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[Crowley] I don't know that I knew what the hell I was doing,
Official YIFY movies site: YTS.MX
to tell you the truth.
I knew I was writing a play about gay life.
When I started to write this play,
I had been so advised by so many people
in positions of authority not to go there.
[harp plays]
[Parsons] There are certain historical things
that are part of your social DNA
and you can be a better version of who you are by knowing
what came before.
[Quinto] And for young people who aren't familiar with Boys in the Band,
I think it's a reminder of just how difficult and how painful it was.
[Quinto] The play itself, it was really revelatory and unprecedented.
Nobody had ever seen anything like it at the time.
This is 1968, right before Stonewall.
[crowd chanting] Gay power!
[Crowley] And I remember it was buried in the Times, the New York Times,
You know, like page 18, 19 or something,
it was some very peculiar heading on it
like "Unpleasantness at Village Bar," or something, you know.
It was not, like, an event that would define an era of liberation.
[Bomer] There was this combustion
that was taking place.
All the frustrations and the desperation that they were experiencing
starts to bubble to the surface.
Being gay wasn't legal, it wasn't okay, it wasn't accepted.
It was illegal for men to dance together,
It was illegal for groups of gay men to congregate together.
So, you ran the risk of getting arrested socializing.
[Crowley] I was so dumb or so young,
I didn't even feel like I was taking any risk.
I just got this idea for a play.
These nine gay guys at a birthday party.
He is the first person to take up the challenge.
to write about gay men's lives in a way that was completely commercial.
This is a monumental thing.
Mart's play showed gay audiences that they could be seen.
And next came difficult conversations about how they should be seen.
[Bomer] What I think is wonderful about this piece is
that there are so many different well-drawn gay characters.
They're not a cliché.
[Washington] I think they're real men because Mart wrote them as real men
and they're imperfect, as all good characters
and good human beings are.
[de Jesús] This was a cast of all out, very out,
proud, gay men playing gay characters.
There's a different type of camaraderie
and there's a different flow of energy that exists
when you get nine gay men together,
and that's really beautiful to watch.
[Watkins] When you've got leading men saying,
"here's who I am, and I'm still working"
or "I get to work not in spite of that, but because of it,"
that is a turn of events.
That changes the zeitgeist.
[Carver] There's something about it that's so familiar to my generation
and it speaks to being a part of history
and some sort of spirit out there in the world that won't ever change.
[Emory] Harold has very tight, tight, black curly hair.
This number's practically bald.
Hey, thank you and fuck you!
[Crowley] You know, I sold the play
by couching it as a comedy-drama situation.
And the laughs sold it, and…
the laughs lightened it up.
And although I have never seen my soul,
I understand from my mother's Rabbi that it's a knockout.
[laughs]
[Crowley] I hope that they take the serious content
that's buried underneath to heart.
[Parsons] It's been so long, and we have come so far.
If things are better today, and I hope that's true worldwide,
it's because of things like this and moments in time like this.
Fifty years later, the fact that now everyone can be open with themselves
and we can look back on it and go, "Oh, wow.
We were there, and now we're here,
and let's thank the people who got us to this place."
Hi.
Come in. Welcome to my apartment.
Mart Crowley was very helpful with sharing memories that he had
about the process of writing the play and a lot of personal stories
about loosely who these guys were based on.
They're based on people he knew
and they are really his group of friends,
and they came to life in this, you know, feat of imagination,
this huge creative risk.
This is sort of a New York gallery, as you see, it's only
wide enough for one person to look at the pictures at one time.
These are all my friends.
[Crowley] The Boys in the Band originally premiered
off Broadway April 14th. It was Easter Sunday, as a matter of fact,
and the joke was, "I hope it doesn't lay an egg."
The revival of the play was April 30th, 2018, fifty years later.
This is the photograph that was used to publicize
the play on Broadway,
and it is obviously mocking up the original.
Here we are, the cast and me.
I wanted to acknowledge the bravery
of those guys that took on those parts,
even against the advice of their agents.
There was a tremendous undercurrent of fear
about what this could do to them and their careers.
And I think that they were all, in their own ways,
incredibly brave to bring it to life.
It would have been career suicide to have come out
and not even acknowledge personally that they were gay, but…
Because some of them weren't.
