‘Relax,’ Get Set for Outfest

Outfest ‘98, the Los Angeles Gay & Lesbian Film Festival, launches its 16th edition tonight with a gala premiere at the palatial Orpheum, 842 S. Broadway, with P.J. Castellaneta’s lively “Relax . . . It’s Just Sex.” While not the festival’s most venturesome picture, it’s a crowd-pleaser that’s ideal for an opening celebration.

Actually, it’s lots like other modestly budgeted L.A. thirtysomething movies in which most everyone lives in old Spanish flats or houses with trendy decor. It’s talky with humor that comes from TV sitcoms rather than life, yet Castellaneta digs deeper and ranges further than many of his contemporaries. He’s also got an established actress in the versatile Jennifer Tilly to anchor his film.

Tilly plays a witty and amusing woman with a desire for children, a live-in boyfriend not quite ready to settle down and a need to play den mother to her gay and lesbian friends who, like her, are beset by romantic problems. The film’s key accomplishment is to present a network of friendships spanning sexual orientation and various races and ethnicities as well.

Outfest ‘98, which runs through July 20, will hold most screenings, as usual, at the Directors Guild, 7920 Sunset Blvd., with additional screenings at the nearby Sunset 5, 8000 Sunset Blvd., and Harmony Gold Preview House, 7655 Sunset Blvd. There will be further screenings at the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center’s new Village at the Ed Gould Plaza, 1125 N. McCadden Place (near Highland Avenue and Santa Monica Boulevard). There will be special events at several other locations, and a selection of Outfest films will screen July 22 and 23 at the Ken Theater, 4061 Adams Blvd., San Diego.

Outfest ’98 is especially strong in documentaries. Jochen Hick’s “Sex/Life in L.A.” (Directors Guild, Friday at 9:15 p.m. and next Thursday at 2:15 p.m.) documents incisively the lives of several good-looking young men who came to Hollywood to seek their fortune and for the most part became porn stars, prostitutes or both. Some of these young men, at least for now, seem resilient and detached enough to survive and even prosper; others have been waylaid by drugs and despair. Featured are supermodel Tony Ward, who had his 15 minutes of fame partnered with Madonna in her banned-on-MTV music video “Justify My Love,” starred in Bruce La Bruce’s outrageous “Hustler White” and is struggling to make it as an actor and performance artist Ron Athey.

Two years ago, a Salt Lake City high school senior named Kelli Peterson, sick of feeling miserable and isolated, helped co-found the Gay-Straight Alliance for gay students and for straight students trying to understand better their gay relatives. Her 15-member group unwittingly unleashed a firestorm, with the state legislature voting to ban all extracurricular clubs in high schools rather than permit any on-campus meetings involving gay men and lesbians.

The unfolding of Peterson’s story and her ultimate victory become the frame of Jeff Dupre’s outstanding documentary “Out of the Past” (Directors Guild, Saturday at 11:30 a.m.). Here, Dupre discusses the lives of Puritan cleric Michael Wigglesworth, 19th century novelist Sarah Orne Jewett, pioneer activists Henry Gerber and Barbara Gittings and civil rights activist Bayard Rustin, who organized the 1963 march on Washington but was not allowed to lead it because he was gay. Dupre makes a strong case for the importance of reclaiming gays from history in giving young people a sense of identity and in breaking down stereotypes.

Another important documentary is Fenton Bailey’s and Randy Barbato’s “The Real Ellen Show” (Directors Guild, Sunday at 3:30 p.m.), which chronicles the decision of Ellen DeGeneres to come out and to have her TV sitcom character also come out. You get a clear sense of the tremendous courage it took for DeGeneres and her colleagues to take this step and to weather the storm of publicity and controversy, further fueled by DeGeneres’ romance with actress Anne Heche. Whether the show thereupon became “too gay” for network TV or whether ABC subsequently failed to support it--as DeGeneres contends--or a mixture of both, DeGeneres emerges as a brave heroine, blazing the trail for others to follow.

Angela Maccarone’s “Everything Will Be Fine” (Directors Guild, Sunday at 6 p.m. and at the Village, Monday at 2 p.m.) is a jaunty yet sensitive romantic comedy about two beautiful young women of African German ancestry, living in Hamburg. Kim (Kati Studemann) is an elegant, upwardly mobile type who’s to become both a partner in an advertising firm and wife to her boss, its owner once a big account is landed. In the meantime she hires the free-spirited Nabou (Chantal de Freitas) to be her housekeeper; Kim just happens to live in an apartment directly below Nabou’s ex-lover. With wry humor, Maccarone sorts out what it’s like to be black and what it’s like to be a lesbian--and what it’s like to be both in Germany today.

