DAVID WEISMAN INTERVIEW
BY LAWRENCE FERBER
FOR GAY PRESS -- APRIL 2001


1) Why this book?

Frankly, I didn’t choose the book; It chose me. In some way that was also the case with Schrader, Babenco, Hurt, Julia even many in the crew. Astonishing how such disparate souls converged and devoted themselves for so long, for so little compensation or no pay at all, to the making of this movie. In my case it was the author, more than the book itself that made the choice; In some unfathomable way I was ensnared by the Spider Woman herself, long before I knew what happened.

2) Tell me more about working with Puig. His manner. Was he a big ol’ queen?

I wouldn’t quite say he was a “big ol’ queen.” He was modest, unassuming in manner, slight in build, but his influence on Kiss of the Spider Woman loomed greater than any big ol’ queen-bee on the hive. Manuel Puig was mother of it all: The novel, the film, the Broadway Musical, and for me personally the most unforgettable character I’ve ever known. I confess that I’d always been somewhat repelled by his type in the past, yet from the instant I met Manuel, I was startled, enchanted, totally absorbed by him: Here was this sweet, effeminate, charismatic, in many ways mystical creature, actually a dazzlingly witty, glamorous woman trapped in a pleasant but thoroughly passive male form, estranged from his native Argentina, adrift for much of his life as a wanderer-dreamer obsessed with trivia and movie-plots he’d gleaned from his beloved Hollywood celluloid fantasies. Puig only discovered his own unique artistic voice in 1968 at age 37, when his debut novel Betrayed By Rita Hayworth was published in Barcelona. He’d long given up on the film-directing career he’d studied for in 1950s Rome at Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, where he met gay Cuban-exile cinematographer Nestor Almendros (with whom Manuel wound up sharing a life-long friendship and at one point even a threadbare lower eastside Manhattan flat). Puig worked for years at translating Spanish and Italian commercial texts, surviving on a few dollars a day in Paris, New York, Mexico, wherever he could indulge his insatiable movie lust; His true brilliance was discovered only when a close friend read an unfinished manuscript which Manuel had been hiding, and encouraged him to turn the laboriously overly-detailed film-script pages into a lush novel. Writing was his daily therapy; he’d sink into his subconscious and scribble down voices visiting him from his past. But it was with his fourth novel Kiss of the Spider Woman, published when he was a ripe 45, that Puig reveals himself so utterly.

No question Manuel is there in every page on a molecular level, not only as Molina but as all of his silver-screen-heroine incarnations as well, particularly the Spider Woman. The web that Molina spins to ensnare his idealized man, represented in Kiss of the Spider Woman by Valentin, the same web into which Molina himself eventually becomes trapped, was a composite of all Manuel’s doomed love-affairs with hetero males who would freely have sex with him while insisting that they could only make true love with a biologically-authentic woman. The story’s jail-cell may be a metaphor for the emotional “prison” of Puig’s ephemeral lovelife, but I’ve never known anyone who could so spontaneously transform the most awful tragedy, or life’s pettiest detail, into such totally delirious comedy as only Manuel did so often with little more than an arched eyebrow, or a breathy wispy “ai!”

Like many South American gays his age, Manuel spent his early life closeted in a world of camp codes where the Spanish feminine-form “la” was commonly used when striving for “discretion” in public. But Manuel turn this self-conscious charade into a delicious Grand-Guignol all his own. He’d have you in stitches, wryly commenting about whomever just left the room as if the entire world were a woman, describing the most ultra-macho stud as “one of the girls”—yet somehow his observations always rang true. Most everyone earned a secret “la” code-name from Manuel, but you’d have to be in his good graces to ever find out what it was. Back then I was still a compulsive gym-rat so Manuel immediately dubbed me “La Butch”; Hector was prone to such hysterics during filming that Puig—rolling his eyes with a shudder of mock horror—would always refer to Babenco behind his back as “La Madwoman.”

