Written by:
Laurie K. Schenden
Photographer:
Carole Segal
Dodging real-life hurricanes while shooting a film can be exhausting business. But Jennifer Beals became quite lucid when calling from wind-whipped Louisiana last October to talk about another role she has in the can, as a lesbian in a project for Showtime code-named Earthlings.
The story is about a circle of lesbian friends living in Los Angeles. The code name — which will likely change by the time it airs — refers to a code word lesbians use when identifying their sisters, i.e.: “Is she an earthling; has she been to the planet?”
Beals plays one of the lesbian friends in a cast that includes Pam Grier (Jackie Brown), Mia Kirshner (Exotica), Laurel Holloman (The Incredibly True Adventures of Two Girls in Love), Scott Bairstow (Wolf Lake) and Leisha Hailey (former singer with the Murmurs). It was still undetermined at press time whether the project will stand alone as a two-hour movie or air as the pilot for a series, but everyone interviewed for this story is eager to do the series. For Beals, living outside society’s norm is nothing new.
“Because I’m biracial, I’ve always lived sort of on the outside," says Beals. “The idea of being ‘the other’ in society is not foreign to me.” Beals says her greatest hope for this project “is that there is some young girl or some older woman who feels so uncomfortable with herself, and by seeing this show is able to come into her most authentic self and is able to embrace who she is.”
Although she’s made dozens of films, Beals is still probably best known for making a hard hat and blowtorch look seductive in Flashdance (1983). Working as a welder by day, she sizzled on the dance floor at night. Following that hit film, she attended Yale, married, made numerous films, remarried and has “two fantastic stepchildren.” She’s currently living in Los Angeles and shooting John Grisham’s The Runaway Jury in Louisiana.
In Earthlings, Beals plays Bette, a museum director who is committed to her demanding job. “She’s very detail-oriented, the queen of multitasking, and she loves Tina,” Beals says. She and Tina, played by Laurel Holloman, want to have a child, but Bette’s long hours at work and the search for a satisfactory donor are just two issues that begin to wear on the relationship. Mia Kirshner, an intense young actress known for her offbeat roles on film (Exotica, Not Another Teen Movie) and television (24, Wolf Lake), plays the straight girl who moves from the Midwest to be with her boyfriend. Scott Bairstow plays Kirshner’s boyfriend, who lives next door to Bette and Tina. Grier, who paved the way for women to kick ass and look sexy doing it in movies from Foxy Brown (1974) to Jackie Brown (1997), plays the wise and worldly lesbian artist and a close friend of Bette’s.
Like Beals, personal experience gave Grier the motivation to embrace the lesbian role. “I’ve been a black woman who’s been discriminated against because of the color of my skin,” says Grier. “I want people — my fans — to watch [the show], people who are so homophobic … and maybe turn them around. For many in the black community, it’s still something we’re way behind on.”
Grier’s character is Kit, who knows what it’s like to “fight so many issues and still come out with her dignity intact.” Kit is an artist and a filmmaker in leather and chains who wears an old captain’s hat, which signifies her role as group mentor. Her history — and uniqueness — are revealed in a tattoo on her back (which put Grier into the makeup chair at 3 a.m. each day). The artwork is sort of a genealogy of friends, loves and lovers, and by showing how they are all connected, it’s a bit like mapping out the six degrees of separation — although among lesbians, it’s sometimes more like two degrees.
“She’s like the Yoda of the group,” says Grier. “She’s been through the fire … she knows everybody’s secrets.”
Beals compares the premise to “a more profound Sex and the City with gay women. I’m so going to get in trouble for saying that by somebody from HBO, but it’s very true.”
Initially, Showtime worried about finding seasoned actresses willing to play gay. When they cast Queer as Folk, they had problems getting actors who would commit to playing gay men. “I think for male actors, the stigma of being gay is much greater than a woman who’s deemed to be a lesbian,” says Beals. “Frankly, I think more men are homophobic than women.”
Kirshner, a Canadian who grew up among gay friends, doesn’t believe people should be defined by their sexuality, and says that for her, “This is not a show about gay women.” Her attraction to the part of the heterosexual Jenny had more to do with what she says is “a really interesting portrait of flawed women and their dynamic together and their search for intimacy.”
“Things that I’m attracted to are very much character-based and story-based, and certainly this story is unique in its honesty,” she continues. “It shows a lot of intricacies of human behavior.”
The way sex is dealt with on the show, for instance, is not gratuitous, but rather essential to the story line. It’s “extremely emotional and it’s not pretty,” Kirshner says. “It’s about power and vulnerability and loss, and a lot of it is very sad sex.”
