Stars flinch at playing a homosexual

Press, 10 November 1986, Page 19

Stars flinch at playing a homosexual

David Hartnells

HOIWWOO©

I’m not one to gossip, but the director, Marshall Mason, wants to get his movie, "The Front Runner,” off the starting line, but casting problems have delayed the feature. It is based on Patricia Warren’s novel about a macho college track coach who becomes attracted to his openly gay star runner. Many actors and their agents keep running from the lead role, although the Olympic diver, Greg Louganis, has been cast as a straight team member, Grant Show (one of America’s top afternoon soapie stars) as the team star and Matt Lattanzi (who is Olivia Newton John’s husband) as a gay runner.

“We never expected the problems we’ve experienced in casting the lead,” says Mason. “The only reason I can give is the A.I.D.S. situation.” Harrison Ford was one of the actors who passed for legitimate reasons, according to Mason.

"He’s booked for the next 82 years.” But I’ll bet you Ford did not want to play a gay on the screen. It would not be good for his image. It is a pity soome Hollywood actors are so unsure of themselves.

The Mayor of Carmel and multi-million dollar superstar, Clint Eastwood, has been branded a real scrooge. The word is that he is always com-

plaining about having nothing on which to hang his clothes at the Warner Brothers studio. I hear it is because he always takes his hangers home every night after shooting. The studio is so mad about his everyday requests for more hangers, that now hangers that cannot be removed have been installed in his dressing room. The playwright Eileen Ryan recently told a press luncheon that when she was six years old she beat up all the little boys who would not be in her plays. I wonder if that is where Sean Penn gets his ideas from, after alll Ryan is his mother! Farrah Fawcett plans

to follow her live-in lover and father of her child, Ryan O’Neil down the aisle, but neither will say when. Fawcett’s latest movie, “Extremities,” has just been launched in the United States. It is the film of the Broadway play which she starred in and made it a smash hit. It is the same play in which Jamie Lyn Bauer starred in New Zealand about a year ago. By the way, Bauer looks like returning to the soapie “The Young And The Restless,” although, if she does, we will not see her on our screens in New Zealand for about 3y 2 years. The actress LesleyAnne Down, and the director, William Fried-

kin, are now involved in a no-holds-barred battle for the sole custody of their three-year-old son.

Robert Wagner has just finished a telly movie with Elizabeth Taylor and is now starting another with Audrey Hepburn. I wonder if we will have to put up with another romance with his

leading lady just to get extra P.R. for the movie ... but my lips are sealed!