Movie about Liberace and his gay lover is... Too Gay for theaters.

So HBO is running it instead!

Steven Soderbergh's Behind the Candelabra (which premieres Sunday, May 26 at 9 p.m. EDT on HBO) is as good as you've heard. It's a moving and beautifully made film that traces the clandestine half-decade romance between Vegas showman and pianist Liberace and his much, much younger live-in boyfriend Scott Thorson, who cowrote the 1988 memoir on which the film is based.

During a press tour in January, Soderbergh explained how he was turned down by every studio he approached with his Liberace project because executives deemed it "too gay" to turn an acceptable profit:

Nobody would make it. We went to everybody in town. We needed $5 million. Nobody would do it…They said it was too gay. Everybody. This was after Brokeback Mountain, by the way. Which is not as funny as this movie. I was stunned. It made no sense to any of us…[The people at HBO are] great and they're really good at what they do, and ultimately I think more people will see it, and that's all you care about. Studios were going, "We don't know how to sell it." They were scared.

The film does indeed have its share of gay love and intercourse, including a sweaty, grunting sequence in which Scott (played by Matt Damon) is taking Liberace from behind while the aging performer offers him drugs to take during sex. But the Hollywood rejection shouldn't have been all that shocking to Soderbergh and company. Hollywood and mainstream cinema have a long and well-documented history of not "knowing" how to "sell" and market movies featuring explicit gay sex to a wide audience. 

Seriously?  It has scene's of Matt Damon 'taking Liberace from behind'.  Is that 'all'?  Seriously?  Is that 'all' the studios had trouble with?  Matt Damon banging Michael Douglas 'from behind'!?  What a bunch of backwards twerps those studio types are!!  Why won't they spend their money to try to sell my gay sex scenes!? 

Maybe they aren't crazy about Soderbergh's 'vision' of  Thorson's book.  [hell, maybe they didn't know who Liberace is! or was.]

Personally, I don't pay MY money to get 'THEIR' vision of the world, regardless of who the they are!  Inter racial strife isn't entertaining to me.  And Hollywood doesn't know how to 'sell' us interracial couples?  Maybe because we're not going to the movies to BUY inter racial couples, not because Americans are racists, but because it's not ENTERTAINING!   

As I recall, one of the black directors had a flick out a few years ago about a family reunion, where one of the family men showed up with a WHITE girlfriend.  He caught a lot of heat for having ANY white chicks in the film, because it was supposed to be a 'black' flick!  How is that NOT racist [too]?  Neither is watching Michael Douglas taking one in the tail pipe!


And a short note to the creator of this crap.
  
Hey Mr. Sodomybergh, I don't want to see Michael Douglas banging Catherine Zeta-Jones 'from behind' EITHER.  It's not THE ANGLE that bothers me, it's that I, and most Americans, DON'T want to see ANYONE having sex.  That's not 'entertainment' to most of us, it's porn!

Just because you CAN film that crap now, and get it distributed, doesn't mean you should!
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Schteveo