Although Babenco like Puig was an Argentine living in Brazil, Puig kept his distance and eventually grew to dislike Hector’s mythomania quite a bit. Puig had bitter past experiences with other Argentine directors and Hector reminded Manuel of everything he deplored about “Porteños” (as Buenos Aires natives are called). But I think the rancor dated from Hector visiting Manuel in Rio with presents and ice-cream, promising him a “first crack” at the script, while he knew I had already Len Schrader working on the first draft in Los Angeles for some time.

Puig had accolytes (“my daughters,” he called them) plus fellow gay movie-buffs in marginal film- or TV-related jobs around the globe, who managed to send Manuel videos of rare vintage films, silent Garbos and Lubitches and the such, unobtainable elsewhere. Thus Puig amassed a formidable collection, thousands of pre-1945 gems—for his nightly scheherezade-like routine of a quiet dinner and a double-feature on videotape with his mother Malé (short for Maria Elena), whom Manuel had installed in a posh apartment, a shady block down the street from his own modest duplex in the trendy Leblon section of Rio de Janeiro.

Puig had managed to pull off the ultimate Freudian coup — having separated his soul-mate mother from his curmudgeon father (Manuel claimed that his father had slipped into dementia which neccessitated institutionalizing him in Argentina. Puig’s late-in-life success as a worldclass novelist enabled him to place Mom on a pedestal where both could at last relax with Dad not around, and delight in each other’s company daily for the final two decades of his life.

Puig never actually visted the São Paulo set of Spider Woman—even though he was very much involved behind-the-scenes with the shoot, particularly while the script was in flux after the abrupt casting-switch from Burt Lancaster to William Hurt. Manuel kept flying in from Rio with an endless stream of rich ideas and cinematic details, at one point literally moving into my São Paulo hotel suite for weeks. Unlike your archetypical novelist fretting about their masterpiece being violated, Puig brought so many fabulous embellishments to the table, that I’d really hate to think how the film might have turned out without his generous contribution.

It was incredible how Manuel could embroider ideas, how much emotional content he got from seemingly mundane details, devoting two pages to Molina recalling how a Waiter (with whom he was infatuated) stood beside his table to prepare a salad. As one of the six vintage movie-tales Molina tells Valentin in the novel, Manuel invented a “Nazi Propaganda Film” like the ones he’d seen in Argentina back when he was a child. He adored having Sonia Braga play all three key women in Kiss—Valentin’s girlfriend Marta, and the Spider Woman whose brief appearance embodies the transcendental turning-point in the story—but Manuel really invested himself in the cinematic realization of Leni LaMaison, patriotic Parisian cabaret-star who despite herself falls for an Invader of her beloved homeland (“Love has no country, Leni” friend Michelle reminds her). Puig helped Sonia find her screen-persona and make it iconographic, a blend of WW-II German film-diva Zara Leander and Gloria Swanson.

Another of Puig’s fellow-Argentine-exile-in-São Paulo cohorts was Patricio Bisso, a uniquely gifted actor-singer-costume designer who performed all three tasks on Kiss (Patricio plays Greta, Molina’s female-impersonator “sister” who does a balloon-dance in the tacky-gay-cabaret scene). I’ll never forget the day Patricio that was fitting Sonia for one of Leni’s lavish period gowns; Quietly, Manuel put a record on the stereo—then spun on his heel to face us—both hands coyly arched on one hip—and with a flick of his head, he stepped majestically forward to the music, dark eyes flashing, demonstrating what had to be the flawless body-language of a period-1940s chanteuse: “Shoulders back, hands-on-hip!” Grasping Sonia’s hand he offered deadpan “woman-to-woman” advice: “There’s nothing to it: Just think liver-trouble.” He had the whole room pounding the floor with laughter.

