The Boys in the Band is a 1970 American drama film directed by William Friedkin from a screenplay by Mart Crowley, based on Crowley's 1968 Off-Broadway play of the same name. It is among the early major American motion pictures to revolve around gay characters, often cited as a milestone in the history of queer cinema, and thought to be the first mainstream American film to use the swear word "cunt".
The film is set in an Upper East Side apartment in Manhattan in 1968.
Act I
Michael, a Roman Catholic, recovering alcoholic and sporadically-employed writer, is preparing to host a birthday party for one of his friends, Harold. Michael's best friend, Donald, a self-described underachiever who has moved from the city, arrives and helps Michael prepare. Donald observes that Michael has not been drinking the past five weeks, and Michael acknowledges that he has quit drinking and smoking because his bad habits make him aggressive. Alan, Michael's (presumably straight) former college roommate, calls with an urgent need to see Michael. Michael reluctantly agrees and invites him to come over.
One by one, the guests arrive. Emory is a stereotypical flamboyant interior designer. Hank, a soon-to-be-divorced schoolteacher, and Larry, a fashion photographer, are a couple whose relationship is on the rocks, struggling with monogamy. Bernard is an amiable bookstore clerk. "Cowboy", a hustler and Emory's "gift" to Harold, arrives. Michael warns his guests that Alan is an uptight straight conservative, that he has never come out to Alan, and asks his guests to be discreet that they are gay.
Alan calls again to inform Michael that he will not be coming after all, and the party continues in a festive manner. However, Alan arrives unexpectedly, finds Michael and his friends dancing Heat Wave, and throws the gathering into turmoil. Alan bonds with Hank, whom he mistakes as being straight, and shows discomfort towards Emory's flamboyant behavior. Michael takes Alan to his bedroom to discuss Alan's urgent conversation, but Alan dodges his questions.
As tensions mount, Alan descends from the upstairs bathroom and announces he's leaving. Emory chides him for being a closeted homosexual which results in Alan punching Emory and calling him a "faggot." During the ensuing chaos, Harold finally makes his grand appearance. In the middle of the scuffle, Michael impulsively begins drinking and smoking again and becomes verbally aggressive. As the guests become more and more intoxicated, hidden resentments begin to surface.
Act II
As Hank helps a vomiting Alan in Michael's bathroom, Michael and Harold trade vicious insults over Harold's obsessive insecurity about his appearance and Michael's financial irresponsibility. Emory brings out Harold's birthday cake and presents. Emory's birthday present is an evening with Cowboy, a prostitute. From Hank, he receives a sweater and from Bernard bejeweled knee pads. He receives a frame photo of himself from Michael, with an inscription that he keeps private when asked what it says. Touched, he thanks Michael sincerely for the gift.
Alan tries to leave again but is stopped by Michael, who points out that he would have already left if he really wanted to. He informs everyone that they are playing a party game with the objective for each guest to call the one person he truly believes he has loved. Harold refuses to play. With each call, past scars and present anxieties are revealed. Bernard reluctantly attempts to call the son of his mother's employer, with whom he had had a sexual encounter as a teenager. Emory calls a dentist on whom he had had a crush while in high school. Both immediately regret the phone calls. After some bickering over Hank's doubt that serially unfaithful Larry will choose him, Hank and Larry call each other via two phone lines in Michael's apartment.
Michael believes Alan is a closeted homosexual, but his plan to out Alan with the game appears to backfire when Alan calls his wife, not his male college friend, whom Michael had presumed to be Alan's love.
Harold informs Michael that no matter what Michael does, he will always be a homosexual, just like the rest of them. He departs, taking Cowboy and his presents with him. Emory leaves with a distraught Bernard, promising to sober him up on the way home. Michael laments over the group's treatment of each other, wishing "if we could just not hate ourselves so much." He tells Donald that he never learned what Alan wanted to confide in him. Michael collapses and sobs into Donald's arms. When he pulls himself together, it appears his life will remain very much the same.
Mart Crowley and Dominick Dunne set up the film version of the play with Cinema Center Films, owned by CBS Television. Crowley was paid $250,000 plus a percentage of the profits for the film rights; in addition to this, he received a fee for writing the script.[2]
Crowley and Dunne originally wanted the play's director, Robert Moore, to direct the film but Gordon Stulberg, head of Cinema Center, was reluctant to entrust the job to someone who had never made a movie before. They decided on William Friedkin, who had just made a film of The Birthday Party by Harold Pinter that impressed them.[3]
Friedkin rehearsed for two weeks with the cast. He shot a scene that was offstage in the play where Hank and Larry kiss passionately. The actors who played them were reluctant to perform this on film, but eventually they did. However, Friedkin cut the scene during editing, feeling it was over-sensationalistic; nevertheless, he later admitted regretting that decision.[3]
The bar scene in the opening was filmed at Julius in Greenwich Village.[4] Studio shots were at the Chelsea Studios in New York City.[5] According to the commentary by Friedkin on the 2008 DVD release, Michael's apartment was inspired by the real-life Upper East Side apartment of actress Tammy Grimes. (Grimes was a personal friend of Mart Crowley.) Most of the patio scenes were filmed at Grimes' home. The actual apartment interior would not allow for filming, given its size and other technical factors, so a replica of Grimes' apartment was built on the Chelsea Studios sound stage, and that is where the interior scenes were filmed.