When Jenny moves to Los Angeles, she finds that her relationship with Tim has changed. “She’s caught between this affair that she has with this [woman] that profoundly moved her, and a man that she loves very much.” In one scene, Tim masturbates beside Jenny as she’s sleeping, then starts having sex with her. “It’s this very sad scene,” says Kirshner. “He comes and [Jenny] is wide awake and he just rolls over and goes to sleep. It really spoke volumes to where their relationship was at and where she was at in terms of her connection to a man she once loved.”
Other scenes carry a similar type of honesty. When Jenny has sex with a woman for the first time, it’s also the first time she’s cheated on her boyfriend. “She just bursts into tears and she’s frightened,” Kirshner says. “I think that it’s not pretty and it’s not sexy. But I think women can relate to how vulnerable it feels to have a profound sexual experience.”
Earthlings’ treatment of sex certainly differs from that on Showtime’s Queer as Folk, a series centered mostly around gay men. It’s hard not to make comparisons between Earthlings and Queer as Folk because the only other regular series on television with predominantly gay themes is Will and Grace, and Earthlings is definitely more Queer than Will. But Ilene Chaiken, Earthlings’ creator and executive producer, doesn’t like to compare the two, although Queer’s success certainly hasn’t hurt. Chaiken says she pitched the idea for a lesbian ensemble drama even before the original Queer as Folk aired in the United States.
“It was a little too soon,” says the screenwriter. “They were intrigued … but nobody was quite ready to do a lesbian show.”
After that rejection, Chaiken wrote Dirty Pictures for Showtime, a film about the work of controversial gay artist Robert Mapplethorpe, which won her a Golden Globe. Showtime then made the American version of Queer as Folk, which became a hit series. Recently Showtime, HBO and Bravo have all stepped up their gay-themed programming — there’s even talk of creating an all-gay network. In that environment, Chaiken pitched the lesbian show again to another Showtime executive.
“Right there he said, ‘Oh my god, we have to do this,’” Chaiken says. “I saw [president of Showtime programming] Jerry Offsay a few days later and he said, ‘We’re going to do that show.’”
One thing that sets Earthlings apart from those other shows is the lesbians in charge. Rose Troche (Go Fish, Six Feet Under) directed the pilot; Kathy Greenberg and Michelle Abbott are producers and collaborated on the script with Chaiken.
“The dynamic on the set is very different,” says Beals. “Working with intelligent women is very different from working with a very male-oriented set. There are some male directors who are very open to listening to what women have to say on the set, but there are other sets where you are so aware of being a second-class citizen.”
It’s also much easier to film a love scene with another woman, says Beals.
“All women feel fat at one point, or feel this part of their body is not beautiful. When you’re in a love scene with a man and you say, ‘Can you put your hand here, because my ass feels a little fat?’ he may not really understand the depth of what you’re saying. …
“Before our love scenes, Laurel Holloman and I would talk about, ‘OK, what part do you not feel comfortable with and how can I make you more comfortable?’ We were very good at describing the parts of ourselves that we didn’t like.” To help with the realism, producers even hired a lesbian “sexpert” from the Vancouver gay community, where Earthlings was filmed.
“What we ended up talking about,” says Beals, “was not so much sex, because you can figure out how to please another woman if you can figure out how you want to be pleased, but we started talking about history and class and race, and how those elements figure in. By the end of the film, I just thought, it’s not really that different from anatomy and all the social pressures that come with it.”
Beals admits that in the beginning, she had certain expectations of what it would be like to have a same-sex relationship.
“Society dictates to you how to be in love with the opposite sex, and how you behave with the opposite sex in a romantic relationship,” she says. “I always thought it would be different with a same-sex relationship, and another part of me thought that love is love and all you have to do is love this person and the rest will follow, which is what I ended up with.”
One of the topics batted around early on was how committed to the truth everyone had to be, says Beals. “Nobody seemed to be threatened by the subject matter. What we were doing was so important.”
To give the cast a crash course in lesbian relationships, director Troche, who wrote and directed the lesbian film Go Fish, put together a series of scenes for the cast to see that included people in gay and straight relationships.
“Some of them were love scenes,” says Beals. “We could see when actresses were afraid. [We felt] that’s so sad, because it’s such an interesting story and that person was afraid.”
What added to the comfort on the set of Earthlings was a camaraderie that developed between the women. “We all get along really, really well,” says Kirshner. “A bunch of us got together to watch the Emmys.” They also spent evenings watching American Idol and having karaoke nights. “I so hope we go back,” says Beals; “it’s such an amazing group of women.”
While everyone waits to hear whether or not Chaiken’s creation will become the first lesbian ensemble drama series on television, the writer says she hopes the enthusiasm for more gay-themed programming is not just a trend.
“I definitely think there’s more interest, because they’re always looking for stories that haven’t been told,” she says. “And certainly we have many stories that haven’t been told.”
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