Manuel and I co-wrote the cabaret song Sonia sings in the Nazi movie, “Je me moque de l’amour.” (I Laugh At Love) That is, we co-wrote lyrics for the song, in French. As for the tune, Manuel had all these records of European film-music hits from the 30s and 40s, and that song he played that day for his “liver-trouble” demonstration got so stuck in my mind, I used the music for the movie’s Parisian cabaret scene.

The lyrics on Manuel’s scratchy disc were sung in German and later the record-cover got lost, so I never found out the song’s title or author. Puig and I surmised it was an old traditional German melody for which fresh lyrics had been composed in the 1930s. So we guilelessly used it together with the new French lyrics we cooked up, never dreaming that one day our humble little Spider Woman would turn into such an international hit, that we’d get sued when some of the heirs to the melody’s actual team of composers recognised it while the film was in theaters all over Germany. We settled for about $15,000 -- what it would’ve cost to license the tune, had I known its name and publisher, or had that kind of spare cash available while finishing the film.

Despite Puig’s intense involvement with the production, as much as I tried I couldn’t get him to attend the world premiere in Cannes even though he was a quick planehop away at an Amsterdam bookfair. He kept insisting he wanted to quietly view the finished movie alone at home in Rio, on video, a little bit at a time. Understandably, as Kiss truly was the most intimate and revealing of his works. In the end it was Puig who really had his emotional guts up there on the screen. That was 1985 and with the death of Borges the following year Puig was to become the major living Argentine author—which amused him no end: After years of being dismissed by Latino-literatti snobs, his name was suddenly whispered in connection with a Nobel Prize. Consequently, soon after Kiss of the Spider Woman had gone from unknown dark-horse to the toast of the Cannes Film Festival, Hector felt a deep urge to obtain Puig’s “blessing.” He kept nagging and pressuring me until finally I convinced Manuel to attend a Kiss screening in Rio. When Puig did not dash to the phone afterwards to heap praise upon the director, and gush how much he loved the movie, Babenco was furious. I warned him to just leave Manuel alone, but poor Hector could not contain himself—so finally he rang Puig to confront him and somehow try to patch up their relationship by using the film’s success as an “intermediary”. “I don’t like it,” said Manuel, “What’s more I don’t like you, and I don’t know why you keep bothering me.” Undaunted, Hector pleaded with Manuel, insisting he wanted him to be happy, vowing he’d even change the final cut of the film to please Puig (even though Kiss was already playing to critical acclaim and record boxoffice in New York) but Manuel cut him off: “It’s too late.” Click. He hung up on Babenco, and that turned out to be the last time they ever spoke
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Puig knew I was not an avid reader of his novels, but he brushed that aside; I think we were drawn to each other because we both lived life as a ribald farce, and joining forces made things more fun. Eventually we wound up collaborating on screenplays and treatments, two of which, Seven Tropical Sins and Chica Boom! resulted in Manuel’s being flown into Los Angeles for meetings we had with Madonna, Bette Midler, Lou Adler, Bob Rafelson, Mel Brooks, Isabella Rossellini, Milena Canonero—all of whom, even Warren Beatty, adored Manuel. Such attention may have well been a marvelous fulfillment of childhood dreams, but Manuel took it all in stride; Without a single piece of luggage he’d hop a crowded public-bus one block from his apartment in Leblon, ride it all the way to Rio de Janeiro’s distant Galeão Airport, then presto! A half-day later he’d climb into a cab at LAX and arrive at my house off-Melrose in Hollywood with nothing but the beach-clothes and sandals he’d been wearing when he left Brazil. After a brief nap and shower, he’d dig around in my closet with a twinkle in his eye, trying on whatever might be appropriate for our upcoming meeting or dinner, and uncannily, despite our size difference, my clothes would always fit him—as you can see in the photo of (left-to-right) myself, Sonia and Puig at the LA post-premiere party for Kiss of the Spider Woman at nightclub Studio One.

