Turner Classic Movies host Dave Karger was 11 when he first watched an Academy Awards ceremony, and an obsession was born.
The year was 1985, and he noticed, among other things, that the winner for Best Documentary was The Times of Harvey Milk. His first thought, he notes in his new book, 50 Oscar Nights, was There’s a man called Milk? Later, the name of the martyred gay politician would mean much more to Karger, a gay man himself. And the movies and the Oscars would become a huge part of Karger’s life, through his career as an entertainment journalist and his gig at TCM.
For the book, he interviewed 50 Oscar winners about the night they won. The earliest winner was Rita Moreno, Best Supporting Actress for 1961’s West Side Story; the most recent was Olivia Colman, Best Actress for 2018’s The Favourite. In between are not only stars, directors, and screenwriters but also behind-the-scenes personnel such as costume designers and sound mixers.
“Diversity was of paramount importance to me,” Karger tells The Advocate. By this, he means not only by race and orientation — one-third of the interviewees are people of color or LGBTQ+ — but by mixing the big names with the unsung heroes.
Oprah Winfrey congratulates John Legend on his Best Original Song win for Selma.Darren Decker/A.M.P.A.S. via Running Press
“Some of the lesser-known people in my book turned out to be the best interviewees,” he says. “They’ll be real discoveries for people who do read the entire book.”
One is sound mixer Kevin O’Connell, who won his first Oscar on his 21st nomination — in 2017, for Mel Gibson’s war film Hacksaw Ridge. “For thirty-three years, I was always the guy sitting in the stands, clapping, watching somebody else onstage,” he noted to Karger. When he finally got the award, he had “the most euphoric, amazing feeling that anybody could ever have,” he said. If it could be bottled, no one would need recreational drugs, he added.
In accepting the Oscar for Best Sound Mixing, O’Connell thanked his late mother, Skippy O’Connell, a longtime staffer in the sound department at 20th Century Fox. She had encouraged him to leave his dangerous job as a Los Angeles firefighter and go into the film industry.
“It’s a story that makes me cry every time I read the chapter,” Karger says.
Rita Moreno celebrates her win for West Side Story.Bettman/Getty Images via Running Press
Another is Mark Bridges, the costume designer who created the fabulous clothes for Phantom Thread (2017), which starred Daniel Day-Lewis as a fashion designer. On Oscar night in 2018, Bridges didn’t just win the coveted award; he got a prize for the shortest acceptance speech, at 36 seconds. Host Jimmy Kimmel had announced there would be a prize for the briefest speech, and Bridges ended up with a Jet Ski, for which he had no use, and a voucher for a hotel stay in Lake Havasu, a resort area in Arizona.
After getting photographed atop the Jet Ski with Helen Mirren at his side, he was presented with a document to sign saying he’d pay the taxes on the value of the watercraft. “They had just turned off the cameras,” he told Karger. “I thought it was hilarious.” He ended up donating the Jet Ski to be auctioned for charity, and he’s never used the voucher.
Bridges, a gay man, is one of several members of the LGBTQ+ community in the book. The others include Elton John, Melissa Etheridge, Joel Grey, and Rob Epstein — the latter being the director-producer of The Times of Harvey Milk. Epstein recounted accepting the award along with producer Richard Schmiechen, whose support was crucial to getting the film made, and becoming the first winner to thank a same-sex partner from the Oscar stage. “I came up with the term partner in life, so I’m told,” he recalled to Karger. It was important to acknowledge that the film was the first LGBTQ-themed one to win an Oscar and that he and Schmiechen were the first out gay filmmakers to be honored, Epstein said.
Etheridge had a similarly groundbreaking moment when accepting her Best Original Song Oscar in 2007 for “I Need to Wake Up,” which she wrote for Al Gore’s environmental documentary An Inconvenient Truth. She thanked her then-wife, actress Tammy Lynn Michaels, and the audience applauded at the word “wife” — their marriage wasn’t legally recognized, and the fight for marriage equality was ongoing. She further noted that for the first couple of months after she won the award, “I told everyone that the Oscar was the only naked man who’d ever been in my bedroom.”
Paul Sorvino with his daughter, Mira Sorvino, the night she won Best Supporting Actress for Mighty Aphrodite.BEI/Shutterstock via Running Press
50 Oscar Nights also includes many straight allies who won for LGBTQ-themed projects, such as Moonlight screenwriter Barry Jenkins. The year he won the Oscar for the Moonlight screenplay was 2017, when the film won Best Picture as well, but only after an infamous mix-up. Presenters Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway had been given the wrong envelope and announced La La Land as Best Picture. Moonlight’s creators came onstage after several minutes of uncertainty, which dampened their spirits, Jenkins told Karger.
Karger wasn’t sure Jenkins would agree to the interview or that he’d go into so much detail, as he hadn’t spoken publicly about the situation before. But “he shared very honestly,” Karger says, in what the author considers one of the highlights of his book.
Another highlight and another interview marked by great honesty was his talk with Sally Field about her Best Actress win for Norma Rae in 1981, Karger says. “I found her so funny, candid, fierce,” he says, including about her relationship with Burt Reynolds, which wasn’t going well at the time.
Field also had an experience that would be envied by any classic movie fan: Arriving late at the after-party, she ended up sitting next to Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn. “I turned into Gidget again,” Field recalled.
Of all the winners Karger sought out for the book, “the holy grail was Meryl Streep,” he says. “I had to be persistent to get her,” he notes of the perennial Oscar nominee and three-time winner. “I couldn’t do the book without her.”
There are some he would like to have interviewed but couldn’t, such as Eva Marie Saint, the Best Supporting Actress winner for 1954’s On the Waterfront, and the legendary Barbra Streisand, who won Best Actress in 1969 for Funny Girl. But Saint is nearing 100 and apparently doesn’t do interviews anymore, and Streisand was busy writing her own book.
Overall, though, he’s more than happy with the interviews he landed and with the reception the book is getting. He’d love to do a second volume, as he’s sure there are “still many, many more fascinating stories to tell.”
And as Oscar night 2024 approaches, he says yes, “the Oscars are super gay.”
“By and large, the LGBTQ+ community is more interested in the Oscars than our straight counterparts,” he says. “The Oscars are the epitome of good taste, and so is our community.”
50 Oscar Nights is out now from Running Press.
Emma Thompson with her mother, Phyllida Law, the night Thompson won Best Actress for Howards End.Kevin Mazur/WireImage/Getty Images via Running Press