Three years ago Charley Lang made the unforgettably touching “Live to Tell: The First Gay & Lesbian Prom in America,” and now he’s followed it up with the 40-minute “Battle for the Tiara” (Directors Guild, Sunday at 8:30 p.m.), a funny yet also touching account of a local drag competition, a parody of the Miss America Pageant, which in its ninth year raised $100,000 in the fight against AIDS (it’s now held in the Wilshire Ebell, complete with celebrity judges).

None of the contestants is a professional drag performer and some are built more like Mr. America than Miss America. There are the usual exaggerations of bespangled femininity--”the bigger the hair the bigger the girl”--but one contestant, Chenille Bedspread, Miss Oklahoma, came through with a homey homage “to all the women in my family--and a bit of Anita Bryant, if she had a soul.”

To meet Gwen Welles was never to forget her. She was a radiant, red-haired beauty with pale blue eyes and translucent skin, and she projected pure vulnerability. As an actress she first came to attention in “Nashville” as a shy young woman who thinks she’s hired to sing, only to be pressed into stripping before a large all-male audience. Welles never became a star, but in small roles she lit up the screen in a number of pictures, including Donna Deitch’s landmark lesbian drama “Desert Hearts” (1986).

When Welles moved into Deitch’s guest cottage, the two women became best friends, although Welles was straight and Deitch gay. And when Welles became terminally ill with cancer, dying at 42, Deitch abided by her friend’s wishes and gave her a chance to be a star at last in a film that would record the final chapter of her life, although at the onset she thought she might beat the cancer. The result, “Angel on My Shoulder” (Directors Guild, Tuesday at 7 p.m.) is a loving, never exploitative and remarkably detached portrait of a complex, contradictory woman with a troubled, unstable past and her struggle to come to terms with herself.

Welles’ life didn’t have to end that way. When she was discovered to have a small malignant tumor, her doctor told her that she had a 90% chance of full recovery if she submitted to radiation and/or a colostomy; a combination of extreme holistic views, pure vanity and a strong will defeated her friends’ attempts to persuade to heed her doctor’s advice. Welles comes across as infuriatingly self-indulgent and self-destructive but also increasingly self-aware and finally self-accepting.

“2 by 4” (Directors Guild, Tuesday at 9:30 p.m.), one of the most accomplished films among those available for preview, is a tour de force for its director, co-writer and star, Jimmy Smallhorne, who plays a rugged construction worker and member of a macho Irish community in the North Bronx, not the most sympathetic milieu for a man who is simultaneously overcome by memories of childhood trauma and his growing attraction to men. “2 by 4” has a great gritty look and the feel of Eugene O’Neill, is just right for expressing raw pain amid boozy camaraderie.

Zhang Yuan’s “East Palace, West Palace” (Harmony Gold, Wednesday at 7 p.m.), first seen at the last American Film Institute Film Fest, is a powerful and elegant two-character psychological drama. In it, a young gay man (Si Han), arrested in a cruising area on the vast park-like grounds of Beijing’s Forbidden City, begins a battle of wits with the macho arresting officer (Hu Jun) detaining him in park headquarters. “East Palace, West Palace” is a brave and audacious film and, not surprisingly, was made outside the official Chinese motion picture industry.

Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato’s “Party Monster” (Directors Guild, Wednesday at 9:30 p.m.) offers a lively, thoroughly fascinating account of how Michael Alig, a gay young man out of the Midwest, took the downtown Manhattan nightclub scene by storm, swiftly filling a momentary vacuum in the wake of the death of Andy Warhol and creating that ‘80s phenomenon, the club kids, some of whom have survived to tell us what the scene and Michael were all about. Alig was a natural-born gender-bending, anything-goes party promoter with tremendous flair; unfortunately for him and his many followers, “anything” included copious quantities of a wide range of drugs, leading to dark consequences. A deadly pied piper if ever there was one, Alig left a swath of destroyed lives in his wake, including that of his still-loving, ever-forgiving mother.

For full schedule and tickets: (213) 782-1135.