Spending time with Puig was like living life in a multiplex, but inevitably the best parts came “after the show”—when Manuel would offer his running commentary about whatever we’d just lived through. I remember taking him back to his hotel once after this grueling encounter with an egomaniacal Hollywood-type; I was driving, Sonia Braga beside me, Manuel in back; We were all unusually quiet, bummed out that a project we’d harbored high hopes for had just gone up in smoke; Then Manuel began his phlegmatic re-cap of the meeting, repeating the same dumb phrase of rejection we just heard; Within seconds he had me and Sonia in caniptions, both of us laughing so hard with tears stinging our eyes, that I literally drove off the street and smacked into a tree! There we sat ignoring the mishap, Sonia and I gagging uncontrollably with side-splitting laughter, while Manuel slyly kept repeating the same phrase which a half-hour before had made us feel so depressed; Finally Sonia and I each managed to crawl from the car, begging Manuel to stop, but to no avail; When the Cops arrived they found us both still sprawled on the sidewalk laughing like loons, with Manuel perched in the dented car’s backseat, enigmatically beaming like a Cheshire cat.

Puig’s generosity towards me was not limited to his creativity. He had retained his novel’s legitmate-stage-rights and, after the film’s success, Hal Prince had the idea of doing a musical version of Spider Woman on Broadway; I was flabbergasted when Manuel offered to cut me in: “Listen La Butch, La Prince wants me to sign a contract, so why don’t you become my partner?” Like a shmuck I declined, insisting I knew nothing about Broadway, and besides that, I really thought the whole thing was a tacky bad joke. That—plus getting rid of the 300SL gullwing Mercedes I owned back in the 70s—were the only two things I have ever really regretted having done in life.

Manuel’s death in July 1990 struck me like an earthquake. He’d recently moved with his mother to a wonderful lush home outside Mexico City, and had just returned from New York City meetings with Prince on the Broadway Show. He’d suffered intense gall bladder pain for months until he could bear it no longer and, reluctant to leave his mother alone for too long, he checked into a seedy Cuernavaca hospital rather than drive clear into Mexico City to a state-of-the-art for surgery. Three days later, his closest friend Javier (aka Puig’s “daughter” Becky, named for Rita’s offspring with Orson Welles) called me with the bombshell that Manuel had just died of toxic shock! I cried like a baby. We’d been long prepping ourselves for Malé’s death (Puig’s mother was well in her 80s) and the devastating effect that her passing would have upon Manuel—but not for this. That phone-call still haunts me to this day; Strange how Manuel Puig met his end like that of the other great star-gazer in my life, Andy Warhol, who three years earlier in 1987 likewise died abruptly from post-operative causes following a long postponed gall-bladder surgery.

3) What do you think the film would have been like if Hurt got his way and they reversed roles? Babenco said Julia played Molina in a Carman Miranda manner.

That’s funny. Carmen Miranda, I mean. Anyway, here’s how I remember it:

March 1983. After 14 months developing Kiss of the Spider Woman for Burt Lancaster as Molina, Burt was still unsatisfied and was busily working on his own “version” of the script, but the tale behind this high-drama is a chapter unto itself. Suffice to say tensions existed with our star concerning the “direction” of the project. After meetings with Richard Gere and Martin Sheen, we’d all recently come together on Raul Julia to play “the kid” (as Lancaster constantly referred to the Valentin character).

Raul was principally a stage-actor at that point in his career; Hector had originally sought him out because they shared Spanish as their native tongue (Hector hadn’t mastered English yet and spoke Italian with Lancaster) plus the fact that Puerto Rico-born Julia, as a genuine Latino, brought a certain authenticity to the Valentin role.

Raul’s New York agent Jeff Hunter kept bugging me for a start-date but we in reality had no firm commitment from Lancaster, so everything was continually up in the air—particularly the production financing we’d been nurturing at Lorimar, which was keyed to Burt’s interest.

