Epilogue: "...and that's why I made The Number 23

from imdb.com/WENN Movie/TV news:

Carrey To Pen Depression Self-Help Book

Actor Jim Carrey is writing a self-help book for sufferers of depression who want to avoid using drugs to beat the condition. The Fun With Dick And Jane star battled with depression for years after his meteoric rise to fame in the 1990s, using Prozac and other medication to try and control his dark thoughts. But the 46-year-old states numbing the pain with medication is not the way to deal with the problem, and hopes his new book will help people focus on where their problems stem from. He says, "I dealt with depression for a while by medicating with Prozac and although it was good for dealing with the problem there and then, I wasn't getting to the bottom of my anger and frustration. I think we have a real problem these days in that everything is treated with a drug. I think there's a whole new way of healing depression that doesn't require drugs, and I'm writing a book about it. Who better than a comedian to talk about depression right?"

"I think there's a whole new way of healing depression that doesn't require drugs..."? I'm not sure which is more annoying: that Jim Carrey wants to invent psychotherapy; or that he's planning to ignore decades of clinical research because he's an actor with a theory.

On the other hand, how many scientists and doctors have back-to-back Golden Globe Awards? Take that biochemistry!!!

The Dina Show

From Reuters:

Lindsay Lohan's mom to star in reality TV show

Dina Lohan took a lot of heat for managing daughter Lindsay Lohan's rise to stardom and U.S. television viewers now can watch as she shepherds 14-year-old daughter Ali into a show business career.

Full story

Last November, Vanity Fair ran a story, "Moms Gone Wild" about Dina Lohan, Lynne Spears and Kathy Hilton. Money quote:

And yet Lohan,...does not appear to have a close personal relationship with reality. "Lindsay's no different than any other 20-year-old girl who's doing some experimenting," Dina says to me during our brief phone conversation, which took place several days before Lindsay, fresh out of rehab, got arrested again, this time for D.U.I. and cocaine possession. "It's just that when we did this kind of thing we didn't have cameras turned on us all the time. What were you doing when you were 20, for goodness' sake?" I didn't have the heart to say, Well, not crashing my Mercedes into a tree! But nor was I beautiful, talented, and surrounded by people who couldn't say no to me.

Any bets on how soon we'll see the words, "edited to make me look bad," in a press release?

The New York Times Interviews Marni Nixon

Voice of the Many, but Rarely Herself

Frank J. Prial, New York Times, 6 March, 2007

The role of Mrs. Higgins, the mother of Prof. Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady, requires an actress capable of expressing hauteur, exasperation and motherly concern, sometimes all at once. What it does not require is a singing voice, as it is among that classic musical’s few roles without a song.

So who has been cast in the New York Philharmonic’s concert-style revival at Lincoln Center this week?

None other than Marni Nixon, perhaps the most famous singing-voice-without-a-face in the history of motion pictures.

“I’d love to have a song in the show,” Ms. Nixon said during an interview in her West End Avenue apartment in New York. “I’d love to be able to call up Alan Jay Lerner and Fritz Loewe and say, ‘Please, can you add something called ‘Mrs. Higgins’s Lament?’ But it isn’t going to happen, of course.”

Among her unseen roles were the singing voices for Deborah Kerr in The King and I, Natalie Wood in West Side Story and Margaret O’Brien in The Secret Garden — as well as, most famously, Audrey Hepburn in the Oscar-winning screen version of My Fair Lady. Most recently, in 1998, she was the animated Grandmother Fa in Disney’s Mulan.

For her part, Ms. Nixon, 77, said she understood perfectly why the studio moguls chose to place famous faces in the starring roles and relegate her to the shadows.

“Hollywood wanted recognizable stars,” Ms. Nixon said. “And the fact that a lot of the stars couldn’t sing was only a minor inconvenience to the big producers.”

Her first dubbing job was for Miss O’Brien in The Secret Garden. Miss O’Brien, 12 at the time, was one of Hollywood’s top child stars. Ms. Nixon was 19.

Her first major job, she said, was singing the role of Anna in The King and I. “Deborah was tough to work with, but she was a complete professional,” Ms. Nixon said of Miss Kerr. “We worked on phrasing, we worked on interpretation, everything. It’s hard to believe now, but each number took a week.”

A dubber, Ms. Nixon explained, doesn’t simply substitute her voice for the actress’s voice. “The important thing is to sound as the actress would sound if she were doing the actual singing,” she said.

