Erotic drama blends desire, love and art
Brian (Brian Sheppard) is a lovesick poet suffering from writer’s block. Drew (Colman Domingo, “Selma”) is a sculptor obsessed with his muse. Bob ( Jim Lescault) is a talent agent cruising the streets for a night’s companionship. Jim (Zack Ryan) is an actor, and the titular “Beautiful Something” of writer-director Joseph Graham’s erotic drama.
Over a single night in Philadelphia, these four characters wrestle with desire and learn a little about themselves in the process.
Graham (“Strapped,” “The Horror Network Vol. 1”), who lives in San Francisco, recently sat down at a Mission cafe to talk about the genesis of his story and characters, and his thrill at having “Beautiful Something” make its local debut at Frameline.
Q: When did you shoot “Beautiful Something”? You have that one scene between Brian and Jim where you can see their breath.
A: They got a lot warmer than we did! We shot for two weeks in November 2013 and two weeks in January 2014, barely missing the snow, but not missing the cold. We intended to shoot in the fall, and it had to be pushed back. … If you’re going to shoot a movie outside in Philadelphia, November, January is probably not the best time to do it.
Q: It does add a little something extra to that scene in
terms of expressing lust. A: Exactly. It makes the scene hotter. It makes a lot of scenes better. I always imagined (the story) on a hot summer night, but it wanted to be on a cold winter. Sometimes the movies just tell you what they want to be. You just follow along or resist at your peril.
Q: Until Bob mentions marriage toward the end of the film, it is impossible to tell what era this is all taking place. Brian has a typewriter and a landline, and that kind of sets the tone for everything else. Was that deliberate?
A: The fact that that affects the viewer’s sense of time was a lovely, peripheral side dish. It started with wanting Brian — Brian Sheppard and I felt that he would have rejected, for vainglorious reasons, computers as a way to write poetry. We felt that he had to choose each word. He rejected the cell phone, because he felt you weren’t free, you were tied down. The character felt that way.
The film’s autobiographical, so all this stuff that happened to me happened in the early to mid-’90s. For me, it’s easy to go from one city to another, but it’s hard to go from one time to another. ’Cause to me, the movie takes place in the ’90s, but we didn’t want to literally do that. But I guess that sensibility and that nostalgia permeated a lot of choices.
Q: You have a poet, a sculptor, an actor and a talent agent. Why those particular characters? Obviously, art is as important as sexuality.
A: It’s more about how art relates to desire, and I and my characters happen to be gay. It wasn’t intentional, but it started to become clear as I wrote and wrote that this movie wanted to be about desire and this movie wanted to be about desire as it relates to love and desire as it relates to art and love as it relates to art. To me, there’s kind of a triad between desire, love, and art, and they are all interlocked somehow.
Q: There’s the muse idea.
A: Brian’s muse seems to be his broken heart, which he nurtures carefully, despite himself. I would have liked to have done more with Drew. … His character got stripped down, but I wanted to get to the confusion of his need for this young man: ‘Why do I need this?’ He’s self-aware enough to sort of get a glimpse at the greater of his needs and drives. Jim is just so childlike. … He’s just too young and too close and too new to really be able to understand, and what he does get glimpses of, in terms of his relationship to Drew, just scares him to death. It’s just too intense.
Q: How do you feel about bringing “Beautiful Something” to Frameline and the Castro?
A: It’s so corny, but I have to pinch myself sometimes. I’m experiencing three dreams coming true simultaneously. I abandoned this film, even though I loved it, because I tried a couple of times to get it made and it didn’t happen. It got made. For 20 years, I’ve wanted to play Frameline. For a couple of f— reasons that weren’t Frameline’s fault, it didn’t happen. Now it’s happening. And I’m playing the Castro. My film is playing the Castro. It’s so film geeky, but it’s just, ‘Aaaah!’ … The experience of being invited to play Frameline is just one of sheer gratitude. I’m so excited and grateful.