Fringe Theory - Why We Don't Need the Man

So, the audience was getting a little hostile. Lisa kept going down the box office grosses of lezzie movies gone by: Bound, Boys Don't Cry, Go Fish. It's all demoralizing; even the ones that did well pale in comparison to Brokeback Mountain, which is, after all, why we're all here.

We want so badly to cross over.

And I think to myself, "F--k it." We're asking the wrong damn question. We're never going to cross over.

Hollywood is about making money. It's about butts in the seats. It's not even really personal, or particularly discriminatory. If there were more lesbians on the planet, than say, 18 to 34 year-old men, I'm sure the movie landscape would look really different. You'd thumb through the weekend movie section of the newspaper and decide between the Jennifer Aniston/Halle Berry buddy-cop movie, or the rom-com with Sarah Jessica Parker and Anne Hathaway.

But barring some colossal cultural shift, or a Y: The Last Man-style apocalypse, we're in the money-spending minority. It's a numbers game. And even if, by some twist of fate, Angelina Jolie and Sandy Bullock decide they want to remake Aimee & Jaguar (could happen), and the stars align, and the movie is good, and the studio supports it, and people race in droves to see it, and little gold statues line up on the producers' mantles — well, that would be great.

But it would be a fluke. Because every movie is a miracle. It's a miracle it happens at all, let alone with movie stars playing lesbians in a spectacular and accessible script.

And then, the really tough question: If you make it, will lesbians go? Will they actually haul their butts out of the house and plunk down $10 for a movie ticket in enough numbers to make it worth anybody's while? Hollywood doesn't think so.

You end up in a kind of marketing chicken-or-egg scenario: Studios won't or can't spend a lot of money to market a lezzie movie if they are not convinced an audience will turn out for it, but then the lezzie audience complains that they were not marketed to, so they didn't go see the movie.

The upshot: The movie fails and then the next time a filmmaker brings a lesbian-themed movie to a studio, they say it doesn't make money. If a movie plays in the woods and there is nobody there to see it, does it exist?

And while I'm on the topic of cash, let me just say that if you go to somebody's house or a bar to watch The L Word, but don't get Showtime yourself, shame on you. A few people are excused for economic hardship, but, like, 12. The rest of you: Buy Showtime! If you hate the show or don't watch, no worries. But, if you tune in week after week to find out who Shane is sleeping with, or if Bette and Tina are breaking up, and never pay the five bucks a month for the channel, then you are not counted.

If you are not counted, in TV ratings land, you literally don't count. Nobody out there who pays to make movies knows you exist. Nobody knows that you want to see stories about chicks hooking up while wearing inappropriately expensive clothing.

They'll say there's no audience for lesbian content or, more importantly, no paying audience. And they'd be right.

Now, I may sound dreary and defeatist, which I have to say I was feeling while sitting there on my panel, rehashing the lesbian version of the Rodney Dangerfield "We don't get no respect" routine — when I had an epiphany.

We don't need to cross over.

There is a seismic technological revolution going on, which I hope will change everything. Stay with me for a second. This whole conundrum we're in — this whole damn panel — is predicated on a few pieces of conventional wisdom:

1) Movies cost lots of money to make.
2) Movies are hard to distribute, and get into theaters and sell on TV.
3) Studios are the only institutions with enough money to finance movies, ergo we need to ask permission from studios to tell the stories we want to tell. And since they're paying, they have the power to ask you to "make things less gay," etc., so it will cross over. Even the good studio execs or indie financiers, who care about the movie, want it to succeed.