It being Hollywood, of course, sometimes the jobs verged on the ludicrous. Her work with Marilyn Monroe, for instance, in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), consisted of just one phrase in one song — perhaps the musical’s most famous, “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.” The phrase: “These rocks don’t lose their shape.”

If the studio bosses had had their way, Ms. Nixon said, she would have done more. “Actually, the studio wanted her entire voice dubbed,” she said. “They thought her voice was silly. I thought her voice suited her persona beautifully.”

In 1964, when Ms. Nixon was tapped to sing Eliza Doolittle in George Cukor’s screen version of My Fair Lady, one of her chief concerns was how the choice would sit with Julie Andrews, who had had great success with the role onstage but was passed over by Hollywood for the established star: Hepburn.

“I did the job,” Ms. Nixon said, “but I felt uneasy,” especially when she and Ms. Andrews later worked together in The Sound of Music.

The story is now part of Hollywood lore: Ms. Andrews came out ahead by starring in Disney’s Mary Poppins and winning the Oscar for best actress in the same year that “My Fair Lady” was released. [Ms. Nixon voiced the animated geese in "Jolly Holiday" in that film.]

Ms. Andrews seemed to harbor no grudges, Ms. Nixon said. When the two appeared in The Sound of Music, she said, Ms. Andrews made a point of seeking her out, shaking her hand and saying, “I like your work.” (Ms. Nixon played one of the nuns.)

When Ms. Nixon was cast as Eliza in a City Center revival of My Fair Lady, Ms. Andrews helped her overcome anxiety about handling the role.

Ms. Nixon received a modest reward for her highly praised dubbing work: stepping in front of the camera before millions of people as a presenter at the 1969 Academy Awards. The category? Best musical score.

Perhaps naturally, not all the people whose voices she dubbed were happy about it. When filming West Side Story, Wood refused to cooperate, and Ms. Nixon worked by herself on the musical numbers. It was not entirely Wood’s fault; the studio bosses were keeping her in the dark about Ms. Nixon’s true role.

“She thought I was there for backup and that she would be doing the entire picture,” Ms. Nixon said. “In fact, they didn’t like her singing, and, without telling her, proceeded to use my voice.”
And when Wood found out? “Well, she was enraged,” Ms. Nixon said. [Natalie Wood's vocals can be heard on the special edition DVD of West Side Story. The correct decision was made.]

Ms. Nixon will be surrounded by a high-wattage cast at this week’s Philharmonic staging of My Fair Lady, including Kelsey Grammer as Henry Higgins, Kelli O’Hara as Eliza Doolittle, Brian Dennehy as Alfred P. Doolittle and Charles Kimbrough as Col. Hugh Pickering. There will be four performances in Avery Fisher Hall, tomorrow, Thursday, Friday and Saturday.

Born in 1930 into a musical family in Southern California, Ms. Nixon started learning the violin at 4. Soon she had a singing act with her sisters. But young Marni had bigger plans. As a child she was an extra in dozens of films. As a teenager she joined the Roger Wagner Chorale (in which her best pal was another teenager, Marilyn Horne) and began to sing in local concerts. She won enough parts to make her solo debut at 17, in Carmina Burana, under Leopold Stokowski at the Hollywood Bowl.

Though the dubbing work has drifted away, Ms. Nixon said, she keeps busy. “I still do a lot of singing,” she said. “The idea is to choose the things that are possible for me to do well and to be useful to the play at the same time. It’s just too bad people know how old I am because my voice sounds like I’m much younger.”

She was in the Broadway musical James Joyce’s The Dead, with Christopher Walken, in 1999, and she has put together a one-woman show about herself, titled The Voice of Hollywood.

She describes her show as a stroll down memory lane. “I show some stills from the films I dubbed, tell some stories, sing a few things and answer questions about my life,” she said. “People always love to ask me questions. And why not? I’ve had a really fantastic life, I think.”


Nixon also dubbed for Deborah Kerr in An Affair to Remember. The liner notes in the remastered edition of The King & I's soundtrack feature more of Nixon's recollections of working with the great Deborah Kerr. The album also contains some material that was cut from the film, including Mrs. Anna's soliloquy, "Shall I Tell You What I Think of You?" The number shifts back and forth between dialogue and song, and Kerr and Nixon recorded it standing side by side at the same microphone, each pointing to the other when it was her turn to take over.

