03/15/2002 "Stakes are high when looks win"

Stakes are high when looks win
- By Steve Dow (The Age)

There was a guy that Los Angeles film maker Dirk Shafer once knew. A circuit party boy, he was obsessed with his looks and with ageing. Terribly insecure, he really believed in exterior beauty like a religion. On his 30th birthday, he committed suicide. Nothing romantic in the tale.

Some years on, he is the basis for a character called Hector in Shafer's new film, Circuit. Hector hustles his way through the drug and dance and prostitution scenes of LA.

There was this other guy whom Shafer had just met: he collapsed in a fit on the dance floor after using the party drug GHB. The paramedics were called. "It was a real eye-opener for me," says Shafer. The friend survived.

Shafer's film Circuit has its Melbourne premiere this month as part of the 12th Melbourne Queer Film Festival. It will be released in the United States next month.

Inspiration for the film arrived when Shafer took himself to the Palm Springs White Party. Shafer immersed himself in all the trappings of that side of gay culture.

"What I saw was amazingly visual," he says from his LA home. "The lights and shows, everything was just so cinematic. There was just so much that stimulated me about it."

Shafer co-wrote the script in 1997 but it took a few years to get the project off the ground. He feared in that time that the gay party circuit might go out of fashion. No chance. It only got bigger.

The film attempts to chart and document the sweaty, tribal, all-night ritual of the circuit scene in the US, in which body-conscious gay men trip from city to city in a Bacchanalian feast dripping with recreational drugs.

The film has some parallels with Australia: a Melbourne-Sydney axis of gay boys can be seen at parties in both cities. If the intensity and opportunity of the US scene is much bigger, the potential pitfalls are the same: drug addiction and unsafe sex.

While the film appears to be a treatise on the pitfalls, Shafer says he is careful to represent a range of views and experiences of the party life, from the unhealthily addicted to those who dip in and take the odd recreational drug, to those who party drug-free.

Yet, for a film maker who used to get his kit off for Playboy (Shafer sent his experience up in film Man of the Year in 1996), he can be a little thin-skinned about criticism of his own work.

A bitchy review posted by a gay man on a web site read, in part: "Like the trashiest gay novel you've ever read, Circuit is one of the most elongated, ridiculous and stupid movies to be seen. Running over two hours, the film is nothing more than a gay soap."

The film maker can take heart from reviews such as those from Out magazine, which said that if Shafer "decides to trim some, he might end up having one great movie".

Most of the cast are straight men, including Johnathan Wade Drahos, who plays John, a gay rookie cop from a small town who emerges on the gay party scene big time.

"When I was auditioning, the straight actors found them juicy, wonderful roles. But the gay actors were horrified; it was too close to home. And then, when the film was to be released, there was the possibility they would be outed.

"I don't see a problem with a gay man playing a gay man if they are a really good actor. But I guess (the film) goes close to their personal lives, and it scares them."

Circuit plays on March 15 at midnight and March 23 at 10pm at the RMIT Capitol Theatre, 113 Swanston Street, city.

Steve Dow is the author of Gay, published by www.worldwriting.com