FilmOut to celebrate its 20th anniversary this month
By Benny Cartwright
FilmOut San Diego is presenting a 20th anniversary screening of the popular LGBTQ film, Eating Out, on Wednesday, May 15, at 7 pm, as part of their monthly screening series.
The film, written and directed by Q. Allan Brocka, was an unexpected hit when it premiered in 2004, and remains a popular LGBTQ classic today.
LGBTQ San Diego County News caught up with Brocka, who currently resides in Los Angeles, in advance of the screening, to hear his thoughts on the making of the film, how it holds up 20 years later, and other projects he has in the works.
Also, Brocka will be attending the screening in San Diego and participating in a Q&A session following the film, so fans can ask him additional questions.
The popularity of Eating Out turned out to be so great that it spawned four sequels including Eating Out 2: Sloppy Seconds (2006), Eating Out: All You Can Eat (2009), Eating Out: Drama Camp (2011), and Eating Out: The Open Weekend (2011). All of the films are sexually charged and celebrate LGBTQ sexuality, something that Brocka said was rare to see on screen when the original film in the franchise was released.
And that original Eating Out film was a surprise success! According to Brocka, the idea for the film was simply to play a joke on his film class while getting his masters of film from the California Institute of the Arts.
“I had written all of the ‘important stuff’ for my degree program, so I wanted to write something fun, sexy, and super gay,” Brocka told LGBTQ San Diego County News. “In the middle of the final Eating Out script, there’s like a 17-page phone-sex scene, but I had first written that phone call script for class.”
Brocka said his goal was to have that phone-sex scene read in front of his class to humor his classmates and thought that would be the end of it. He had a variety of other scripts he still had to write for his masters program and continued to work on those.
But sometime later, Brocka met Michael Shoel of Ariztical Entertainment at a film festival, and a plan was hatched to turn Brocka’s little script into something bigger. At the time, Ariztical was a DVD distribution company that wanted to get into production, and Shoel told Brocka he believed they could make around $60,000 with a film, as long as it had “cute guys” on the cover, and two “full-frontal” nudity shots.
Brocka’s script originally had no nudity incorporated into it, but they made it happen and produced the film for a mere $43,000. The film was shot over 10 days in the desert community of Tucson, Arizona, where Shoel lived and they ran with it.
“I thought it would screen at a few local film festivals and I would’ve been happy with that,” Brocka said. “But it ended up premiering in 2004 at something like 100 festivals and grossing over $2 million in DVD sales.”
According to the website where tickets are purchased, the film, which stars Rebekah Kochan, Ryan Carnes, Scott Lunsford, Emily Stiles, and Jim Verraros – who took ninth place on season 1 of American Idol – follows the story of Caleb, a hunky poli-sci major, fresh off of a breakup with the aggressive Tiffany. Caleb is shocked when his gay roommate, Kyle (played by Verraros), lets him in on a little secret: gay men can get any girl they want.
Armed with this tidbit of knowledge, Caleb agrees to a plan hatched by Kyle, and finds himself pretending to be gay in order to woo Gwen, a smart-mouthed cutie with a penchant for boys who like boys.
Soon Caleb realizes his plan is not as simple as he first thought and at Gwen’s urging, he finds himself roped into “eating out” with her hunky roommate Marc – who is, naturally, the object of Kyle’s affection. The story explores whether Caleb can find a way to reveal his true feelings for Gwen without hurting Marc, or if both Marc and Kyle will be left out in the cold.
That story line sat well with audiences, and Brocka and friends would joke about doing a sequel – a sort of “sloppy seconds” to the first movie. And once they saw the success of the DVD sales that followed the initial on-screen release of the film, they knew a sequel was in order and named it appropriately, Eating Out 2: Sloppy Seconds, released in 2006.
Brocka recalled rushing to the local Virgin Megastore in West Hollywood on the day the original Eating Out film hit the shelves.
“I just wanted to see it on the shelf,” Brocka said, adding that he never expected the film to be one of the number one selling DVDs for over a month.
While the film received a mixed reception and won a variety of awards from various film festivals, Brocka said the film was remarkable because it gave people the opportunity to see queer people exploring sexuality with each other on screen in a positive portrayal.
“A lot of my work was influenced by what I call ‘American sex comedies’ – films like American Pie, Revenge of the Nerds, and others,” Brocka said. “In films like these, anytime there was a queer character, they were the most disgusting thing that could happen. Gay characters were typically portrayed as completely asexual and laughed at.”
Brocka wanted to change that portrayal with Eating Out.
“I wanted [LGBTQ people] to be the heroes of that,” he continued, “we have sex and it can be amazing and funny all at the same time.”