When I was in college, I took a film class on the genre of the movie musical. My professor told us that Barbara Cook dubbed Audrey Hepburn's voice in My Fair Lady. I tried to tell him he was wrong by asking, "Wasn't it Marni Nixon?" He assured me that it wasn't and I let it go. Don't I tell the best stories?

For further reading... Ms. Nixon has also recently published a biography, I Could Have Sung All Night: My Story, that was co-written with Stephen Cole, who has also written, among other things, the book and lyrics to a musical version of The Night of the Hunter.

Seriously. I have the album.

Happy Birthday, King!

When I started this thing, I made a conscious decision to ignore birthdays. Too many, too often. I can't even keep up on the weekly DVD updates that I'm pretty sure nobody cares about anyway.

But this is the King.

Clark Gable earned that nickname when he was voted the King of Hollywood by some poll; Ed Sullivan crowned him in 1938 and it stuck.

I recently finished the book Deadly Illusions: Jean Harlow and the Murder of Paul Bern by former MGM story editor Samuel Marx and a dancer named Joyce Vanderveen, who was presumably his girlfriend at the time. The book, published in 1983, isn't great. MGM Producer Paul Bern married Jean Harlow in July of 1932. Two months later, his body was found in their home with a bullet through the brain. Officially, his death was labeled a suicide, though that conclusion has been under scrutiny since day one, mostly because several MGM executives (including LB himself) were at the scene several hours before the cops were called. The situation grew even fishier when Bern's brother announced that Paul had never had a secret first wife - even though no one had asked.

It's a fascinating subject for a book, and Marx & Vanderveen uncover a great deal of evidence that the secret first wife - who was scizophrenic - probably killed Bern. But a lot of their evidence is hearsay. The not-entirely-reliable biographer Charles Higham calls Marx out of the blue to say that Howard Strickling, MGM's head of publicity at the time, called him out of the blue about writing his (Strickling's) memoir. Strickling showed up at Higham's and confessed everything about the Paul Bern cover-up - after insisting that Higham neither record the conversation nor take notes. And of course, Strickling died before Higham revealed anything to Marx. Please.

There's a lot of extraneous information (Joyce lost her appetite when the restaurant they went to was decorated with hunting trophies! Parking is hard in Los Angeles!) that has nothing to do with Paul Bern or Jean Harlow. What is ultimately an occasionally dull 260-page book, could likely be trimmed to the length of a fascinating article in Vanity Fair. (Of course, it didn't help matters that I started Deadly Illusions right after reading James Ellroy's My Dark Places, a much better book about a man digging into the past to solve the death of someone close to him.)

And why do I bring all this up on Gable's birthday? Because reading about Jean Harlow made me want to see her in action, so I watched Red Dust last night. Directed by an uncredited (for some reason) Victor Fleming, Red Dust is the film Baby Jean was making when Bern died, but I chose it because it's my favorite Harlow movie and the best of the six films she made with Gable. He owns and runs a rubber plantation in Indochina. She's a "hostess" in trouble with the law in Saigon, hiding out until the heat dies down. Neither can resist the other's raw sex appeal and the sparks and banter fly.

Trouble ensues when the new surveyor shows up from the States with his wife (Mary Astor) in tow, but everything works out in the end. John Lee Mahin's script is packed with indelible dialogue, none of which I can remember at the moment. And if I have to re-watch the movie, I won't get this damn thing posted until tonight and no one will read it until after the King's birthday is over. Suffice it to say that never has a debate between roquefort and gorgonzola been so delightful.

Red Dust is not available on DVD yet (though it does show up occasionally on Turner Classic Movies), but two other Gable/Harlow vehicles are: China Seas and Wife vs. Secretary. Both are included in the divine Clark Gable Signature Collection, as is John Ford's 1953 remake of Red Dust, Mogambo. Re-set in Africa, Mogambo features Gable in the same role, with Ava Gardner and Grace Kelly in for Harlow and Astor. Unlike Red Dust, Mogambo was made under the strictures of the production code. And it shows.

The Guardian on Oscar Levant

Hollywood's piano man

Misha Donat, The Guardian, 22 Dec 2006

From a week ago, but Levant's birthday was the 27th, so I'm not too far behind.

Also, he died in 1972, so not much about him has changed in the past week.

"It isn't what you are, it's what you don't become that hurts."

