Making the Band (and the Boys)
Directed by Crayton Robey
At the Quad Cinema
Runtime: 93 min.
Documentary-maker Crayton Robey hasn’t fallen for the hype that Brokeback Mountain made a difference in the way gayness is treated in the popular arts. Instead, he went back to an authentic landmark: Mart Crowley’s 1968 stage play The Boys in the Band. Crowley’s groundbreaking drama is the subject of Robey’s Making the Boys, a remarkably evenhanded history.
Robey creates his own hype, as when recently describing Crowley’s play to NY1 theater critic Patrick Pacheco as: “A piece that we all need to embrace. It informs us. It gives us power.” The premise of a birthday party gathering where a group of seven gay male New Yorkers expose their vulnerabilities made the play easily graspable, transportable, perhaps even timeless.
Recalling the history behind the play’s creation and its real cultural impact, Robey’s doc avoids the kind of received opinion and specious publicity that made still-not-justified claims for films like Brokeback Mountain and Milk and so distorted the perception of gay life’s acceptance in pop culture.
With Making the Boys, Robey’s erudition opposes today’s gullible reflexes—especially gay culture’s tendency to accept any commercialization of its interests. That Robey never simply celebrates how much Crowley’s play or its film version earned may seem a small detail to praise, but in these times, Robey’s discretion is rare and commendable.
Making the Boys makes
the important point that Crowley’s 1968 advance happened at an
historically propitious moment—not related to any movement (the next
year’s Stonewall riot resulted from social forces already underway), but
part of a zeitgeist wave. Robey follows a current that began with 1960s
social change, specifying Crowley’s life path from small town Catholic
schoolboy to film industry gofer to habitué of Hollywood’s semi-discreet
’60s gay world. The liberalism of the Hollywood scene to which Crowley
belonged is confirmed by exclusive home movies of Roddy McDowell’s
rumored/legendary Sunday celebrity brunches. It’s spectacular footage
that clearly became the foundation of Crowley’s theatricalized
exposé/confession of how gay men struggled through oppression and
self-loathing.
Phases of the play’s production offer cursory information and would be the stuff of a typical theater doc. But Making the Boys centers
around a more interesting account of the play’s contemporary
reputation. Robey does the necessary work of laying out what gay men
expect from culture. (“If the younger generation can only see something
to be ashamed of in Boys in the Band, they need to get a sense of
humor,” says composer Marc Shaiman. “There can only be one historically
important gay play and that’s Boys in the Band,” playwright Terence McNally testifies.)
This
doesn’t prevent Robey from making a doc that canvasses the play’s many
admirers (including Charles Kaiser, Carson Kressley, Ed Koch, Cheyenne
Jackson, McNally and Andy Cohen) as well as its detractors (Edward
Albee, Larry Kramer). This balance saves Robey from the mistake of
over-valuing a play that, in actuality, never lives up to the
significant Tennessee Williams and Eugene O’Neill works Crowley first
admired. (William Friedkin’s famous— but uninspired—1970 film version
hardly improved on its basics.) But Making the Boys makes the grade by adequately recognizing the play as an expression from real life, not P.C. sanctimony like Brokeback Mountain and Milk—and that’s a genuine milestone.