aking Love screenwriter Barry Sandler still remembers the night he walked out of his own film.
It was March 5, 1982. A line of mostly straight couples snaked around the block outside a Miami movie theater for the film's opening day. The gay Sandler surveyed the crowd and wondered, Do they know what this movie is?
Shortly after the film started rolling, Sandler got his answer. "I can see the guys' nervous titters. Then that kiss scene happens and it's pandemonium. People start marching up the aisles," he says. "I had to leave. I couldn't watch it."
But for Advocate readers and gay moviegoers at large, Making Love was a watershed. The film tells the story of a young married doctor (Michael Ontkean) who leaves his wife for a promiscuous Los Angeles novelist, played by Harry Hamlin. It's a coming-out story and a love triangle wrapped into one.
And that kiss scene? It could still incite mayhem in some places.
Perhaps Sandler should've anticipated a strong reaction. In 1982, Making Love—the first big studio romance to feature two gay characters who weren't psychopathic, suicidal, deviant, or destitute—was unprecedented in American cinema. Then again, 20th Century Fox had given Sandler so many green lights, he may have thought groundbreaking would be easy.
Then–Fox president Sherry Lansing is still proud of her decision to make the film. "I absolutely fell in love with the script. I thought this was going to be one of the biggest movies in the history of film, " she tells The Advocate. Making Love would ultimately make a tepid $12 million at the box office.
"Film is very much an act of passion," she adds. "It's like falling in love. You can't always explain it—but if you love it, you fight for it. People will tell you it's risky and you just hang with it."
Some actors, like Michael Douglas and Richard Gere, who were initially offered the lead roles, weren't up to that challenge.
Some actors, like Michael Douglas and Richard Gere, who were initially offered the lead roles, weren't up to that challenge. For Harry Hamlin, there was no question.
"I was being offered roles in movies that were pretty stupid," says the actor, who had appeared in Clash of the Titans before landing Making Love. "If I was going to spend 10 weeks making a film, I wanted to do a real slice of American life rather than a guy trying to save a town from rabid bats."
While Hamlin now says that Making Love paralyzed his film career, he has no regrets. He does, however, lament that the producers tended to sanitize the script. "I think the studio watered it down somewhat," he says, "whenever there was an opportunity to make it less threatening, more palatable to an audience." Hamlin remembers messing up the set around his writing desk with crumpled papers and open books. "I wanted my office to look like I'd been writing for eight or nine hours alone. I came back in the next morning and everything was back in order. I never figured out their motivation; I think the producers didn't want it to look at all dirty."
Rubbish, says Lansing: "How can you say it was watered-down? People wouldn't have walked out."
Maybe Hamlin didn't get to wear a tattered shirt for his writing scenes, but some design changes did stick. Sandler says, laughing, "They had originally decorated the inside of Harry Hamlin's house with a full-length blow-up of Judy Garland above the fireplace."