A line from the Joan Crawford melodrama Humoresque, spoken by Oscar Levant - who was born 100 years ago this month. He's playing the part of a pianist, but they are words that might have been intended for himself. Today the actor, musician and composer is chiefly remembered for his flamboyant public persona and his association with George Gershwin, yet at the peak of his career, in the early 1940s, his concert fee was higher than those commanded by Vladimir Horowitz and Arthur Rubinstein. Not because he was regarded as a finer pianist (he wasn't), but because his radio show, Information Please, had a regular audience of 12m and had made him a household name in the US.

Born in Pittsburgh on December 27 1906, Levant was the youngest son in an orthodox Jewish family. He received his first piano lessons from one of his brothers. On the day of his first lesson at high school, the Polish pianist Ignacy Jan Paderewski was due to give a local recital. The 12-year-old Levant greeted his new teacher by asking him if he wanted to hear what Paderewski was going to perform - and played the programme in its entirety.

Levant made his debut on Broadway at the age of 21 in Burlesque, adapted by Clifford Odets from a story by Fannie Hurst. He was cast as a pianist, and the play was filmed the following year as The Dance of Life. "I played an unsympathetic part: myself," he commented.

The best of his films was The Band Wagon, the Minnelli musical made in 1953, starring Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse. But by this time, Levant was clearly ill. He had always been a notorious hypochondriac and he had become addicted to prescription drugs. He was to make only one more film (also for Minnelli) - The Cobweb, in which he played another part that might have been modelled on himself: a patient in a psychiatric hospital.

His ill-tempered personality was legendary. Ernst Lubitsch's comedy That Uncertain Feeling features an obnoxious pianist who causes mayhem to the bourgeois marriage of Merle Oberon and Melvyn Douglas. The part was reputedly modelled on Levant. Kenneth Tynan summed him up: "Pearl is disease of oyster; Levant is disease of Hollywood."

As a wit, he could hold his own with such friends of his as Dorothy Parker, SJ Perelman and George S Kaufman and Tynan picked Levant as one of Hollywood's three quickest on the draw for one-liners. It was Levant who famously quipped, "I knew Doris Day before she was a virgin."

Levant's talent for wisecracking ultimately put paid to his ambition to be taken seriously as a musician. The pieces he wrote during his period of study with Schoenberg - a piano concerto which he performed with the NBC Symphony, a string quartet and a nocturne - have sunk without trace. Of the 80-odd songs he composed, one at least - "Blame It On My Youth" - is still widely known, and was recorded by such artists as Chet Baker, Art Farmer, Keith Jarrett and Nat King Cole. Levant complained it brought back more memories than royalties.

His own recordings as a pianist include etudes, polonaises and mazurkas by Chopin, as well as music by Debussy and Liszt, and the Grieg and Tchaikovsky concertos (the latter with the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Eugene Ormandy). But it is as a Gershwin pianist that his chief claim to fame lies. He played all the major works to the composer, so his interpretations have the stamp of authority; and his recordings of the "Rhapsody in Blue" (with Ormandy) and the "I Got Rhythm Variations" (with Morton Gould and his orchestra) have a rhythmic verve and spontaneity that have never been surpassed. So much did Levant fall under the spell of Gershwin, that a chapter devoted to him in his autobiography A Smattering of Ignorance is entitled - not without a tinge of irony - "My Life".

Oddly enough, in an article that notes Levant in Hollywood, the films he made with Vincente Minnelli and his association with George Gershwin, there is no mention of An American in Paris. Possibly because Ms. Donat finds the film as difficult to sit through as I do.

This article is the inspiration for this weeks 5 on Friday.

Gay rights and wrongs: Hollywood's biggest taboo

When two of America's brightest young actors decided to come out of the closet, there were hopes the industry was learning to practise what it preached. But homosexuality is still the love that dare not speak its name, reports Andrew Gumbel

The Independent, December 2006

The article focuses on two television actors, but Hollywood is Hollywood and that means movies.

Sometimes, Hollywood's secrets spill out in the most surprising ways. Back in October, two of the stars on Grey's Anatomy, the hottest hospital drama show on American television, had a raging fight on the set. Isaiah Washington was ready to go with a scene, but some of the other actors were not. He and Patrick Dempsey - who both play surgical residents in a fictional Seattle hospital - started exchanging words and, at one point, Washington grabbed Dempsey by the throat. According to news reports at the time, Washington said: "I'm not your little faggot like that guy." Or something along those lines.