Brocka, who is of Filipino descent and was born on Guam, noted that his identities have also shaped his film-making and storytelling voice drastically. He said he knew from the age of 12 that he wanted to be a filmmaker – his uncle was Lino Brocka, a well-known film director in the Philippines.
“On Guam, only major release films were screened there,” Brocka said. “Steven Spielberg films were big there, so he was the biggest inspiration to me, but it led me to believe that all films had to be major Hollywood productions.”
It wasn’t until he got to college that someone showed him some films by John Waters, often referred to as “one of the grandfathers of cult cinema,” that he realized films could be about anything. (By the way, Mink Stole, one of just three actors who has starred in all of John Waters’ films to date, was featured in all of the Eating Out films except the original one).
“I don’t have to make a Hollywood film,” Brocka said. “Films can be about me, and that’s how I found my voice and started telling queer stories.”
But being able to share his own stories didn’t always mesh with studio executives.
“Most of the scripts I wrote in the early days had queer Filipino leads,” he said. “But I had many studio execs sit me down and basically tell me to pick one – why do they need to be Asian and queer?”
Ironically, Brocka found it was these same executives who had also told him to “Write what you know” – and being queer and Filipino was what he knew! He realized, however, what they meant was, “Write what you know about straight, white people.”
This was incredibly disappointing for Brocka, so when Eating Out came along, he tried hard to cast people of color for the lead roles.
“Unfortunately, back then, people of color already had a hard enough time finding lead roles,” Brocka said. “And then asking actors who were queer and/or of color to participate in a film that had sex scenes and full frontal nudity was really risky for them.”
These actors who already had the odds stacked against them, just couldn’t afford to have those sorts of roles on their resume, if they wanted to get other work in the future, Brocka explained.
“In the early 2000s, people were still not out of the closet like they are today,” he said. “Big stars like Ricky Martin and Neil Patrick Harris were even still in the closet then.”
Brocka was disappointed that the first Eating Out film featured an all-white principal cast and told himself he would never do that again. Since that first film, Brocka has always worked hard to ensure he includes characters of color to his scripts. In fact, his 2006 feature film, Boy Culture, originally was scripted to have an all-white cast, but Brocka wanted to change that to reflect the world he knew and included a black lead character.
By the time Eating Out 3 was released in 2009 – just five years after the original film – Brocka said that things in the Hollywood landscape had changed drastically. It was much easier to cast openly LGBTQ people for these types of films, and Brocka noted that Eating Out 3 featured a cast of all openly LGBTQ leads, including the actor who played the straight identified character.
When asked if he felt the film still holds up today, 20 years later, Brocka admits that it’s “not the best looking film as it was made with very little money.” He also noted that not all of the comedy holds up, as comedy has changed over the last two decades, but he feels the film still resonates well with people.
“People still talk and think fondly about the film – including several podcasters who have done Eating Out rewatch episodes that poke fun at the film,” he said.
What’s next for Brocka?
The filmmaker is currently working on a new movie called Love & Lockdown, featuring an all-Filipino cast. The film was shot in the Philippines last summer and Brocka calls it “a trans romantic comedy.” Love & Lockdown follows the story of trans horticulturalist Danny who finds himself stranded by the COVID-19 lockdown in the Philippines, where his family is from. While there, Danny and his British Indian girlfriend Neisha are unwillingly outed to Danny’s estranged family – who still thought Danny was a woman living in Toronto. Instead of the inevitable rejection he expects, he has no idea how to navigate the radical acceptance he finds.
Along with Love & Lockdown, Brocka said he is seriously considering a final Eating Out film he’d like to make to end the series. While hopeful that this year’s 20th anniversary of the original film will spark great interest in that, he’s still trying to figure out if it will make financial sense.
Unlike 20 years ago, Brocka noted, DVD sales, which were really the success of the film, just aren’t a thing anymore, and the streaming companies today don’t pay very well.
Maybe the San Diego audience at the 20th anniversary screening can give Brocka some encouragement to follow-through with his idea for a sixth and final Eating Out film!
He’s looking forward to visiting San Diego for the screening and said it was an honor to be invited.
“It’s kind of a dream that still resonates with me 20 years later, and I’m so pleased that somebody still finds my film interesting,” he said.
Brocka said that he actually attended the original San Diego screening of Eating Out in 2004 when it was presented at the FilmOut Festival, and he’s very excited to come back 20 years later – although he said he has visited San Diego many times over the years and loves it here!
FilmOut’s will screen Eating Out May 15 at 7 pm at the Landmark Hillcrest Cinemas, located at 3965 Fifth Ave. Tickets are $12 online or $15 at the door. Visit bit.ly/4dnU0uJ for tickets or more information.
–Benny Cartwright is a longtime activist and community leader. Reach him at [email protected]. Follow him on Instagram @BennyC80.
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