is scheduled to start at Landmark’s Greenway Theater on August 31.