The remark was probably meant as no more than a rebuke of Dempsey and his apparent expectation that Washington would work to his schedule. But the gossip-mongers on the internet quickly started asking who exactly the "faggot" might be. Was one of the cast-members on the show gay? So far, so trivial. But then something thoroughly unexpected happened. T R Knight, a 33-year-old actor on the show who plays an emphatically heterosexual doctor called George O'Malley, issued a statement to People magazine. "I guess there have been a few questions about my sexuality, and I'd like to quiet any unnecessary rumours that may be out there," he said. "While I prefer to keep my personal life private, I hope the fact that I'm gay isn't the most interesting part of me."

In the showbusiness world, this was little short of a bombshell. Hollywood may fancy itself as a politically progressive sort of place, where gay people are not only accepted but are employed in large numbers. But the unwritten rule - unchanged in many decades - is that no actor ever admits he is homosexual. Especially not a young, good-looking actor whose character, like Dr O'Malley, conducts on-screen relationships with one attractive woman after another.

Knight's coming out was not the only surprise of the season. A few weeks later, some of the blunter showbiz bloggers on the internet started murmuring about another prominent television actor, Neil Patrick Harris, who is currently starring in a sitcom called How I Met Your Mother, playing an inveterate womaniser. Harris made his name as a teenage performer in the Steven Bochco - David E Kelley comedy Doogie Howser[, M.D.] about a child prodigy. He then played a drugged out version of himself in the cult 2004 film Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle.
In late October, a website called Canada.com posted a nasty little item that started: "Nepotism is alive and well in Hollywood." It went on to suggest that Harris had secured a guest role on How I Met Your Mother for a fellow actor it referred to as his boyfriend. Harris's publicist issued a statement stating that Harris "is not of that persuasion", only to be deluged in more negative publicity on the web from bloggers accusing both Harris and his publicist of hypocrisy and bad faith.

Once again, People magazine got the scoop, another personal statement from an actor acknowledging his homosexuality. "The public eye has always been kind to me, and until recently, I have been able to live a pretty normal life," Harris said. "Now, it seems there is speculation and interest in my private life .

"So, rather than ignore those who choose to publish their opinions without actually talking to me, I am happy to dispel any rumours or misconceptions and am quite proud to say that I am a very content gay man living my life to the fullest and fortunate to be working with wonderful people in the business I love."

Actors who have spent any time working in the Hollywood system are little short of stunned. It's not that there is anything faintly unusual or shocking about the existence of gay actors. Going public, though, is something that simply is not done. "It's a death sentence for your career," said Eve Gordon, a (heterosexual) film and television actress. "All my friends who are gay keep it secret. They don't even know where to draw the line socially... It's like being a Communist in the McCarthy era. It's a gigantic terror. So coming out is an incredibly brave thing to do."

That hard truth is itself a taboo topic of conversation in 2006. This, after all, was touted as the year of the gay movie, thanks to the success and multiple awards showered on Brokeback Mountain, Capote and other titles featuring openly gay characters. Hollywood likes to think of itself as a bastion of sexual tolerance. When gay men started going down with Aids in disproportionate numbers in the 1980s, Hollywood rushed to raise money and awareness of the disease and destigmatise its causes.

The Aids crisis, in turn, made it easier to break one taboo - the depiction of gay characters on screen. Tom Hanks' Oscar-winning turn as a lawyer dying of Aids in Philadelphia (1992) was undoubtedly the big turning point in that battle. Before that, playing gay was regarded as a possible threat to an actor's future career. After that, it became positively desirable.

According to Donna Deitch, who wrote and directed the groundbreaking lesbian romance Desert Hearts in the mid-1980s, playing a gay character is now seen on a par with playing an autistic character, or a schizophrenic, or someone with horrible physical deformities. "That's where the acclaim is," she said. "Actors want to play disadvantaged people, whatever the disadvantage is...

"In 1986, when I made Desert Hearts, you couldn't get any actors of any consequence or familiarity to even consider the role of a gay character. It wasn't going to happen. Now, if you are offering a gay part, and it's a good part, people are going to jump at it. That's what's changed."

The appeal extends to female gay parts as well as male ones: Hillary Swank won an Oscar for her role as a transgendered teenager in Boys Don't Cry, and Charlize Theron came close to winning another one when she played the real-life lesbian serial killer Aileen Wuornos in Monster (2003). The one difference, Deitch pointed out sardonically, is that lesbian characters almost invariably end up either in a bisexual love triangle or dead. "Only in Desert Hearts," she said, "do they live happily ever after."

