Any new gay movies for 2016
In an unforgettable section of the 1995 documentary The Celluloid Closet, Vidal claims he re-wrote part of the 1959 film to heavily imply that Charlton Heston’s title character and his childhood friend (and later betrayer) Messala (Stephen Boyd) were more than just friends growing up. So it’s important to remember, when re-examining the gay legacy of Ben-Hur, that if ever there were homoerotic tensions between Messala and his childhood friend, Judah Ben-Hur, they were the invention of Gore Vidal, one of the many screenwriters on the 1959 Ben-Hur. That death-so famous from the 1959 film-was not in the book, and therefore off limits to Clarke. That’s one of the reasons why, for example, Toby Kebell’s Messala doesn’t die in the arms of Jack Huston’s Ben-Hur at the end of the famous chariot race. I had to go back to the source material, so anything that’s in the 59 version that is not in the book I could not use.” owned the old MGM library and so I can’t do a remake of that, because Warner Bros. When asked if his version was an adaptation or reinterpretation of the book, rather than the 1959 film, Clarke explained: “That’s very accurate, and there’s a reason for that.
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and this is where the question of adaptation and rebooting gets complicated. Clarke-who previously wrote the screenplay for 2010’s The Way Back-then picked up the original 1880 Lew Wallace book Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ.
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To hear screenwriter Keith Clarke tell it, the reason may be more technical than you’d expect.Ĭlarke was inspired to write his own version of Ben-Hur after watching the 1959 classic with his wife and ruminating on the theme of forgiveness. “Why Has Hollywood Put Ben-Hur Back in the Closet?” a Guardian headline asks-noting that any of the homoerotic undertones present in the 1959 version of the film are absent in this version.
#Any new gay movies for 2016 update
Despite positive reviews (including one from this site), there’s a small storm of controversy brewing around 2016’s update of the classic story Ben-Hur.