The actors all in this version are open and out and successful,
but in the original, six were gay, played by gay actors,
and three were played by straight actors.
All of them, though, had everything on the line.
You know, the gay community had been verboten,
so nobody ever really talked about it unless you were gay
and you knew somebody else who was gay,
and then you talked about it within the confines of your own…
private surroundings, but there wasn't too much public announcement about it.
And there's Billy Friedkin and me on the set
of The Boys in the Band up there.
Here's the original set design by Peter Harvey.
[Parsons] I wrote to Mart, and I have this trove of emails from him now
that so well written and such good reads
about all these movies that made an effect on him,
and, "I saw this in this country,"
because he's another one, like Michael,
he was always jet-setting around or whatever.
This cigarette box, it was a gift from the cast and crew.
They bought it in Tiffany's,
but Tiffany's wouldn't engrave it because it has a line from the play
which is, "Thank you and fuck you."
[laughs]
[Donald] You know what you are, Michael? You're a real person.
Thank you and fuck you.
This is who Donald was based on,
my friend Douglas Murray,
and the play is dedicated to Doug,
and to Howard.
They couldn't stand each other.
This is my goddaughter, and she's holding up the photo--
the photograph
that is a gift in the play.
[Bomer] This play has gone through so many different iterations
in terms of how it's been perceived by society.
It was loved and adored because it was the first time
gay men were being portrayed like this on stage,
and then it was sort of reviled because people thought it was regressive,
then I think the nice thing about fifty years later
is that we're able to revisit in a way where we could say,
"Oh, this is a part of our history."
[Crowley] I like this picture very much.
There's Joe on one end…
and Ryan on the other end,
and me here.
The fact that all actors involved in this are openly gay men,
it was a great way to show how far we'd come
the fact that now everyone can be open with themselves.
[Watkins] There were people who said, "I remember this.
Thank you for telling our story,"
and then there were young people who said, "You're telling my story."
[de Jesús] One person, he was, like, sobbing, crying, and he said,
"I'm just so proud.
I'm so proud to be an out, gay man."
[Crowley] Ones my age that were saying,
"Oh, we're not like that anymore." And then...
the youngest ones saying, "Well, we're still just like that." [laughs]
There is a phenomenon as a 52-year-old gay man where you
don't really know how to grow old gracefully.
Mart is, for me, an example of what is possible.
Here's the Tony Award that we all won.
Well, I was totally surprised.
Nobody believes that, but I was, I mean,
in fact, I didn't even have a speech prepared.
I mean, knew who I had to thank, I had a list.
I got out a paper that had a list of people that I had to thank,
but then my eyes teared up and I couldn't even read that.
This telegram, which was from my psychiatrist.
He sent it to me on opening night.
"Dear Mart, no one can be more pleased nor proud of you than I."
So, we'd come through a lot together
and I guess he was thrilled with his work. [laughs]
-[man] Set. -[director] Action.
[jazz music plays]
[Quinto] My character is Harold.
He's a complicated fellow.
I know that he's based on someone in Mart's life,
a guy named Howard Jeffrey.
It's always interesting to hear stories about people
who have influenced characters and…
and so that was cool.
[Crowley] Howard Jeffrey was my best friend.
I would say that, you know, pretty much,
Michael, the lead in the play, is based on me.
And Harold, who is his nemesis in the play,
was based on Howard.
-And how are you this evening? -You're stoned, and you're late.
You were supposed to arrive at this location
at approximately 8:30 dash 9:00.
This is Howard Jeffrey.
That picture was taken by Jerome Robbins.
And as you see, Howard was a very attractive guy.
He was a dancer.
The top echelon of choreographers all wanted him.
He was born in Los Angeles, worked all over the country.
Many of the big movies of their era, he was a part of.
[Crowley] Natalie Wood, Howard taught her all the routines
in West Side Story the film.
That's where I met him.
And then the three of us became lifelong friends from then on.
Big film stars worshipped him,
particularly if they weren't dancers themselves.
Barbra Streisand, when she did Funny Girl, which was her first film,
was so reliant on Howard that she demanded that whenever she had to dance
with a partner it would be with Howard.
And so therefore he's featured in the Ziegfeld Follies sequence
with the pregnant bride.
She demanded that he be one of the waiters in the great "Waiters' Gallop."
And here's Howard again.
