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Written on February 7, 2012

About 25 years ago, I recall remarking to a friend that gay marriage was a civil rights issue.  And, that this was where the juice of a movement and the real fight lay. I came to that conclusion in the late 80s… it was a slow simmering realization as I reflected on what my family went through in the 70s hiding the love and life that was my father’s.  (When you see the movie, Wild About Harry, you’ll get a glimpse into the backstory: mother dies and father picks up the pieces, raising two daughters alone.  Well, supposedly alone.  And, there’s the rub.)

In making this movie, when the script was written, I heard from so many people — that the character of the father, Harry, was selfish.  How could a parent subject his children to this kind of relationship!?  How weird & bizarre.  I’ve heard it all.

Mr. Phipps and my father have been on my mind this week.  I think of what it would have been like if I came home from school today and ran into the workshop for my daily discussion with Mr. Phipps.

I started writing the dialogue… and then stopped.  I tried to play out the scenario in my mind’s eye, but I just couldn’t imagine flinging the door open and announcing:  ”Mr. Phipps! Mr. Phipps! It’s legal! You and Dad can get married now!”

In 1977, predicting a court victory — in any of the fifty States — over the right to marry your gay lover was akin to meeting a friendly civilization from another planet.

In 1977, there wasn’t a discourse about the civil rights of same sex love partners. Indeed, the notion that relationships founded in love could raise a family together was preposterous; evil; against the Bible; not Christian; a monster with five heads.  Even our laws in the United States prevented a gay person from raising a child.  Proving that a parent was gay gave grandparents and the courts the ability to take a child away from his biological mother or father — which is still on the books in some States today!

1970s New England — the birthplace of The Great Experiment otherwise known as the Democracy of the United States of America — coupling still depended on the roles men and women were expected to play while in the delirium of heterosexual romance.

A Typical Day After School

During high school, at the end of each day, after the sports bus dropped me off in front of our house, I would run into the workshop and tell Mr. Phipps my revelation of the day.  Usually, updates were around a boy I had my eye on that week. We’d dissect the latest permutation of glances shared around a locker or a shelf of books.

While I watched Mr. Phipps paint a ‘primitive’ village in the landscape of eighteenth century Massachusetts, I would describe every furtive exchange.  I’d go back the next day, eager to talk about the next installment of this budding crush; in my quest for advice, I might find Mr. Phipps sanding the rough edges of a hutch or a three corner cupboard — which he knocked off routinely in about 48 hours — making sure clients  believed it took months to make his replicas of early 18th century American furniture.

While I was growing up,  I didn’t know my Dad loved Mr. Phipps. All I knew was that Dad and Mr. Phipps were great friends.  (As I described in the teacup story.)  In the 70s and especially with children in the picture, there was no language to describe Mr. Phipps’ and my father’s relationship. Sure, there were many derogatory ways to describe two gay men with two kids in tow.  Come to think of it, I still don’t know of a positive expression describing raising two girls with a delightful positive spin sanctioned by society. ( I think it’s time to coin an expression.)

Frankly, even gay men at the time — I have come to learn — thought Mr. Phipps’ relationship with my father was bizarre because there were children in the picture.  Would Freddy be a step-father since his lover has children? Why does he want to have anything to do with a man that has children?! None of Mr. Phipps’ friends knew how to relate to us; or what to call us… Freddy’s friends?  Freddy’s adopted daughters? Freddy’s little girls?… just blank looks. Looking back on it, I think Mr. Phipps’ cabal of independent thinkers and gay men felt betrayed. (Actually, I know so, I spoke with one of Mr. Phipps’ dear friends a few years back describing these days in the early 70s.)

Mr. Phipps & The Pear Tree Collection circa 1971, Manhattan, NYC

In the early 70s, before my Dad came onto the scene, the affable, wild and  single Freddy  had a formidable following; he ran a popular furniture shop called “The Pear Tree Collection” on Bleecker Street in the Village’s halcyon days.  It was the perfect place for men to meet men.  And, Mr. Phipps was apparently very popular.

When Mr. Phipps hooked up with a widower and then decided to live with him and his children, Mr. Phipps’ friends never quite recovered from the shock.  And, then to move to a suburb in New Jersey and live (secretly) in the home of the dead wife — a family oriented community filled with Madison Avenue husbands and diligent Wall Street fathers was enough to have the Village (not to mention the families of the straight community as well) pass out from over-exposure to the unthinkable.

Meanwhile… Gay!? I never heard of this in the 70s.  Queer?  Maybe wisps of images and fragments of descriptions.  Definitely drag queen.  Ah, yes, I did hear of “queens”. But Mr. Phipps wasn’t a queen or remotely queenie so why would I think there was anything odd about him sleeping in the attic and later in another room when we moved to Cape Cod?  He was Dad’s friend.  Besides he was Dad’s business partner and a bachelor to boot.  Doesn’t every bachelor want to be around children?

