The object of his affection: for producer Laurence Mark, filming 'The Object of My Affection' was a ten-year labor of love - Interview

For producer Laurence Mark, filming The Object of My Affection was a ten-year labor of love

In 1987, producer and former studio executive Laurence Mark optioned Stephen McCauley's wry novel The Object of My Affection. It was long before anyone in Hollywood had even considered the possibility of a mainstream movie about the romantic attachment between a gay man and a straight woman. Mark convinced Pulitzer prize-winning playwright Wendy Wasserstein to write the script. And the two of them hung on for dear life as the project bounced from studio to studio--starting out and ending up at 20th Century Fox.

Along the way, says Mark, Wasserstein contributed several rewrites and endured some eyebrow-raising script notes from executives. Case in point: "Shouldn't the gay man and the straight woman get together in the end? I mean, after all, won't the audience be disappointed if they don't?" When Mark and Wasserstein pointed out that in real life gay men rarely change their stripes, it was even suggested that perhaps the protagonists should unite in a "fake arrangement" (a.k.a. a marriage of convenience). After all, the executives argued, "that happens in real life, doesn't it?"

Mark lets the irony of these statements hang in the air for a moment. What those studio executives saw as a risky enterprise was to Mark just another variation on a dramatic tradition. As far back as Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, the essence of great love stories has always involved the barriers erected between the lovers.

Lately, however, creating this kind of dramatic tension has become increasingly difficult. "There are no real obstacles to romance these days," says Mark. "Virginity, class, money, and all the other taboos no longer exist." But the barrier in Object--one partner is straight, and the other gay--was a valid and virtually unexplored dilemma. "For me, the story presented the most valid obstacle since Ghost," he says, adding, "a movie in which the obstacle was that the guy was dead."

Rather than compromise the story ("Wendy and I wanted the characters to be true to each other and to themselves," he notes), Mark played the waiting game. His ability to finesse difficult projects was developed during his days as an executive at Paramount Pictures, where he championed a little film called Terms of Endearment. He describes the balancing act of keeping harmony on a set that contained such volatile elements as a nervous first-time film director (James L. Brooks) and three rather formidable actors--Shirley MacLaine, Debra Winger, and Jack Nicholson--as "a major Henry Kissinger assignment." But when the film won the Oscar for Best Picture of 1983, Mark was being touted as a future studio head.

Incidentally, Mark adds, he was never in the closet in Hollywood, not even back in the '70s, when it was decidedly unfashionable to be out. And since his being gay was as organic to who he was as his love for movies, he says it neither propelled him forward nor held him back. "I never felt there was any drawback [to being out]. And I may be naive, but I don't think that anyone ever used it against me." How being a studio head might have impacted on that openness, we'll never know, simply because what Mark always wanted to do was to produce--ever since he was born in a trunk.

"Well, not exactly a trunk," he adds. "But I was conceived in a dressing room in Atlantic City." The assignation between his mother, singer Marion Carter, and her agent-husband produced their only child, Laurence, who was raised on Manhattan's snazzy Sutton Place before prepping at Hotchkiss in Connecticut and attending Wesleyan and New York University graduate school (he has a master's in film).

"From the start it was always the theater or movies," says the "40-ish" Mark of his career destiny. And he's managed to do both. His musical theater debut was 1996's Big, a Broadway musical version of the hit film that opened against Rent and Bring In 'da Noise, Bring In 'da Funk--and closed soon thereafter.

If nothing else, Big taught Mark a thing or two about timing. Having unsuccessfully pushed The Object of My Affection around Hollywood for almost a decade, he sensed that its time had come. Other studios were financing major films with gay characters--In & Out at Paramount, My Best Friend's Wedding at TriStar. Mark himself was executive-producing James Brooks's Oscar-nominated As Good As It Gets, in which one of the three lead characters, played by Greg Kinnear--who is up for Best Supporting Actor--is gay.

Mark says that Brooks used him as a touchstone when developing Kinnear's character. "I believed so strongly in the presentation of that character as not being from the La Cage aux Folles school," he says. That attention to realism in the portrayal of gay characters is just as evident in The Object of My Affection. In fact, the film's greatest accomplishment may not be its creation of a believable love story between a gay man and a straight woman but rather its presentation of the notion of a harmonious extended family. The film's lead characters have friends, families, ex-lovers--all of whom find a way to respect each other.

"I think these Norman Rockwell--type families exist less and less in the real world," says Mark. "Everyone is re-creating that concept in way that works for them. This movie has family values, it's just a different sort of family--one that is there by choice rather than obligation."

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