Amid all of this, an agent in New York named Gene Parseghian phoned me up and introduced himself as Jeff Hunter’s partner. He told me Kiss of the Spider Woman was the best script he’d read in ten years, and wondered if we had ever considered William Hurt. I assumed that he was suggesting Hurt for the Valentin role in lieu of Raul, and didn’t quite know what to say; sensing my confusion, Gene clarified that he was proposing Hurt for the part of Molina. Now the icon of Burt Lancaster as Molina had dominated my mind for well over a year, so I was even more at a loss. Parseghian told me Hurt and Julia had long wanted to work together, then gently made a suggestion: If for any reason Burt Lancaster did not do the movie, would we please consider William Hurt?

June 1983. Lancaster had just dropped out for what we all had agreed to euphemistically term “health reasons.” Hector, who’d all along been having Len Schrader’s script translated page-by-page into Portuguese so that he could read it, immediately wanted to film the movie in that language with two Brazilian actors, which would have immediately limited its appeal as a regional rather than international movie. I saw my dream falling apart, so with nothing to lose I called Parseghian to ask if he was serious about Hurt (after Ken Russell’s Altered States and the commercial hit Body Heat, with Big Chill and Gorky Park in the can, Bill had not only become a major new star, but he was considered an actor’s actor as well). Gene said yes indeed he was serious, and asked me delicately if Babenco really wanted Bill for the part. Yes, I lied; In fact I’d tried to tell Hector about this notion (while we were still mired with Burt Lancaster) and he scoffed: “William Hurt? David, are you crazy? This young blond American guy? He is like a football player!”

July 1983. Hector and I were in New York for meetings with Bill and Raul. We’d decided to make the film together and were closing deals with their agents. Everything was set and Raul had invited Hector, myself and Bill over to his apartment to toast our new venture, it was the very first time Hector and I were in the same room together with Bill and Raul. Afterwards on leaving Raul’s place, Hector couldn’t wait to tell me what had hit him while we were sipping Chablis, listening to Bill talk about fly-fishing: The two actors were perfectly miscast.

It was obvious, and Hector saw it before anyone. Macho, stoic, cerebral Hurt was a natural for the tortured revolutionary. While the exuberant Raul Julia, with his great voice, Caribbean warmth, Latin charm, a man so thoroughly hetero but so utterly in touch with his feminine side, was the ideal choice for Molina!

Late September 1983. As Hurt remained distant, aloof, complicated, and his English-language-vocabulary-rich allegorical style of communication totally incomprehensible to Babenco, the notion of Raul as Molina persisted as Hector’s private lament to me; However it was unthinkable then to openly broach such a potentially destabilizing concept. Several days before filming began, Hector and I had left Hurt and Julia alone with the crew prepping in our São Paulo prison location to rehearse by themselves, while we went off and worked in my hotel room to harmonize script-pages by Len Schrader with new scenes that were being written daily by Manuel and myself.

Suddenly, Bill’s driver burst into the room with an astonishing report from the location: Having swapped parts on their own as an actors’ exercise, Hurt and Julia had had an epiphany and it appeared that they now wanted to permanently switch roles for the film. Babenco was justifiably elated, because up to then Hurt hadn’t shown him a hint of the Molina character he had been mentally preparing for himself during rehearsals. We were told by the Driver that Bill and Raul were already headed back to the hotel, bursting with excitement to tell Hector about their incredible revelation.

Babenco, ecastatic over this “lucky” turn of events (“It is my dream come true!”), planned to embrace Raul as Molina the instant he walked through the door . But I smelled a trap, conscious or otherwise; In my view this was a test by Bill to see if the director truly wanted him as an actor, or simply sought William Hurt the moviestar. A knockdown dragout between mee and Hector ensued while we were waiting for the two actors to arrive. Somehow I managed to convince Babenco to sit on his emotions, and despite himself, Hector succeeded in acting blasé to Hurt’s role-switch epiphany, feeding him instead a rather wobbly but reassuring lie: “Please Bill, do not make jokes. YOU are my Molina.” Hurt paced the room, indignant, raging at the director: “Hector, you are not listening to me. YOU’RE NOT LISTENING TO ME!!”

