The hopelessly dated 1968 play “The Boys in the Band” yields a surprisingly sprightly and multifaceted documentary, “Making the Boys.”
The Mart Crowley piece about an all-gay birthday party is a “landmark,” i.e. unwatchable, work, full of campy gesturing and bitchy one-liners. “A bunch of queens getting drunk,” summarizes one observer. ” ‘Friends’ without Prozac,” says another.
But as playwright Tony Kushner remarks in this frequently funny and always compelling film, the play is “deeply integrated into the history of our community.”
The film takes us from ’60s Malibu beach parties, where Rock Hudson lounged, to gays picketing the play as retrograde merely 18 months after its frankness made a splash. “Highly skillful work that I despised,” says gay playwright Edward Albee, author of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”
Crowley, who started as a gofer for Natalie Wood (and wound up writing for her husband Robert Wagner’s 1970s show “Hart to Hart”), seems pleasantly puzzled by it all. After his follow-up play flopped, he took up residence in a bottle and stayed there for years, but today seems fit and mellow at 75.
Meanwhile, the producer, director and much of the cast died of AIDS. The bitterness of the epidemic years is now muted: Via unprotected sex, says activist Larry Kramer, “we were murdering our friends. I don’t think we’ve ever taken responsibility for that.” Kramer spent the 1980s blaming the Catholic Church and the government for AIDS.