Hetro- Metro- Retro-sexual

Festival activity has died down for the holidays, so I've been focusing on writing a follow-up movie to Butch Jamie. I guess you could call it a sequel, but that makes it sound so cliche, like it's the same movie twice. It's not like Jamie gets cast in another film as a man and dates another straight girl. No, we've been there, done that. This movie simply takes various plotlines from the end of Butch Jamie (which I won't give away if you haven't seen it yet) and creates a whole new movie out of them. This one I've tentatively titled Heterosexual Jill.


As you may know, one of the plotlines in Butch Jamie is about Jamie and Jill's relationship. Jill is straight and thinks Jamie is a man. Jamie isn't a man, so you can see the dilemma. Now...if they end up together, if they don't, how, why, what, who, where -- there's plenty of surprises to be had, so I won't go into much detail (the story isn't as cliche as it may sound). But regardless of how things turn out, there is obviously something interesting about that situation, something that deserves to be explored; that little something called sexuality....


Was Jill attracted to Jamie because she thought she was a man, or was she attracted to him because he's really a woman? If we want to get deep about it, we could say -- what is gender -- the way you present yourself, or who you are? And how does who you are change depending on the way you choose to represent yourself and how other people perceive you and relate to you?


So the film is a romantic comedy. I think the words "romantic comedy" are almost as bad as "sequel" -- cliche, generic, same-ol, same-ol. So...let's just call it a comedy with a "romantic element." The #1 question that people ask me is -- "Is there sex in it?" Well, let's say for now that...I'm trying. I'm trying to have sex in it. We'll see how that goes. I tell people that there often isn't sex in comedies, but that doesn't seem to make any difference to them. Then somehow we always end up talking about the LWord, and even though the LWord has a lot of sex in it, lesbians do like to complain about how the women are represented on the show. So picky, those lesbians.

But let's get back on topic. Heterosexual Jill. A follow-up comedy with a romantic element. The tagline might read "Hetro-sexual is the new Metro-sexual" (I don't really like that, but I'm just brainstorming. Maybe it could be something like "Hetro-sexual is so Retro-sexual." Although don't be fooled by the title -- the film will have lots of lesbians! Maybe the tagline should be "Lesbians may have sex in this movie." That will probably be better for sales). There may be some singing involved (not a "musical" as one may try to label it, but rather a film with singing....) We have Jill dealing with her sexuality, we have Jamie dealing with Jill, somehow we'll have Lola and David in there (again, I don't want to give away the ending to the first movie, so I'm tip-toeing around the plot with all four of the characters), we'll have a new character named Jose whose name rhymes with gay, we may have a girl named Ruby whose name rhymes with booby, and of course, we'll have Howard, the cat actor (Hey - Howard ryhmes with coward. I just noticed that. That must have been a subconscious choice on my part).



The story is still in development so anything can happen. But so far in my rough draft, we have Howard running around in mini tap shoes, Howard being chased by Jamie who is wearing a big black cat suit, and possibly Howard in a sombrero at some point. We'll see how it all goes down. Howard is shooting a movie, so the costume choices are endless. As Glen suggests in this draft, we could even dress Howard up as a dog. But -- that's just a little much, don't you think?

GLEN
Think of it - if we cast a cat in a dog's role, that would be something original. No one has ever done that before. Have you ever seen a movie where they've done that?

JAMIE
No.

GLEN
They have all sorts of small dog costumes - toy poodles, Chihuahuas, min pins...what was that other one? I suppose we could find a Pomeranian outfit.

JAMIE
(cracking a smile)
Maybe you could dress him up as a Great Dane and then build a really small set so that he looks bigger.