Mr. Phipps became my sister’s and my friend.  He laughed with us; he made dinner for us; he sat on the floor and played with my sister and her dolls.  He told stories about his Dad and about his childhood during the Great Depression while living in Massachusetts; he painfully described how his father made just enough money to feed  Mr. Phipps’ nine brothers and sisters in an ancient farm house built before the American Revolution of 1776.

more anon…

A blog about the journey I took to make “Wild About Harry”

The Trailer of the film “Wild About Harry”

 A conversation between James Egan (JE), producer of the film, and Gwen Wynne (GW) the writer, director, and producer.

 JE: So growing up as a girl it was important for you to see a female coming of age story, even if they were made by male directors? How critical is it for a young woman growing up to see these sorts of films?

GW: Movies are a wonderful way to look at what you are going through and watching how a character handles problems, they are life‐changing, and that’s what’s so powerful about films. I know that you, James, are making movies that are trying to pass on that we have a responsibility to others, and I think that being filmmakers we do have a responsibility in our story‐telling. For me, personally, movies about young women growing up were especially important because I was isolated in a household where I didn’t have any examples to show the way, after my mother died when I was eleven.

JE: One of the important ways in which this film succeeds, I think, given the contemporary political landscape of antigay families and antigay people raising children, is through making the subject matter entertaining and allowing a more mainstream audience the possibility to access this film. Was that a conscious choice?

GW: Absolutely, it was a conscious choice for us to create a film that teenagers would want to see. With my producers, such as you, James, we consciously cast the film so that teenagers would go to it ‐we have actor Josh Peck, who teenagers adore, he’s a real hero to them because he’s funny, and he plays a heroic character in our film. We have people like Adam Pascal, who is a cult hit with girls, he’s loved and adored and did a very significant play called RENT, that was on Broadway and became a movie. And then there’s Tate Donovan, from The O.C., that teenagers love, and Stacey Dash, from Clueless, so we purposely tried to create and cast characters that a young audience could relate to and like, and so that they could overcome the subject matter too. We’ve definitely, purposefully been tailoring this movie for teenagers, because it is they who will be deciding the future of these issues.

JE: What’s interesting is that you’ve been able to create a look in this film that people have been commenting on, saying that it has a really epic and beautiful quality to it for a low budget film. What would you say inspired this particular look, which people are calling almost ‘European’ in terms of the lighting and setting? Were there some particular directors who inspired you in this particular vision?

GW: I don’t mean to sound highbrow, but I love Ingmar Bergman, and actually shooting in New England is very much like shooting in Sweden because of the lighting. Bergman shot on an island surrounded by water, and Cape Cod is surrounded by water, so you have this incredible light that doesn’t exist in most places. We purposely shot on film and Super 16 to evoke a time period, and we shot on a smaller camera so that we could move it very easily. The camera choice was also purposeful because Vietnam was happening at the time that the movie takes place, and the Super 16 camera was being used by reporters to capture the horrific events. I like to call some of the camera movement my ‘Vietnam footage’, such as when the men are caught kissing, because it was so shocking and sadly men and women have been killed for being homosexual, so that was the intellectual reason for that kind of cinematic look.

JE: In this film, music plays an important role. Not only does it set the tone of the seventies, but also the music almost acts as a character in the way that it reflects the turmoil of the era. At times when the characters are making important emotional choices, the music supports and echoes those choices that are being made, both politically and sexually. Do you want to talk about your choices in music?

GW: The independent music world in 1973 ‐‐the time when the film is set ‐‐was at an incredible moment historically. We used some songs that go on for ten minutes, and of course we didn’t use the song for the entire ten minutes, but these artists were allowed to create music that nowadays probably wouldn’t be allowed on the commercial airwaves. So we used music that was inspiring a generation of youth to take action and to examine what was happening the world around them.

The song ‘I Wish I Could Change The World’, for example, is in a sense so basic but so evocative of what was happening in the early 70s. Disillusion was setting into the culture. But the culture fought back through its voice through music and through political action. It was an inspiring time. I was growing up in that time period and so many people I know in my generation were so shaped by how we could make our lives about changing the world. We were convinced that it was our duty. So the music in the film is another character, it is a force that inspires and give strength to the vision that we’re trying to share: Peace.

The Bottom Line article-”The making of Wild About Harry”

Cape Cod Times article

Cape Cod Times interview with Gwenn Wynn and Daneille Savre at screening of Wild About Harry (formerly “American Primitive”) at the Cape Cinema in Denis, MA.

Tate Donovan, Anne Ramsay and Suzan Crowley at OUTFEST’s AMERICAN PRIMITIVE screening

Interviews with the director and actors, behind the scenes video, and footage from the film.