Out of the celluloid closet

"All That Heaven Allows was a brilliant dissection of an intolerant society's reaction to an unconventional marriage," says Mark Marquez, a graduate student at San Diego State's film studies program. "And it was no accident that director Douglas Sirk got Rock Hudson to play the 'objectional' groom — a studly gardener who marries an older widow. Sirk and Hudson had worked together before on Magnificent Obsession, and he knew why Rock would be perfect for the role of the suitor who makes polite society uneasy — Hudson was gay. Of course, Sirk couldn't just come out and tell a story about homosexual romance back in those days, so he had to put things in code. I learned about it while watching Rock Hudson's Home Movies, by Mark Rappaport, which highlighted all the gay subtext in Hudson's films. I got to thinking about how great it is that we don't need subtext anymore. We can just come out and make a gay romance. Then I saw how they inserted a digital 1980s Arnold Schwarzenegger into the new Terminator movie, and I thought, 'If we can bring an old figure into a modern movie, why not bring a modern figure into an old movie? Why not make All That Heaven Allows about what it was really about?"

Marquez has already received permission from SDSU to make the project his doctoral dissertation; now he is seeking funding for the extensive CGI that will be required to replace Jane Wyman as Hudson's love interest. If the effort is a success, he says he hopes to start a company that will do the same for other Hollywood classics. "Just wait until I get my hands on John Wayne and Montgomery Clift in Red River!"