In 1987, when Haynes was 26, he began the first film that the public really noticed, though he’d been making films since grade school. It was a film about Karen Carpenter called
Superstar, with Barbie & Ken dolls as Karen & Richard Carpenter. The mock documentary was made while Haynes was working on his M.F.A. at Bard College (his undergraduate degree is from Brown, where he studied art & semiotics). To represent Karen’s anorexia, Haynes carved away the doll’s face as the film unfolded. Superstar is said to be an intellectual exercise about roles & societal pressures, & the critical reaction was characteristic of all Haynes’s films. Academics loved it.
Superstar was also an underground hit, shown in museums & clubs. The Husband saw it as a “secret feature” at the Seattle International Film Festival & raved. Haynes received a cease-&-desist order from Richard Carpenter, a legal move that helped put it on
Entertainment Weekly’s Top 50 cult films of all time.
Around that time, Haynes was living in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, & had been a founding member of Gran Fury, the artists’ collective of Act Up, theAIDS ac tivist group. With Christine Vachon, a Brown classmate, he ran Apparatus Productions, a set up for short independent films that eventually produced Haynes’s first feature film,
Poison. This film established Haynes as a leader of the New Queer Cinema, a movement that was as significant for the gay themed stories it told as for the way in which it told them from a gay point of view. Poison is a film with 3 interwoven stories: an AIDS-inspired horror film, a mock TV documentary & a Jean Genet-ish story of a homoerotic experience at a French prison. It won the grand jury prize at Sundance. More infamously, because Haynes had received a National Endowment for the Arts grant, it was taken up by Congressional Republicans & conservative commentators, who called it “filth” & gay porn. Haynes little art film helped put a stop to federally funded films forever.
Haynes’s next film was
Safe. Julianne Moore starred as a suburban woman with an undiagnosable environmental illness. It’s partly a horrifyingly intense study of suburbia,Wes Craven called it the scariest film of 1995, & a metaphor for the AIDS epidemic. Unlike
Poison,
Safe tells a straight ahead story.At the time, Haynes’s lover, Jim Lyons, was ill with AIDS, & Haynes visited him in the hospital in the mornings before going to the set.
Haynes first visit to Portland, where his sister lives, was to write
Far From Heaven, my favorite of his films & his first box-office success. The film was nominated for 4 Oscars.
Far From Heaven is a tribute to Douglas Sirk’s melodramas, with Julianne Moore as a perfect 1950s housewife who discovers that her husband, played by Dennis Quaid, is gay; she then falls in love with a black man, played by Dennis Haysbert.
I have spotted Todd Haynes around Portland. He has come into the store that I manage. This city is a lo-fi, a do-it-yourselfer’s paradise, a place where, your career is not necessarily everything. I have known people for weeks that never asked me what I did for a living. Haynes: “
When I moved to Portland, I was more social & productive than I’d ever been in my entire life. I remember being at an opening, talking to Gus, & people were just saying, ‘Hey Todd!’ ‘Hey Todd!’ I just felt available, & I loved that feeling. In New York, if someone came & knocked on your door without telling you, you’d be like, ‘Get out.’ ” Gus is my good close personal friend- Gus Van Sant, who directed me in
Drugstore Cowboy; he also lives in Portland.
Haynes bought an old Arts & Crafts bungalow in the NE Quadrant, not that far from where I live. He planted a garden, painted, got out his guitar, & made movies. Portland is a cheap city, or cheaper than New York, which is a plus for the method that Haynes uses to make films. Randall Poster, Haynes music supervisor on
Velvet Goldmine, another really terrific Haynes film:
“He lives in a modest way and that is ultimately very powerful, because he’s kind of incorruptible, & he has people by his side who will kill for him. These movies are very hard, & it’s a long road, but it’s ultimately very fulfilling.”I am a fan of his work. Because I am a Douglas Sirk freak,
Far From Heaven is one of my favorite films ever, flawless really. I always watch his homage to glitter rock-
Velvet Goldmine whenever I happen on it on cable.
We almost share a birthday. I would really love to have him over for cocktails, & he can bring Gus.
