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By DAN RENZI
Thursday, May 08, 2008
Todd Stephens is the writer, director, and producer of ‘Another Gay Sequel: Gays Gone Wild,’ the second installment of the deliciously-raunchy ‘Another Gay Movie’ series. Filmed almost entirely in Fort Lauderdale and slated for a mid-August premiere, ‘Gays Gone Wild’ stars RuPaul, Scott Thompson, and Perez Hilton--yes, that Perez Hilton--and it promises to be this summer’s big hit on the gay film circuit. Stephens recently came back to Miami to hold a test screening of the film at the Colony Theater in South Beach, and Express caught up with him to talk about what it really takes to make an audience laugh.
It’s about a group off friends going to Fort Lauderdale, and reuniting after spending the previous summer together (in the first film). And they come across this contest called “Gays Gone Wild,” about who can have the most sex over the course of the vacation. And that challenges each of them to figure out their parameters of how casual sex fits into their lives, with two of them being a monogamous couple.
It’s really meant to make people laugh. But exploring the fact that all of us, being gay men, have to figure out if we’re going to be monogamous?...are we going to be promiscuous?...what does it all mean? And then Andy, the horn-dog (played by Jake Mosser) goes down with the plan of having as much sex as possible, but meets some he has feelings for, for the first time, and they all learn and grow and blah blah blah.
It went really well. The audience was really receptive, they laughed in the right places, and they gave us really good feedback about what they liked, what they didn’t like.
Yeah, things will get cut, but we won’t add or cut anything huge. It’s more about where people laugh and where they don’t laugh. We film the audience while they are watching it, to see if they laugh in all the right places. Editing a comedy is a science--either it works or it doesn’t work. Either they laugh, or they don’t laugh.
There was a scene with Niko (flamboyantly played by Jonah Blechman) on the beach, it’s kind of a spoof of “10” with Bo Derek, where Niko is running on the beach with the braids…and in earlier screenings, nobody laughed. There are always going to be scenes that we think are hilarious, and no one laughs, and we’re like ‘Why aren’t you laughing?...I think this is funny.’ But that means the joke isn’t set up properly. So that one, we fixed, we went back and made some changes. And this time, people laughed perfectly, how I wanted them to.
I can’t tell you. But it’s funny.
Well…it deals with a certain bodily fluid that wasn’t covered in the first film.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I don’t want to say, it’s setting up an expectation.
No, they all liked the script. It has to do more with people playing multiple gay roles, and the fear of being typecast. It’s more of their “people,” their lawyers, managers, etc., many of whom are gay--and I find they are the most fearful of being out. And in this day and age, the fact that people still feel that way is shocking and sad. It’s weird that the most intense homophobia comes from gay people. But so be it.
You make a movie with different actors. And the guys who did these parts were perfect for this particular film. It’s not so much slap-stick, there’s more emotion. Things work out for a reason.
He’s a sweetheart. Or at least he is to me.
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