This is one of the last photographs that was taken of him
because he was very ill here.
This is in Italy.
In the end, Howard Jeffrey did die in the AIDS plague.
And he was my age, he was 52.
And you can hear in Mart's description of him
a sense that he talked to him yesterday.
He's very present in Mart's imagination, and he's very present on the page.
[Crowley] The play is dedicated to him.
He didn't know about it when I was writing it.
I was terrified to even let him know
because I didn't know what the hell he would…
how he would react.
[laughs]
What's so fucking funny?
[Quinto] What I've learned about Howard and his complexity
and who he was informs Harold to a certain extent.
Life is a goddamned laugh riot! You remember life.
You really get a very clear sense of who this man is
just by, you know, reading Mart's dialogue.
I'm having seconds and thirds, and maybe even fifths.
I'm absolutely desperate to keep the weight up.
There are other influences in my own life,
and in my own experience of people who
I've sort of drawn on to help me
shade in the colors of who my version of Harold is.
I know Zach to be a really hilarious person
with a great sense of humor.
I kept forgetting and accidentally turning my hateful mother on with the salad.
But I think she likes it.
No matter what meal she comes over for, even if it's breakfast,
-she says, "Let's have a salad!" -[laughs]
I thought it would be interesting to really push him in that direction,
to expose that side of him,
which I don't think he gets called on to do all that often.
Now, it is my turn.
[sighs]
-And ready or not, Michael, here goes… -[jazz music plays]
[Crowley] And Howard was as he is in the play, the truth teller, the…
the demolisher of all pretension, you know.
And Howard could always read me that way
and not let me get away with anything.
You have left out one detail.
The pills are paid for.
I resented that at times, of course, bitterly,
and we had many fights about a lot of things.
Michael, thanks for the laughs.
[Crowley] But in retrospect, I learned more from him about myself
than I did from anybody.
Come on, Tex.
You're on.
[Crowley] When I started to write this play, I knew I wanted Emory
to provide Harold with a birthday present who was a hustler.
I just needed a hustler, you know, as a party gift.
I was fascinated by them
and whenever I'd go to Fire Island,
I mean, I knew who was out to make some money for the evening
and there was one particular one that I found rather charming.
Mary, she's gorgeous.
[Crowley] He knew how fascinated I was with his being a sex worker,
and I happened to be dancing with him
and I said to him, "Are you good in bed?
With all these guys that you have to go to bed with,
I mean, how do you do this?"
And he said back to me,
"I'm not like the average hustler you'd meet…"
I try to show a little affection.
Keeps me from feeling like such a whore.
[laughing] And I thought, "Oh, my God!"
I…
I couldn't write anything that good.
Call you tomorrow.
[door closes]
[jazz music plays]
[Crowley] Gosh, so here we are on the set of The Boys in the Band.
-[Crowley] "Who are you?" -[Carver] "Who are you?"
You seem like you've already prepared--
-I haven't prepared, no! -[Crowley laughs]
This is on the fly.
-It is? -Yeah.
[Carver] You, in telling this story, have fundamentally changed pop culture.
This was the first portrayal of gay men anywhere.
[jazz music plays]
What's it like for you to see gayness portrayed now?
What feels familiar? What feels different?
I'm very happy that the topic and the subject matter
has come to be so pervasive.
It seems like every play on Broadway these days
and every musical has got some gay element in it,
and that's all very diverse.
Oh!
-[laughing] -Oh! Hey!
Who the hell are you?
[Carver] You were the same age I am now
when you wrote Boys in the Band.
I suppose that's a question for myself, "What does that feel like for me?"
Yeah, I think so, but I don't wanna panic you
because, I tell you, all I remember about being your age,
and I'm not even gonna say what it is,
-Oh, please do, though. -Well, you've turned a corner, you're now…
-in, you know, thirty… -Yeah.
…one. [laughs]
Yes!
♪ Happy birthday to you! ♪
[Crowley] And I thought,
when I was 31 I thought, "Oh, shit. I'm past 30."
I mean, I haven't done anything.
I gotta do something.
[Cowboy] I never use the steam room when I go to the gym.
It's bad after a workout. It flattens you down.
