Who says you can't teach an old film genre new tricks? Todd Haynes turned 1950s melodrama on its head with last year's acclaimed Far From Heaven. Now the '60s Doris Day/Rock Hudson sex comedies receive a revival—and touch of revisionism—in Down With Love. Bursting with style, candy colors, super-chic artificial sets (a la the architecture of Eero Saarinen, Richard Neutra and Alvar Aalto), Daniel Orlandi's fantastic costumes (inspired by Givenchy, Jean-Louis, Oleg Cassini, and Balenciaga), endless double-entendre wordplay, and Marc Shaiman's swanky score, it's a true eye and ear candy valentine.
Sexy Ewan McGregor plays Catcher Block, a womanizing, martini-shaking playboy journalist capable of 'catch'ing any babe he wants. Except perhaps Barbara Novak (Renee Zellweger), writer of a pre-feminist tome, Down With Love, that instructs women to—like men—separate sex from love and become liberated careerists. Determined to expose Barbara as a romantic in wolf's clothing, Catcher pretends to be a prudish everyman and begins seducing. Meanwhile, their respective best friends—Peter (David Hyde Pierce) and Vikki (Sarah Paulson)—begin falling in love themselves. Up with romance ... '60s style!
Down With Love was written by Eve Ahlert and Dennis Drake, and produced by Bruce Cohen and Dan Jinks, the Oscar-winning openly gay producers of American Beauty. All are professed fans of the '60s Day/Hudson genre: staples like Pillow Talk (1959), Lover Come Back (1961) and Send Me No Flowers (1964). 'My parents were huge fans so I remember having seen those movies since I was a little kid,' Cohen recalls. 'Part of the fun of this [project] was going back and watching them again and discovering what a complete pleasure they were, how funny and sophisticated the dialogue was. One of things that was important from the get-go was that we make a movie that, if you love the Hudson/Day movies, you'll enjoy and appreciate every little nuance that portends back to them. But if you don't then it's a completely delightful experience on its own.' Day, of course, was/is a gay icon ('Que Sera Sera' anyone?). And Hudson, as we all know now, was a big ol' queer. However, the filmmakers chose to not stir up pink-colored subversiveness as much as Haynes did in Far From Heaven. 'I don't know that we wanted to be subversive,' Cohen notes. 'I know it was certainly our intention to keep the style intact but push the envelope further with innuendo. They would play around [with gayness in the old films]. Like in Lover Come Back, where Rock's character pretends to be gay. But nobody suspected [he WAS gay] at that point in time.'
Regardless, Cohen adds 'we had bright pink director's chairs on the set.'
After scouting for a director, Cohen and Jinks enlisted Peyton Reed, the straight-but-of-queer-sensibility fellow behind gay favorite Bring It On. 'When I read the script, [the gay angle] wasn't the first thing that leapt out at me,' Reed admits. 'It was that it's incredibly well written and so specific, with cleverly crafted dialogue. It's certainly not that I choose projects because they're gay themed, but I don't shy away if someone thinks they are. With Bring it On, that was a world I had never seen in movies before—competitive cheerleading was so crazy and oddball I wanted to dive into it! And in this, it sort of paid homage to this forgotten genre, the '60s sex comedy, and there's obviously a lot of [gay] baggage with Doris Day and Rock Hudson. We did talk about what the twists would be in terms of the gay content, and what's there is what we decided on and I think it works.'
Down With Love's inherent gayness is played up most explicitly with the character of Peter, who's suspected of being a homosexual—and confronted to that end!—by romantic interest Vikki. However, David Hyde Pierce feels his character wasn't necessarily gay ... or even bi-curious! 'In the original script there's a scene that was cut out,' he reveals. '[Peter and Catcher are] both looking out a window and Catcher says 'do you want to get married?' and Peter says 'I thought you'd never ask.' 'Not to me, to Vikki.' 'Oh, OK.' That was it. I don't think it was so much the character—I think he's straight and fell in love with Vikki—but it was the writers playing on that element of those movies. Where Rock and Tony Randall end up in bed together because they got thrown out by their wives.'
Incidentally, Randall, who traditionally played Hudson's best friend in those films, cameos. However, Day doesn't. According to the filmmakers, she's dropped out of the public eye by her own choosing. 'She runs a hotel, I think up in Carmel, and has lots of cats,' Reed informs. 'She was aware of the movie and maybe even read the script and found it delightful.'
To fill Barbara's shoes (some were actual '60s models discovered in a warehouse, according to Paulson), Renee Zellweger was enlisted. Jinks and Cohen credit her performance in Bridget Jones' Diary and the fact Regis Philbin once remarked 'you're the new Doris Day!' to her as primary reasons why.
Zellweger, of course, has been surrounded by out queens lately—Chicago's director, producers, and writer to wit. 'Openly anything I can appreciate,' she grins. 'Embracing who you are, there's an honesty in that, it's genuine and I gravitate towards that absolutely.'
Has Zellweger—who hit her first high note opposite Tom Cruise in 1996's Jerry Maguire—worked with closet cases as well? A pause, then a wry smirk. 'I don't know.'
Unlike her character, Zellweger is hip to playas' sly antics: she hung out with 'Catchers-to-be' as a child. 'I was in the boy's club, so I knew what they were talking about and I didn't want my name tossed around the treehouse,' she admits. As for whether she has ever resorted to using those boys' tricks to get, well, a trick (or LTR), she doth protesteth. 'No, no nooooo. I can't do that. I'm very old fashioned and shy. It takes me a while to get to know people. I'm a serial monogamist. It's a fun idea to entertain in my head but no, never.'
McGregor—a bona fide sex magnet sporting a layer of wild honey-toned facial fuzz today—has. 'I'm sure every boy plays at being something other than what they are to attract [someone] to his bed,' he laughs. McGregor even cops to having occupied a quintessential bachelor pad during his early 20s. 'When I got my first job, Lipstick on Your Collar, which was a six-part TV series, I made money for the first time and rented a flat ... . It was above a shop and kind of like the flat you would see in a modern-day romantic comedy. Very small but fantastic.'
A longtime votary of the Day/Hudson comedies, McGregor didn't consider subversion of the genre's style and content integral to his performance at all. In fact, quite the opposite. 'I wanted to nail it,' he enthuses. 'That was the point. There was no point in trying to make a modern-day sex comedy—we have those already.'
Regarding how much Rock Hudson he infused Catcher with, McGregor confesses the gay aspect simply wasn't a component of the cocktail. 'I think, sexually, Catcher's a ladies man. Socially he's a man's man and those areas were probably much more clearly defined then than they are now.' Instead, McGregor was most concerned with bringing the late actor's air of naturalistic enjoyment to his performance. 'When Rock laughed I got the sense he was really enjoying himself,' he muses, 'and yet you never felt he ever broke out of character. There was so much of his spirit in it. I wanted to do that but found it was a tall order. It's not about rocking back on your heels and letting it happen. It's the opposite! You have to work twice as hard to let it come through I think.' The positive experience and successful chemistry of Down With Love has its participants thinking of possible follow-ups in which, like those Day-Hudson flicks, they would reunite. If we're lucky, perhaps for a musical, which Down With Love aches to be at times (stay through the credits for a musical video of 'Here's To Love,' an original tune performed by song-and-dance lovers McGregor and Zellweger). However, there's one contingency to this plan, insists Pierce.
'We'll only do it if we can be bi-curious,' he quips.
