Hollywood shuffle: what is it like to take meetings in Hollywood with a gay documentary film crew on your tail? Q. Allan Brocka tells how he faced the cameras in Gay Hollywood - television - Interview

You want to make it in Hollywood, and you're gay. Are you ahead of the game--or behind the eight ball? Five young gay actors and directors put that question to the test as they try to get ahead in show business in Gay Hollywood, World of Wonder's two-part reality documentary set to air at 10 P.M. Eastern and Pacific on AMC August 11 and 12 (check local listings). For filmmaker Q. Allan Brocka, the task is getting his next movie out there.

I ended up on Gay Hollywood through meeting producers Randy Barbato and Fenton Bailey at 1999's Outfest gay film festival in Los Angeles, where my first short film, Rick and Steve, the Happiest Gay Couple in All the World, which I'd animated with Legos, was screening. My first words to them were, "Give me a job." Then I saw them again at Sundance. They never did give me a job. But they said, "Hey, why don't you be in this show we're doing?" As a media whore who somehow also hates to see himself on film or hear his own voice on his answering machine, I said, "OK!"

That's when Fenton said to Randy, "But is he too successful already?" and Randy said, "Oh, no. He's not." So I was in.

I thought at first that it was going to be a simple documentary, but then they put me and the other gay guys who'd been selected through reality show setups. They made us have roundtable discussions. They sent us on a camping trip and to a psychic. I don't like psychics, and I'm not really talkative. My sense of humor can be pretty dark (Rick and Steve was called homophobic by one of my California Institute of the Arts teachers), and people don't always like that. It takes me a while to find out what people's limits are.

The psychic picked up on this, but she got everything else wrong. She said, "I see a soccer ball. Was there a soccer ball in your childhood?"

"No," I said.

"Did you know someone with a soccer ball?' she asked.

"No."

"Maybe I'm thinking of someone else on the show," she said.

After the reading she came out and said, "I could tell you were the skeptical one from the start," and I said, "It's only a prediction if you say it before it happens. Otherwise it's just watching."

The camping trip was miserable too. At one point I wound up singing in a dress, under the assumption that we were all going to take turns. I went first, to get it over with. Then the others didn't. I think the goal of the camping trip was to get footage of us with our shirts off. Which is fine, since all the other guys on the show are blond Aryan types. And here I was, the nonwhite guy (I'm Filipino) with bleached blond hair. I thought, Should I grow it out dark to represent other people of color? Then I thought, Fuck it, I can't represent everybody.

They also followed me to a lot of meetings. They were with me at the pitch of the film I just shot. The movie's called Eating Out, by the way, about a straight guy pretending to be gay to get a girl who likes to convert gay guys. They filmed me at important casting meetings, and they filmed me in my abject poverty washing dishes in my bathtub.

So what was the point? The adventure. How many people get to have a documentary crew following them around? It's weird. It makes you watch yourself. And I got what I wanted out of it, which was just to have fun. Anything else that comes of it is just frosting.--As told to Dave White

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