Skip to playerSkip to main contentSkip to footer
Movie
  • yesterday
A toreador's (Rudolph Valentino) familial and social life is threatened when he has an affair.

Director: Fred Niblo, Dorothy Arzner

Writer: Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, Tom Cushing, June Mathis

Stars: Rudolph Valentino, Rosa Rosanova, Leo White
Transcript
00:00When their lives were condemned or criminalized, LGBTQ plus filmmakers and allies fought to
00:06put their issues, their dreams, and themselves on the big screen.
00:10You know how hard it was to find these films?
00:13It's like one of the few race films that she ever starred in.
00:15In celebration of pride, on this IMD brief, we recognize six unsung heroes of LGBTQ plus
00:22film history and the movies that changed the face of the film industry forever.
00:26In 1919, Austrian writer-director Richard Oswald debuted his film,
00:32Different From The Others, and it was soon after censored.
00:36Oswald had created what's considered the first pro-gay film ever, starring Conrad Veidt,
00:42who you may recognize as inspiration for Batman's nemesis, The Joker.
00:48Different From The Others is about a violinist who falls for his student,
00:51then is blackmailed for his sexual orientation.
00:54The film presents an overtly sympathetic gay character over a half century before
00:58Hollywood would attempt to do the same with The Boys in the Band,
01:01a milestone film that hasn't exactly aged well.
01:05Are you calling me a screaming queen or a tired fairy?
01:08I beg your pardon.
01:09Oswald was far ahead of his time, and his landmark film was nearly wiped from the pages of history by
01:14the Nazi regime that overtook Germany and sent him fleeing to the U.S. But one copy survived,
01:21which is still screened and saluted at film festivals to this day.
01:31During World War I, Dorothy Arzner got her foot in the door at Paramount Pictures,
01:35working her way up from typing scripts to editing to shooting extra bullfighting scenes for
01:40Rudolph Valentino's 1922 silent romance, Blood and Sand.
01:51She leveraged that success into directing four silent pictures for Paramount,
01:54before the studio entrusted her to direct its first talkie, 1929's The Wild Party.
02:00When star Clara Bow struggled with the newfangled sound equipment,
02:04Arzner attached a microphone to a fishing rod and invented the first boom mic.
02:08Heaven help the man if you do. Heaven help any man.
02:14Arzner, who never conformed to her modern-day conventions, nor did she hide her long-term
02:18relationship with choreographer Marion Morgan, also bucked conventions in her art.
02:23In 1940's Dance Girl Dance, starring Maureen O'Hara and Lucille Ball,
02:28may seem like diversionary fare as a burlesque buddy comedy, and it was treated as such at the time.
02:34But modern critics reinterpret the work as an early indictment of the hypersexualization of women on
02:40film, and this earned it a spot in the U.S. National Film Registry in 2007.
02:45What do you suppose we think of you up here with your silly smirks your mothers would be ashamed of?
02:50From the golden age of Hollywood, we move to the underground scene of 60s and 70s New York,
02:55where twin brothers Mike and George Kuchar evolved the lo-fi into a high art.
03:02Alongside Andy Warhol and Stan Brakhage, the Kuchars made a splash with a non-stop output of
03:08bizarre and compelling short films with the brothers, their family, and their friends in the lead roles.
03:14Like Hold Me While I'm Naked and Sins of the Flesh Apoids,
03:18silent sci-fi camp with comic strip word bubbles providing the dialogue.
03:25Moving to San Francisco to teach film in the 1970s, the Kuchars kept on creating,
03:30contributing to the gonzo black comedy horror Thundercrack and shooting decades of video
03:35diaries of their daily lives. Their far-reaching influence was summed up beautifully in the 2009
03:40documentary It Came From Kuchar, which features acolytes like Wayne Wang, Adam McGoyan, and John
03:46Waters.
03:46I think they should get an award, you know, some kind of, they should be knighted, really.
03:51Now to the 90s for Cheryl Dunye, a visionary filmmaker who uses a faux documentary style to
03:57tell real stories about being a lesbian woman of color, and she calls them Dunye-mentories.
04:03I don't know, but girlfriend has it going on, and I think I've figured out what my project's
04:08going to be on. I'm going to make a movie about her.
04:11That's Dunye and her breakout film The Watermelon Woman, a fake doc about a fictional black actress
04:16lost to time. Dunye continued to make films throughout the 2000s, and in the past few years
04:21has found new success producing and directing TV series, like Ava DuVernay's Queen Sugar,
04:27Lena Waithe's The Shy, and the Jordan Peele-produced Lovecraft Country.
04:31I thought the world was one way, and found out it isn't.
04:35Our final unsung hero was a hit at Sundance, where writer-director Silas Howard broke out
04:40with the first film he ever directed, 2001's By Hook or By Crook.
04:44There's a bathroom!
04:48The film has been called the seminal work of the new trans movement,
04:51and Howard has been creating ever since, becoming the first trans director on Transparent,
04:56and helming multiple episodes on Freeform's Everything's Going to Be Okay,
05:00and the Peabody award-winning Apple TV Plus series, Dickinson.
05:04How do you want to be remembered?
05:07You can add all these pioneering shorts, docs, and films to your watchlist,
05:10and for more unsung heroes and trending tales, stay glued to imdb.com slash imdbrief.