In fact Hector was biting his lip, insecure about the game I’d persuaded him to play — of categorically rejecting Bill’s role-switch idea for at least two days—then if Hurt still was adament about it, we’d delay the film for a day so that Hector could see a rehearsal of Raul as Molina with Bill as Valentin.

Fortunately however, it never came to pass—Which is why I find Hector’s comment about Raul Julia playing Molina “in a Carmen Miranda manner” so peculiar. Finally, on the very morning cameras rolled, Hurt calmly took Babenco aside and confessed to him: “Hector, you’ve been very patient with me, and I’m grateful for that. So today, I have a big surprise for you.”

I really believe if Babenco had immediately knuckled under to Hurt about the role-switch, and accepted Raul as Molina, then Bill would have somehow found a way to take a hike and there would be no movie. But finally, who knows? Anyway that was my gut feeling at the time.

Then a few years ago, in a conversation I was having with Gene Parseghian, he disclosed a marvelous factoid: After our second talk in June 1983, Gene sent Len’s screenplay to Bill Hurt while the actor was in London doing soundwork for Gorky Park. Three days later, Gene phoned me to inform me that William Hurt would do Kiss of the Spider Woman—subject to meeting Hector Babenco and screening his work (at that time neither Bill, Raul, Hunter, Parseghian had ever seen Pixote).

For years I’d absolutely thought Bill did Kiss based on his reading of the script. But apparently Bill read just the first 15 — 20 pages, then rang up his agent to say it looks interesting and find out what Gene thought: Parseghian cautioned Bill there’s no money in it and that the film would either sink his career or win him an Oscar. According to Parseghian, on hearing this, Hurt, drunk as a skunk, said: “Well then sign me up!”

So as I see it, it really never was a case of what would have happened if Bill and Raul had switched roles; Finally, the casting of William Hurt as Molina in Kiss of the Spider Woman was not a premeditated decision made by Babenco, nor myself, but by the teamwork of the fates: By which I mean the fickleness of Burt Lancaster in dealing with a sensitive theme which represented a deeply hidden but fundamental and profound personal aspect of his life, plus a consuming passion for the material which Raul Julia held, then shared with two gay men of impeccable literary taste: Raul’s longtime agent Jeff Hunter and Hurt’s former longtime agent Gene Parseghian.

4) What was your biggest challenge when making this film?

Surviving it. After it was over, my pal Andre Konchalovsky confessed he thought Kiss was a sure-fire recipe for failure on every count—a below-the-equator version of the kind of Euro-pudding where nobody involved speaks the same language and, even if they do, it sure seems like they don’t—but Konchalovsky never wanted to say such a thing to my face because he felt I was a well-intentioned kid, just a bit naïve, and so he fiigured why the hell should he go fuck with my brain?

There were no distribution deals or foreign sales involved in the making of this film; no completion-bond or any kind of film-industry involvement whastsoever. Most suits who read the Spider Woman script sent lovely letters wishing me well, saying how much they looked forward to seeing the movie; Others chuckled or wrote wiseass marketing loglines like “A fag and a commie in a jail cell—Which one do you hate the most?” I actually remember reading that in one studio’s script-coverage.

But to the real challenges: No wonderful wide world of “indie film” existed in 1983. Harvey and Bob’s Miramax was peddling an erotic sizzler called Eréndira, Shaye’s New Line had a few Freddie films and The Samuel Goldwyn Company, big kid on the independent block, never took a risk on a thing; The Sundance Festival was still years off, and Quentin Tarentino was just out of high school. We were royally jerked around by Orion, Universal, Lorimar, and at Columbia, even by the “rabbit” himself, Ray Stark (who liked the script and even said it would make a good Broadway show!), but if any sort of studio money had ever gotten involved, given the way we made the film, I can “put my hand in the fire” (as Hector used to say) to assure you that Kiss of the Spider Woman would somehow have never seen the light of day.