I don't like to foreground my sexuality or that aspect of my life,
but at the same time, I got to a point in the business
where I felt like
I was suffering and then I felt like I had to keep part of myself hidden,
and I knew other people working the business
who were suffering and that they were hiding their true selves,
or getting set up on fake dates by their manager and stuff like that.
And that was about perpetuating
this omission of the truth to young audiences,
and you've spoken at length about how Boys in the Band was
-sort of born out of your frustration -Yeah.
with the business and with the world,
and my coming out was kind of like that for me too.
And what do you do for twenty dollars?
I do my best.
This is the kind of production that…
I think and hope moves the ball forward,
and kind of expands that whole conversation.
Well, I do too.
[Carver] Do you ever have conversations in your head
with actors who are no longer with us?
[Crowley] I'm a really sentimental slob,
and you know that because I break up and tear up too easily.
I mean, I completely fucked up at the Tonys.
-I got to the stage -[Carver laughs]
and there the nine of you were behind me.
So, I wanted to dedicate the thing to the guys that were brave enough
to do the play in the beginning.
-Yeah. -And I owed it all to them.
Like I owe all of this production and this revival to you,
and the other eight actors, and Joe Mantello.
And I was so happy that you were all there
-that I forgot to say thank you! -[both laugh]
[Cowboy] It would be terrible if you got that stuff in your…
[jazz music plays]
I'll be quiet.
Is there anything that you would want
audiences to take away
from the play or this movie in 2020?
Yeah, I want them to take it all away, you know?
-[Crowley laughs] -[Carver, laughing] Oh, God!
-Take it away and get out of here. -Oh, man!
No, I mean really, seriously.
They can take what they like and leave what they don't like behind.
You know what? I like your attitude, Mart.
I think I'm just gonna adopt this approach.
"Take it all away, you can have what you want."
-[laughs] But it's true, isn't it? -Please enjoy.
Just look at what's happened through the years.
Fortunately, you and I can sit here and laugh about it,
but it was no laughing matter then, in any way.
But yet, there's always humor in the darkness, isn't there?
I'm gonna get that down right now!
[both laugh]
-[man] All right, thank you! -[woman] Thank you!
[cheering and applause]
[jazz music plays]
Let's do it please, guys. Here we go.
[director] Action.
[Michael] Oh, no. No. We all have to call on the telephone
the one person we truly believe we have loved.
[Crowley] I love their approach. I mean, it's all realistic.
-Am I stunning? -You're absolutely stunning.
[Crowley] You know, when you look back on something,
you see the "oh, you're dressed funny," or "your hairstyles are funny"
or nostalgic, or whatever.
But if you lived through the period, you don't think anything of it.
[Michael] I butched it up quite a bit.
And I didn't think I was lying to myself, I really thought I was straight.
[Crowley] Yeah, it was a very closeted society.
Everybody was just taken, generally, to be straight,
but that certainly wasn't true.
[Washington] I think Bernard is very comfortable in his own skin
and the fact that he is two minorities.
He's gay, he's Black, but he's also an intellectual and he's in New York City.
So I have these examples of openly gay Black men who wore suits
and functioned inside of white worlds all the time,
and never compromised their racial identity.
You allow him to degrade you constantly by Uncle Tom-ing you to death.
He can do it, Michael.
I can do it. But you can't do it.
I mean, I just pretend like I'm having brunch with Jimmy Baldwin tomorrow
and I'm gonna tell him what these bitches did to me last night.
I'm not ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille.
There's a part of me, as an actor, that always absorbs the characters,
so my extra-ness right now is heightened by the fact that I'm playing Emory.
It's very serious!
[de Jesús] Joe and I spoke about taking up my space as Emory,
and that kind of messed with me here and here,
because Robin himself was in a place of kind of playing small,
so it made me learn from Emory,
and learned that you are in fact capable of taking up space
while allowing others to have their own.
Ask him if he's got any hot cross buns!
[de Jesús] This is who I am,
and people are gonna like it or not, and I'm just gonna do me.
Who is she?
Who was she?
Who does she hope to be?
[jazz music plays]
[Rannells] Well, this is Andy Rannells in Omaha.
I'm gonna say this was my fifth or sixth birthday,
and my mother gave me a Malibu Ken and a Malibu Barbie,
because I asked for them.
I think the idea on paper was to give
Andy Barbies so that he would play with his little sister,
but I really just wanted the Barbies.