But playing gay and admitting to being gay are two completely different things. When it comes to the latter, Hollywood still adheres to the mentality that American audiences look to their on-screen idols as outlets for their own romantic fantasies and thus need to think of them as strictly heterosexual. The mentality is not necessarily wrong - homophobia is certainly widespread in the American heartland, as evidenced by the slew of recent state ballot initiatives condemning gay marriage. But it does suggest a certain failure of the imagination. Actors, after all, are professionals who make audiences believe they are something they are not. If a straight actor like Hanks can play a gay character convincingly, why shouldn't a gay actor play straight? The fear goes deeper still: the actors seeking out gay parts, like Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal in Brokeback Mountain, or Greg Kinnear in the Jack Nicholson comedy As Good As It Gets, are all unambiguously heterosexual in real life. They are, as one veteran Hollywood actor put it, "beyond suspicion". You don't have to believe the scurrilously persistent - and vehemently denied -rumours concerning Tom Cruise's sexuality to understand that Hollywood's most visible leading man is never ever going to play a gay character on screen.

There are exceptions to the rule. A openly gay character actor such as Sir Ian McKellen can work unhindered partly because of the prestige that comes of being a British stage veteran and partly because he is not expected to play heterosexual romantic leads. An actress like Ellen DeGeneres - who famously came out on her own sitcom in the late 1990s - doesn't suffer unduly because she is a comedian first and an actor only second, and because, once again, she doesn't play parts that call for her to knock the sexual socks off her male audience members.
An openly gay actor called Jack Plotnick plays a womaniser on the Lifetime Network's series Lovespring [International]. Another, called Sam Harris, plays a notably effeminate but heterosexual character on CBS's The Class. But these are not big shows, and not the sorts of actors to wind up being discussed in Entertainment Weekly and the gossip rags.

For the most part, fear continues to rule. One actor, who did not want to be named, told a story of asking after a colleague's boyfriend while the two of them were in make-up. The colleague froze, visibly upset, and later explained that he didn't want his homosexuality mentioned even in front of the hair and make-up people, for fear that word might reach the show runners and producers and jeopardise his prospects of future work.

The actor heaped considerable blame on Hollywood's power elite, many of whom, are themselves openly gay but still continue to perpetuate an atmosphere of intolerance and oppression. "A lot of people are working against gays to shore up their own closet door," the actor said. "They say it's all about the market - if people won't buy it, there's nothing they can do about it." This is, of course, the way it's been since the golden age of the Hollywood studio system. Gay actors like Montgomery Clift and Rock Hudson were expected to make public displays of interest in the opposite sex. A recent biography of James Stewart revealed that, at the start of his career, Louis B Mayer was so worried about the implications of Stewart's lack of association with women that he obliged him to visit a private brothel he kept near the MGM lot. Part of the job of powerful gossip columnists like Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons, who took money from the studios, was to keep the public behaviour of gay actors in check and make sure their secret stayed safe from the American public.

Something is clearly changing now, if only because of the rise of the internet and an unmistakable paparazzi culture that feasts on the personal foibles of celebrities big and small. T R Knight and Neil Patrick Harris may not be household names, exactly, but both had endured months, if not years of hounding by the likes of Perez Hilton, a particularly shameless online gossip-monger who makes it entirely his business to "out" as many Hollywood people as possible without regard for privacy or libel laws.

The impact of their coming out remains to be seen, but will be keenly watched by everyone in the industry. Both Grey's Anatomy and How I Met Your Mother have done well enough to guarantee multi-season runs, which suggests that the two actors will remain in work for the foreseeable future.

After those shows fall away, it is anybody's guess what will happen next. Either their careers will fall apart or, just conceivably, another big Hollywood taboo might at last be broken.

A few notes:

By pointing out that Eve Gordon is a heterosexual making an observation on homosexuality, the article proves its own point.

Charlize Theron did, in fact, win an Oscar for Monster.

To emphazine Deitch's point that "lesbian characters almost invariably end up either in a bisexual love triangle or dead," Tom Hanks dies of Aids in Philadelphia; Hilary Swank in Boys Don't Cry and Jake Gyllenhaal in Brokeback Mountain are violently murdered (the latter perhaps only on screen); Charlize Theron is a serial killer in Monster. The necrology of gay characters in Hollywood is long and virtually all-inclusive.

For further viewing: The Celluloid Closet