The total $1.2 million US-dollars-and-Brazilian-cruzeiro equivalent we finally spent to make the movie came from a mix of equity cash plus my modest credit cards. Filmed at a snail’s-pace, the original 63-day schedule grew to a whopping 102 shooting days; The editing, scheduled for three months, took fourteen months, most of it in my garage. Halfway through this post-production quagmire, the film was seen by The New York Film Festival (who wanted Spider Woman for their 1984 season’s closing night selection); By then it still ran about an hour longer than in the eventual final version. According to the projectionist that August day in 1984, the five New York critics on the Festival’s Selection committee walked out after watching forty minutes, shaking their heads. How the film managed to survive such a stunning debacle to its reputation is beyond me; Later that same day Len Schrader and I had another screening scheduled, this one attended by Raul Julia, Jeff Hunter, Gene Parseghian and Fabiano Canosa. When the lights came up after nearly three hours, Raul was white-knuckled, repressing rage. “What happened to all of our great work?” he seethed. The two agents were even more grim. “You’ve got to do something to save the film,” Gene implored. Jeff, near tears, added, “I don’t understand how this could have happened. It might ruin both their careers.”

Still on the same day Len sat thru a midnight screening with Bill, after which, according to Len (who by only late morning made it back to the apartment where we were staying), Hurt wanted to buy the negative and burn it. Then things even got worse. That same August 1984, Hector, back in Brazil for a break from the tedious editing in Los Angeles, was diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma cancer and turned the film over to Leonard and myself to finish all on our own.

But also in August 1984 Bill and Raul began the five-week-long meticulous process re-dubbing of their roles at an ADR soundstage in New York— enabling us to write new dialogue lines and make the key editorial adjustments which pulled it all together. In May 1985, after recutting negative and re-mixing sound a second time (usually a signal of eminent catastrophy), the film finally had its world premiere at Cannes where Bill Hurt won the Best Actor Award.

Ten months after that, Kiss of the Spider Woman became the first independent film ever to get the top 4 Academy Award Nominations (Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Director, Best Screenplay); In all probablility Bill Hurt’s Oscar-win that March night in 1986 was the event that marked the shift of media focus away from major studios to today’s indie-film obssessed paradigm. Not to mention the first time an actor ever won an Oscar or any other world-class film award for playing a homosexual character. Howzat for challenges?

5) What effect did Spider Woman have on your career?

Well I never really had much of a a career in mind. I was just a life-artist, a painter who as a teenager dropped out of Syracuse University’s School of Fine Art (where Lou Reed and I shared classes in figure-drawing, color, basic-design and the such) then while I was in Québec City for the summer earning money drawing portraits for tourists, I met Leonard Cohen who was on his way to Greece and who so utterly boggled my mind that I went to Rome to study art—but wound up designing film-posters for Fellini and Pasolini instead; Then I spent a year in Brazil in 1964 sketching Copacabana street-life becuz I much preferred speaking Portuguese to English, French or Italian; After I got to New York City in 1965, Otto Preminger chose me replace Saul Bass as his pet graphic designer and protégé: At that point, I actually almost HAD a career, but I kept feeding Preminger hash-brownies and LSD, when out of the blue one night I met Edie Sedgwick and Andy Warhol at Max’s Kansas City Restaurant, then ended up spending the next five years making my first film Ciao! Manhattan, which everyone now tells me has become a Sixties cult-classic. So go figure.