As per the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 90% of critics have given the film a positive review based on 20 reviews, with an average rating of 7.20 out of 10.[6] On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 65 out of 100 based on 14 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews."[7]
Contemporary critical reaction was, for the most part, cautiously favorable. Variety wrote that it "drags" but thought it had "perverse interest". Time described it as a "humane, moving picture". The Los Angeles Times praised it as "unquestionably a milestone" but refused to run its ads. Among the major critics, Pauline Kael, who disliked Friedkin, was alone in finding absolutely nothing redeeming about it.[8]
Vincent Canby of The New York Times observed "Except for an inevitable monotony that comes from the use of so many close-ups in a confined space, Friedkin's direction is clean and direct, and, under the circumstances, effective. All of the performances are good, and that of Leonard Frey, as Harold, is much better than good. He's excellent without disturbing the ensemble...Crowley has a good, minor talent for comedy-of-insult, and for creating enough interest, by way of small character revelations, to maintain minimum suspense. There is something basically unpleasant, however, about a play that seems to have been created in an inspiration of love-hate and that finally does nothing more than exploit its (I assume) sincerely conceived stereotypes."[9]
In a San Francisco Chronicle review of a 1999 revival of the film, Edward Guthmann recalled "By the time Boys was released in 1970...it had already earned among gays the stain of Uncle Tomism." He called it "a genuine period piece but one that still has the power to sting. In one sense it's aged surprisingly little — the language and physical gestures of camp are largely the same — but in the attitudes of its characters, and their self-lacerating vision of themselves, it belongs to another time. And that's a good thing."[10]
Bill Weber from Slant wrote in 2015: "The partygoers are caught in the tragedy of the pre-liberation closet, a more crippling and unforgiving one than the closets that remain."[11]
The film was perceived in different ways throughout the gay community. There were those who agreed with most critics and believed The Boys in the Band was making great strides while others thought it portrayed a group of gay men wallowing in self-pity.[12] There were even those who felt discouraged by some of the honesty in the production. One spectator wrote in 2018: "I was horrified by the depiction of the life that might befall me. I have very strong feelings about that play. It's done a lot of harm to gay people."[13][14]
While not as acclaimed or commercially successful as director Friedkin's subsequent films, Friedkin considers this film to be one of his favorites. He remarked in an interview on the 2008 DVD for the movie: "It's one of the few films I've made that I can still watch."[3]
The Boys in the Band was released by MGM/CBS Home Video on VHS videocassette in October 1980, and was later re-released on CBS/Fox Video. It was later released on laserdisc.
The DVD, overseen by Friedkin, was released by Paramount Home Entertainment on November 11, 2008. Additional material includes an audio commentary; interviews with director Friedkin, playwright/screenwriter Crowley, executive producer Dominick Dunne, writer Tony Kushner, and two of the surviving cast members, Peter White and Laurence Luckinbill; and a retrospective look at both the off Broadway 1968 play and 1970 film.
On June 16, 2015, it was released on Blu-ray.
The 2011 documentary Making the Boys explores the production of the play and film in the context of its era.
Ryan Murphy produced a new film version of The Boys in the Band for Netflix in 2020. Joe Mantello, director of the play's 2018 Broadway revival, served as director of the new film version, which featured the entire Broadway revival cast, including Jim Parsons as Michael, Zachary Quinto as Harold, Matt Bomer as Donald, and Charlie Carver as Cowboy.[15] The film was released by Netflix on September 30, 2020.
William David Friedkin was an American film, television and opera director, producer, and screenwriter who was closely identified with the "New Hollywood" movement of the 1970s. Beginning his career in documentaries in the early 1960s, he is best known for his crime thriller film The French Connection (1971), which won five Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director, and the horror film The Exorcist (1973), which earned him another Academy Award nomination for Best Director.
Laurence George Luckinbill is an American actor, playwright and director. He has worked in television, film, and theatre, doing triple duty in the theatre by writing, directing, and starring in stage productions. He is known for penning and starring in one-man shows based upon the lives of United States President Theodore Roosevelt, author Ernest Hemingway, and famous American defense attorney Clarence Darrow; starring in a one-man show based upon the life of US President Lyndon Baines Johnson; and for his portrayal of Spock's half-brother Sybok in the film Star Trek V: The Final Frontier.
