Timing is everything, especially in the arts. The premiere of Mart Crowley's groundbreaking play The Boys in the Band was perfectly timed at the crackling nexus of late-1960s liberated sexuality and drama. Its 1970 film version, though, had the bad fortune to open in the aftermath of the Stonewall riots, when people were less-interested in stories about (supposedly) self-hating gays. That's the story, at least, that Crayton Robey's thoughtful but slightly over-indulgent documentary tries with limited success to disprove.
Though he heavily layers his film with big names in theater (Marc Shaiman, Edward Albee, Terrence McNally), Robey gives pride of place to Crowley, a onetime struggling writer who found more success hobnobbing with the likes of Natalie Wood and other habitués of the 1960s and 1970s gay scene in New York and Hollywood. As Crowley tells it, he was nearly at the end of his creative rope when he came up with the idea for Band and convinced a cutting-edge downtown Manhattan theater group to put on his story of a raucous birthday party thrown by a group of gay friends. Premiering in January 1968, the play was a runaway hit despite, or perhaps because of, its controversial subject matter (gay men simply being open about their sexuality), and would end up playing for years after transferring to Broadway. One interviewee after another testifies to the nearly staggering sense of empowerment they felt simply by seeing themselves represented on stage in ways they could recognize from their own lives.
The film, though, was a different story. Though Crowley was impressively able to keep his no-name theatrical cast and scored an up-and-coming director in a pre-French Connection William Friedkin, when the film premiered in 1970, it was met with a wholly different reaction. 1969 having been the year of the Stonewall riots, gay audiences were less patient with the image of angry, neurotic, self-hating gays that many felt Crowley's film showed. Though it garnered its share of controversy and publicity, the film sank from mainstream view relatively quickly (though a large number of younger writers like Michael Musto and Dan Savage testify to the power that the film had in later years for gay men who still had little-to-no media representation in the pre-Will & Grace years).
Although this dramatic split in opinions about such an iconic work as Band should have been the linchpin of Robey's film, he buries it somewhat beneath an avalanche of similar-sounding quotes from his impressive guest list. There is also a somewhat maudlin and overextended biography from Crowley, who wasn't able to repeat his success and later found work on paper-thin TV series like Hart vs. Hart. Though it's fascinating to witness the contrast of Albee knocking off wry observations and the ever-infuriated activist Larry Kramer hurl a few more verbal bombs, while the likes of Project Runway designer Christian Siriano twitters on self-indulgently, what Robey's film needed, in the final reflection, was more of a focus on his ostensible subject.
For all the attention paid to the issues surrounding Boys, however, but for a handful of too-short clips, there's surprisingly little detail about the specifics of the film or play. Robey keeps his film in the category of micro-targeted, name-dropping theatrical documentaries (2005's The Lady in Question is Charles Busch comes to mind), talking rings around this explosive subject instead of directly engaging with the thing itself.
Though he heavily layers his film with big names in theater (Marc Shaiman, Edward Albee, Terrence McNally), Robey gives pride of place to Crowley, a onetime struggling writer who found more success hobnobbing with the likes of Natalie Wood and other habitués of the 1960s and 1970s gay scene in New York and Hollywood. As Crowley tells it, he was nearly at the end of his creative rope when he came up with the idea for Band and convinced a cutting-edge downtown Manhattan theater group to put on his story of a raucous birthday party thrown by a group of gay friends. Premiering in January 1968, the play was a runaway hit despite, or perhaps because of, its controversial subject matter (gay men simply being open about their sexuality), and would end up playing for years after transferring to Broadway. One interviewee after another testifies to the nearly staggering sense of empowerment they felt simply by seeing themselves represented on stage in ways they could recognize from their own lives.
The film, though, was a different story. Though Crowley was impressively able to keep his no-name theatrical cast and scored an up-and-coming director in a pre-French Connection William Friedkin, when the film premiered in 1970, it was met with a wholly different reaction. 1969 having been the year of the Stonewall riots, gay audiences were less patient with the image of angry, neurotic, self-hating gays that many felt Crowley's film showed. Though it garnered its share of controversy and publicity, the film sank from mainstream view relatively quickly (though a large number of younger writers like Michael Musto and Dan Savage testify to the power that the film had in later years for gay men who still had little-to-no media representation in the pre-Will & Grace years).
Although this dramatic split in opinions about such an iconic work as Band should have been the linchpin of Robey's film, he buries it somewhat beneath an avalanche of similar-sounding quotes from his impressive guest list. There is also a somewhat maudlin and overextended biography from Crowley, who wasn't able to repeat his success and later found work on paper-thin TV series like Hart vs. Hart. Though it's fascinating to witness the contrast of Albee knocking off wry observations and the ever-infuriated activist Larry Kramer hurl a few more verbal bombs, while the likes of Project Runway designer Christian Siriano twitters on self-indulgently, what Robey's film needed, in the final reflection, was more of a focus on his ostensible subject.
For all the attention paid to the issues surrounding Boys, however, but for a handful of too-short clips, there's surprisingly little detail about the specifics of the film or play. Robey keeps his film in the category of micro-targeted, name-dropping theatrical documentaries (2005's The Lady in Question is Charles Busch comes to mind), talking rings around this explosive subject instead of directly engaging with the thing itself.
