DIRECTED BY HERBERT ROSS
In 1978 gay director and former choreographer Herbert Ross – he had been married to ballerina Nora Kaye and then Lee Radziwill but people in Hollywood knew he was gay – surprised everyone by filling two of the five Best Film of 1977 Oscar slots with the newly married Neil Simon/Marsha Mason lovefest “The Goodbye Girl” and the Arthur Laurents-penned ballet soap “The Turning Point”. Both had gay moments, and both were dreadful. Between the two of them, they garnered an incredible 16 Oscar nominations (” The Turning Point” eleven and “The Goodbye Girl” five), with Ross himself getting a nod for Best Director for “The Turning Point”.
The latter was a total szoozefest with a risible plot line featuring aging actors Anne Bancroft and Shirley MacLaine as rival ballet dancers, one who has retired to raise a family while the other has remained single. Their big moment is a catfight stolen entirely from the far more entertaining catfight five years earlier between Carol Burnett and Geraldine Page in “Pete ‘n’ Tillie”. When it came away 0/11 from the ceremony, I rejoiced.
Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of “The Goodbye Girl.” By the late 1970s and early 1980s, it had become clear that Marsha Mason’s four Oscar nominations in the Best Actress category were an egregious error and that the Mason-Simon relationship was the most nauseating example of nepotism in Hollywood since Norma Shearer and Irving Thalberg. The Goodbye Girl ended the ceremony with one Oscar – Best Actor for Richard Dreyfuss. To gay people, like myself, this was insulting. In a Simon script filled with dyke and fag jokes Dreyfuss plays an aspiring actor whose big break comes when he is cast in the leading role in Shakespeare’s Richard III (the hunchback who lost the War of the Roses and put the Princes in the Tower). Unfortunately, his director (Paul Benedict) is a raving, mincing queen who insists that Dreyfus play the part like Bette Midler. All right, this may seem momentarily funny, but did Simon stop to think for a second that gay people spend their entire lives trying to fit in in a straight world? To reverse this process for a few laughs without a hint of irony seems callous and uncaring.
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https://thebrownees.net/seventy-queer-films-of-the-new-hollywood-1967-1981
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