Charles Curtis "Tuc" Watkins III is an American actor, known for his roles as David Vickers on One Life to Live, Mr. Burns in The Mummy, Bob Hunter on Desperate Housewives, Congressman Roger Harris on Black Monday, Hank in The Boys in the Band, Troy on The Other Two, and Colin McKenna on Uncoupled.
To Live and Die in L.A. is a 1985 American neo-noir action crime thriller film directed and co-written by William Friedkin and based on the 1984 novel by former United States Secret Service agent Gerald Petievich, who co-wrote the screenplay with Friedkin. The film features William Petersen, Willem Dafoe and John Pankow among others. Wang Chung composed and performed the original music soundtrack. The film tells the story of the lengths to which two Secret Service agents go to arrest a counterfeiter.
Leonard Frey was an American actor. Frey received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role in the 1971 musical film Fiddler on the Roof. He made his stage debut in an Off-Broadway production of Little Mary Sunshine and received a nomination for the Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a Play for The National Health.
The Celluloid Closet is a 1996 American documentary film directed and co-written by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, and executive produced by Howard Rosenman. The film is based on Vito Russo's 1981 book The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies, and on lecture and film clip presentations he gave from 1972 to 1982. Russo had researched the history of how motion pictures, especially Hollywood films, had portrayed gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender characters.
Cruising is a 1980 crime thriller film written and directed by William Friedkin and starring Al Pacino, Paul Sorvino, and Karen Allen. It is loosely based on the novel of the same name by New York Times reporter Gerald Walker about a serial killer targeting gay men, particularly those men associated with the leather scene in the late 1970s. The title is a double entendre, because "cruising" can describe both police officers on patrol and men who are cruising for sex.
The Boys in the Band is a play by Mart Crowley. The play premiered Off-Broadway in 1968, and was revived on Broadway for its 50th anniversary in 2018. The play revolves around a group of gay men who gather for a birthday party in New York City, and was groundbreaking for its portrayal of gay life. It was adapted into two feature films.
Keith Prentice was an American TV, film and stage actor, whose most famous role was the part of Larry in both the original stage and film versions of The Boys in the Band. He also appeared on the TV soap Dark Shadows during the series' final months in 1971. For a number of years, his picture was displayed on the Taster's Choice coffee label.
Edward Martino Crowley was an American playwright best known for his 1968 play The Boys in the Band.
Kenneth Nelson was an American actor.
Robin de Jesús is an American film and theater actor of Puerto Rican descent. He has received Tony Award nominations for his roles in In the Heights, La Cage aux Folles, and The Boys in the Band.
Robert La Tourneaux was an American actor best known for his role of Cowboy, the good-natured but dim hustler hired as a birthday present for a gay man, in the original Off-Broadway production and 1970 film version of The Boys in the Band.
Luke Timothy Grimes is an American actor and musician. He is known for his role as real life Navy SEAL Marc Alan Lee in the acclaimed film American Sniper. He played Christian Grey's brother, Elliot, in the film Fifty Shades of Grey (2015), and its sequels, Fifty Shades Darker (2017) and Fifty Shades Freed (2018). He currently stars as Kayce Dutton in the Paramount Network drama series Yellowstone (2018–present).
Peter White was an American actor.
The Men From The Boys is a 2002 play by Mart Crowley, a sequel to his notable 1968 play The Boys in the Band. Set in a New York City apartment, the plot features friends gathering after a friend's memorial service.
Charles Carver Martensen is an American actor. His best known roles include Porter Scavo on the ABC television series Desperate Housewives, Ethan on the MTV television series Teen Wolf, Scott Frost on the first season of the HBO television series The Leftovers, and as Cowboy in both The Boys in the Band on Broadway and the subsequent 2020 film of the same name. His identical twin brother Max Carver has frequently portrayed the twin of his characters.
The Boys in the Band is a 2020 American drama film directed by Joe Mantello, based on the 1968 play of the same name by Mart Crowley, who also wrote the screenplay alongside Ned Martel. Crowley had previously adapted The Boys in the Band for a 1970 film version directed by William Friedkin and starring the original 1968 Off-Broadway cast. The film stars the full roster of players from the play's 2018 Broadway revival, comprising a cast of exclusively openly-gay actors.
Hank Beebe was an American composer, known for his choral compositions, Broadway musicals, and most notably for his work through the 1950s to the early 1980s composing industrial musicals for the employees and shareholders of major American business corporations. His work during this period was documented in the 2018 American documentary film Bathtubs Over Broadway.
I Am Syd Stone is a Canadian short drama film, directed by Denis Theriault and released in 2014.
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