[Quinto] This is 1988 at the Pittsburgh Civic Light Opera.
This was my very first professional production of The Wizard of Oz,
in which I played a munchkin.
Great make-up job, you'll notice. I did it myself.
It's obviously Christmas time. I guess cowboys were the thing that year.
It looked like I'm maybe four or five.
[interviewer] Did you have any other siblings?
I did. I had an older brother who had a matching cowboy getup.
I think he's been edited out of the photo. Sorry, Neil!
This was in the sort of mid-70s in Pittsburgh
a time where it also wasn't so okay or encouraged to be gay, certainly.
[jazz music plays]
[Washington] This would have been circa 1983 in Dallas,Texas.
My mother loved a nice red rug.
It's like a red carpet wherever you went.
[Carver] Northern California, and this was right before I got married to the cat.
[interviewer] How did that marriage go?
Well, the cat died.
-Okay, you're a widower. [laughs] -Yeah. I'm a widower.
[de Jesús] This photo was taken on picture day at my school.
And what was cool about this day,
first of all I remember picking out this shirt,
'cause it reminded me of my brother's shirt and I thought I was badass,
but also you got to pick the background.
[Watkins] I wanted to wear my favorite orange shirt
and my mom said, "You have to wear a collared shirt."
When she went into the kitchen, I ran back upstairs,
put on my favorite shirt, ran out the front door, ran to school,
and when the pictures came home, she saw that I was wearing this shirt,
and when she saw how happy I was, she realized,
"I should let the kid wear any shirt he wants to wear."
[interviewer laughs]
Don't you wonder, was that before or after I…
-[interviewer laughs] -threw down in the toilet.
-That looks like an after smile. -It's got to be.
-[interviewer] All right, lightning round. -Oh, yes!
-Ooh! -[laughs nervously]
[interviewer] She's never gonna run out of ideas about…
-Her hair. [laughs] -[interviewer laughs]
The color red.
I remember being so obsessed with the color red.
The Thanksgiving family talent show.
It's just so hard to get into the psyche of a four-year-old
I like that I'm standing in the exact same position and I didn't even realize,
but that's what's happening right now. [laughs]
[interviewer] And she would never…
She would never upset her mother.
Play soccer.
Let her sister win a lip-syncing contest.
Eat all her vegetables.
Which is very opposite from me now, as you can attest,
pretty much all I eat are vegetables. So, parents, don't give up hope.
I'm usually good at this stuff, Charlie.
What does she-- You know what I think it is?
I think the pronoun's really throwing me!
[interviewer] She doesn't even want to hear about…
Okra. She hated okra.
Not Oprah. Okra.
[interviewer] And who did she hope to be?
She hoped to be a movie star.
-Ariel in The Little Mermaid. -[interviewer laughs]
A good friend to people.
I hope I lived up to your hopes and dreams, honey.
[jazz music plays]
-[interviewer] Here we are. -Oh, hi.
Fancy meeting you here.
Where are we today?
We're in Julius' bar,
where I've been many times in my life.
[director] Background!
[Crowley] And this is fun, being in the film, especially with you,
and this lovely silk tie with this golden ring
that will not stay in place.
[jazz music plays]
[interviewer] Are there any palpable differences filming
this version versus the previous?
I'm a grown-up, officially. I was 84 yesterday,
so I guess I count as an adult these days.
I was just a frisky young thing back then
and feeling my oats.
I don't feel my oats much anymore. [laughs]
Anyway. It's nice to be standing in front of it
on this beautiful day when we're shooting around the corner.
[jazz music plays]
Yesterday?
-Yesterday. -Happy belated!
That's fantastic.
Excuse us.
-When was your debut? -Just tonight.
-Tonight? In acting? -Yeah.
This is the best birthday present you could have gotten.
Absolutely, it was fantastic.
Home again. I'm back after 50 years.
-That's incredible. -Comeback.
-Yeah. Love it. -[Crowley laughs]
That's fantastic. Legend coming back.
Thank you. Well, good luck on your close up.
Thank you very much.
[applause]
♪ Happy birthday to you ♪
♪ Happy birthday dear Mart… ♪
[man] Mart is the first one that planted the flag with the play.
It's held up as a great piece of dramatic literature
and that can stand the test of time.
[jazz music plays]