Reel power

Paul Colichman received the script from Condon's agent, and he fell in love with it. Colichman adored the portrayal of Whale as a complex gay character doing battle with the stroke-induced "thunderstorm" raging in his brain. He then forwarded the script to partners Jarchow and Harris. Jarchow offered only a few suggestions -- both of them involved toning down some of the explicit homosexuality, though he eventually relented -- and Regent agreed to finance the film for $2.5 million, with the rest coming from the BBC in England ($500,000) and Showtime ($1 million).

Regent had the option to buy out the cable channel and ultimately did, though Showtime gets to broadcast the movie for free later this year as part of the deal. Condon had no trouble signing on with a company that, up to that point, had nothing but made-for-TV movies on its roster. After all, save for the Candyman sequel, Condon's own résumé read like late-night cable listings.

"To be fair, they were only a year old, so they didn't have a rep at all," says Condon, whose next film is about the first Jewish Miss America. "I've done a few cable movies, and I know those are the bread and butter for these kinds of companies, so that didn't bother me. I was just grateful there was somebody who responded so strongly to the script, because we hadn't found that person anywhere else."

But getting the film made was easy compared with actually getting it into theaters. In 1998, the film screened at Sundance to critical acclaim, despite being shown at midnight in the middle of a snowstorm. No distributor wanted it: Either they had too many "gay" films, or they didn't want to touch a "gay" movie. And a year ago, Regent was in no financial position to distribute and promote Gods and Monsters itself.

Initially, Condon was crushed, but all that changed after Sundance, when Jarchow began talking about how extraordinary the film was: "like capturing lightning in a bottle," he told the writer-director. That's when Jarchow decided to pay off Showtime -- "out of his own pocket," Condon recalls -- to give the movie a proper release.

"That will remain one of those great moments," says Condon, who is still amazed by Jarchow's commitment. "It probably takes someone like that, who's a bit of an outsider, to do that. When you've been in Los Angeles too long, you forget how to take a risk."

Eventually, Lions Gate agreed to distribute the movie, but even then, Gods and Monsters didn't receive the publicity boost hindsight might suggest it needed. Condon says it never played in more than 120 theaters across the country, mostly because Lions Gate was too busy pushing the Nick Nolte-James Coburn father-and-son drama Affliction. Still, Gods and Monsters would go on to win several significant awards, among then the National Board of Review's honor for best picture, a Golden Globe for best supporting actress (Lynn Redgrave), and, of course, the Academy Award for best screenplay adaptation.

When Condon went up to accept his Oscar near the end of the four-hour ceremony, he used the forum to say something about how Hollywood had turned its back on James Whale. The audience, ready to head for the parties, glared at him with "hostility and boredom," Condon recalls.

"People like me don't get to go up there much," he says. "That was a little moment of triumph."

On the surface, Free Enterprise should have been an easy sell: Two friends, Robert (Rafer Weigel) and Mark (Eric McCormack, or Will of NBC's Will and Grace), try to squeeze out meaningful relationships in between seeing midnight showings of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, trading Star Wars dialogue, and having brief encounters with the hero of their childhood visions, Captain Kirk himself. It's a charming, often hysterical little movie that ought to appeal to a dozen different audiences, among them the wannabe-hip Swingers crowd, the Star Trek-Star Wars legions, and the Will and Grace audience. And anyone who would enjoy watching William Shatner play a drunk, lecherous egomaniac prone to doing rap numbers about Julius Caesar.

But writers Robert Burnett (also the film's director) and Mark Altman couldn't find anyone interested in their movie, even after it cleaned up at the AFI International Film Festival in Los Angeles. Distributors worried that Free Enterprise wouldn't play outside of the Trek crowd. They stayed away, until Colichman met with Altman and offered to distribute the movie through Regent, which began picking up films to both aid worthy young filmmakers and build Regent's inventory.

Regent had gotten into the distribution business when it picked up director Waris Hussein's Sixth Happiness in April of this year. Hussein's film is based on the memoirs of Firdaus Kanga, who actually stars in the film as a man suffering from what's known as Glass Bones Disease, which renders him as fragile as a dried twig. But Regent's partners and John Lambert, the company's head of theatrical distribution and acquisition, agreed that Free Enterprise, also acquired by Regent in April, was a far more accessible film to release first. Frankly, it wouldn't be such a tough sell.