"THANK GOD FOR THE INTERNET," says John Cameron Mitchell, the writer-director whose latest film, Shortbus, opens with a scene in which the lead character flips his legs over his head and fellates himself. Three years ago, when Mitchell was planning the picture, he did an Internet casting call. Figuring an agent wouldn't send him many actors who'd try something like that on camera – what would it do to their soap opera careers? – he set up a Web site that explained his ambition: to make a film that would combine explicit sex with genuine emotional drama. Then, trading on his notoriety as creator and star of the 2001 cult film Hedwig and the Angry Inch, he gave press interviews inviting people to check out the site and send in audition tapes in which they talk about sex. More than half a million hits later, he had nearly 500 would-be actors to choose from. His leads, almost all picked from the tapes, ranged in experience from struggling singer-songwriter Jay Brannan to the suitably acrobatic actor Paul Dawson, who'd had experience on the indie film circuit.
Shortbus, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May and opens in New York in October, is about a hipster salon where the gifted and the damaged – grown-up versions of the misfits who rode the short bus to school – come together to work out their sex issues. A guy who wants his boyfriend to allow other people into their relationship, a dominatrix who has never loved anyone, a sex therapist who has never orgasmed – all find their way to a Brooklyn loft in which caring talk gradually gives way to orgiastic coupling. Mixing pathos and wit, Mitchell shows his characters fumbling for connection, physical and otherwise, in a society where that kind of effort isn't valued enough. "It's just like the '60s," quips the salon's host, played by New York drag star Justin Bond, "only with less hope."
Less hope, but more technology. Though Bond's character fantasizes about a "magical circuit board" of desire that connects everyone, the gizmos in Shortbus usually end up shorting out. When the therapist puts a vibrating egg in her vagina and gives her husband the remote, he loses it under a couch cushion – sending her a distinctly nonorgasmic jolt every time someone sits down. And when a gay hunk gets an alert on his handheld that his "perfect match" is a few feet away, both guys fixate on their gadgets instead of each other.
As useful as the Net was in casting the picture, Mitchell considers it better at delivering porn than hope. Coming of age in the late '70s as the gay son of a career army officer, he had to figure out sex on his own. "Now kids learn about sex directly from porn," he says, "and instead of something thrilling or joyful or even dirty, it's like business. So you see kids fetishizing themselves – rather than experiencing emotion or excitement, it's, 'I am a barely legal person. I have a Web site, and I'm going to show my dick on it.'"
Mitchell hopes to encourage less-commercialized sexuality by creating a virtual Shortbus salon online and organizing college screenings and parties with salon "starter kits." He's also hoping the movie will inspire people to get together on their own in the same way that fans of Hedwig set up Web sites and midnight screenings. Could his movie provide an antidote to webcams? Mitchell is enough of a romantic to think so: "I have this weird hope that a true connection will win out somehow."
– Frank Rose
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