Career for me has always been more a form of experimentation. Searching for the eureka moment, like a mad scientist, as it were, with the gleam in my eye that something exhilarating or at least different might result. For instance, when the rights to Kiss of the Spider Woman reverted last year, we got all sorts of re-licensing offers from various major studio libaries anxious to exploit the film’s DVD and TV rights. Boring! Much more fun to try what none of them would do, bring it back to the big screen. In that respect, here’s a cosmic collision: Marcus Hu and Gail Blumenthal of Strand Releasing, the terrific film people handling the theatrical re-issue of Kiss, are opening it in New York at The Quad Cinema. I had no clue that was where they play their films. A decade after Ciao! Manhattan was finished, when the Sedgwick biography “EDIE” was a best-seller in 1982, my underground film finally opened in New York at the very same Quad Cinema, where it broke house records and wound up playing for months; The coincidence is that in 1982 I used the money from that Quad engagement to pay for the Puig rights plus the Kiss of the Spider Woman screenplay and pre-production. Isn’t that one big ol’ circle?

6) What does nobody know about this film or its making?

Sunday July 22 1985. Kiss of the Spider Woman had been the buzz movie at Cannes and rather than wait for the Fall when artfilms do well, we were opening it mid-summer at Cinema 1, which then was the primo screen in New York. I flew in from LA for the Monday pre-opening event. I checked into the Mayflower Hotel and strolled across Central Park South to go to Sonia’s place on East 59th St, Having been away from NY awhile, some strange feeling began creeping over me as I walked, something eerie, oppressive, heavy, as if some humungous water-baloon suspended overhead was about to drop: Here was this gorgeous perfect summer Sunday evening, yet there was absolutely NO GAY CRUISING ACTIVITY whatsoever in Central Park! Like a neutron bomb had gone off. Suddenly it hit me: The AIDS scare, mushrooming since my last visit the previous winter, had now transformed Gaycentric New York City into a ghost town.

I ran the rest of the way to Sonia’s and when I got there I was drenched with sweat, babbling to her in Portuguese about The Gay Plague! Poor Sonia, she felt my brow; misunderstanding my delirious epiphany, actually believing maybe I was sick with this dreaded new disease! All through dinner I kept insisting our movie’s opening would somehow be rocked by the AIDS crisis, even though I knew that was an absurd notion, first because the film has nothing to do with an epidemic, but really because back then most people were trying to pretend that AIDS didn’t exist. Then on July 27 1985, that same Friday the film opened, every single newspaper across America carried in ultrabold type the exact same glaring headline: ROCK HUDSON DYING!

The day it all changed: The health crisis could no longer be swept under the rug by the Reaganites as a strictly homosexual problem. Despite the fact that Puig had written Spider Woman in the mid 70s, long before AIDS had surfaced, just like Rock Hudson in July 1985, Molina was a true gay martyr. At that point in time, all of this was perhaps deeply submerged but nonetheless bubbling like a cauldron in the public subconscious—my definition of “ zeitgeist. The did an intensity of business that was unheard of. Ir was more of a sociological phenomenon erupting like a volcano, ignited by a double-whammie of “gay-martyr zeitgeist”— Public shock at Rock Hudson’s tragic illness whereby mainstream-America-cultural-icon suddenly becomes a gay martyr, and, seemingly unrelated, Public discovery of an exotic little art-film with stellar screen-performances — particularly by overtly heterosexual actor’s-actor William Hurt as the gay martyr queen Molina.

The opening Friday noon show at Cinema 1 (750 seats) might have normally drawn a lunchtime crowd of 50-60 people, but this day it was completely sold out at 11AM! And that’s just for starters cuz by 12:30, they were lining up for the 2:15 show. “They” were these blue-hair Jewish mothers clutching Bloomingdales shopping-bags and morning’s newspapers with the Rock Hudson front-page story plus Spider Woman reviews; Along the line-up ‘round the block for the movie, their chatter revealed that many were frantic with worry about their gay sons. By midnight, every show that day had been sold out— so the theater kept the film running until dawn—by which point the lines consisted of green-haired punkrock club kids. My distributor joked that you could tell time by the rainbow of hair-color on the line for Spider Woman. It was zeitgeist, pure and simple. Brought about, as I seee it, as much by the tragic last act of Rock Hudson’s life as by the goodness of the film. Now that for sure is something nobody knows about the film. I’m not even sure I know it, but I sure did feel it. Guess you hadda be there.