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THE LEGACY OF ARCH BROWN “Zee art film … “ I remember that campy scene in Valley of the Dolls where the beautiful Jennifer North played by the beautiful Sharon Tate has to get a job making soft porn films for a sleazy French movie director. Jennifer complains that a beautiful scenery and a bare bottom doesn't make art. That may have been the case with those many of those XXX movies about boobies, boobies, boobies, boobies that Neely O'Hara laments she didn't have, but the gay filmmakers that emerged from the gay liberation movement of the 1970s radically changed in many ways, at least for many communities in major urban areas, the perception that gay films were either pornographic peep shows, campy drag queens singing, or mainstream films where a gay character commits suicide after being outed. One of these filmmakers was Arch Brown, who made a notable film, The Night Before, with Jack Deveau of Hand in Hand fame. 
Arch did not even set out to make gay films, much less films that because of explicit sex were deemed pornographic. He was born in Chicago as Arnold Kreuger in 1936. After attending Northwestern University, he came to New York City, the destination of so many artistically-inclined and gay people during the 1960s (and before!). His parents thought it would be respectable for him to go into television (perhaps because less overtly gay-oriented than the actual theater), but he switched majors and decided he wanted to write and direct plays. He first worked at Circle Square in the Village, but then he switched careers and got a job in advertising. After contracting hepatitis, he had to quit that job, and ended up, after picking up a guy in Central Park who liked him and his camera expertise, began making “home movies.” But apparently his home movies weren't at the level of crude amateur ones of the peep show variety, and they ended up showing in the private gay movie club Cinema 7. According to an interview in the 1970s gay magazine Michael's Thing, “Andy Warhol's Interview got to him, and Variety sent one of their guys downtown to take a look at these new-fangled movies.” I wonder if Warhol saw something of his own transformation of new realist techniques such as collage in his own pop art in Arch Brown's concretely realistic, but also mixed with elements of surrealism, films of gay men's sexual relationships. 
These films were realistic because the sex was actually occurring on the screen, and they also used creatively materials from everyday life at that time, ranging from pop music to advertising. Arch Brown perfected the above approaches when he collaborated with Jack Deveau in The Night Before. 
This surreal Hand-in-Hand film offers a funny, touching and realistic look at lovers and their emotional responses to both jealousy and carnal lust. Casting a group of nine men of varied types and cock sizes, the film begins with two average men, Hank (Coke Hennessy) and Paul (Michael Cade), who meet and fall in love in New York City when Hank helps photographer Paul with a shoot in the park. 
At Paul's place, they check out photos that he's taken, including one of Paul with another man, both naked. Their ensuing relationship and lust develops through dinners, visiting an art gallery, picking out a kitten, and making out in the dark room. They have their first touching and intimate sexual encounter after this (with no live sound but good string piano music; a good score by David Earnest): Paul passionately eats out Hank's asshole and rolls around the bed with him to fall into a 69 session. Paul later stands and humps Hank's throat before filling his butt with cock; they go to bed after sex. Sounds simple enough, but at this point Brown takes us into the surreal world of Hank's dreams. In his dreams, Hank watches Paul hungrily sucking one man's thick prick after seducing him (when his cock and balls appear through curtains) and fucking another man's tight asshole while Hank himself sucks the cock of a black man in the basement of a building. Also occurring in this sexual montage dream are: Paul fucking the hairy ass of the kitten seller on a roof, Paul and Hank painting each other's body and kissing in a water tower, two professional dancers in a poster coming to life and dancing naked against a black background by a ladder, and Hank participating in an orgy where he is fucked by a huge black double-headed dildo. 
The dream depicts what Brown terms "lover's paranoia", the kind of insecurity one feels when one falls too hard for someone too fast. What's interesting here is how some elements of the film were influenced by Brown's own life (a camera shoot in the park), and how artistic mediums (in this case, painting and photography, which mediums themselves have always undergone a rather fraught relationship!) can both concretely and symbolically convey various dynamics of sexual attraction. This gay sex movie was originally shot on film; filmed with StudioSound, a magnetic transfer of the original magnetic studio sound tracks for the feature. In 1974, according to Variety, one of the 50 top-grossing films at the 55th Street Playhouse in New York City. 
Starting in 1976, Brown made a series of films for P.M. Productions, including the gay porn spoof of Charlie's Angels, Harley's Angels, and also classics like All Tied Up, Five Hard Pieces, Hot Flashes, Muscle Bound, Pier Groups, and Dynamite. 
Brown said in his interview in Michael's Thing, that he didn't want to be political; he basically wanted to make a good fuck film, but his films aren't just two guys fucking, nor are they apolitical. They come out a sociopolitical movement that wanted to carve out a visible niche in New York's arts community, and they also, without hitting the viewer over the head with slogans, realistically show the challenges of gay sexual relationships in a world just starting to break down closets of fear and hiding. Brown himself took advantage of a new climate of tolerance. According to his obituary (he died in 2012), in the late 1970s, Brown began writing plays, which he continued to do until very recently. His first play, News Boy, was his most successful, receiving an Off Broadway production in 1979; it focused on the coming out of the gay son of a conservative politician. A 1998 comedy by Brown, FREEZE!, received the Eric Bentley Playwriting Prize that year and has been produced several times. During the last decade of his life, Brown founded and ran the Thorny Theater, in Palm Springs, which mounted several gay-themed plays each season; the theater closed in 2010. After his partner, Bruce Brown, died in 1993 (Arch used his lover's last name professionally), Brown established the Arch and Bruce Brown Foundation, which gives grants to LGBT playwrights and to theater groups mounting LGBT-themed plays and which has sponsored periodic literary competitions awarding prizes to playwrights and fiction writers whose works are “based on, or inspired by, a historic person, culture, event, or work of art.” Check out our website for Arch Brown's films The Night Before and So Many Men, So Little Time (coupon for these below) and also for several vintage posters of the movies he made for P.M. Productions. |
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