The New Yorker Radio Hour - Billy Eichner on “Bros” and Joyce Carol Oates on “Blonde”

Episode Date: September 30, 2022

One of the first queer rom-coms released in cinemas by a major studio, “Bros” is making movie history. But the film’s co-writer and star, the comedian Billy Eichner, tells David Remnick that the milestone has taken too long to achieve. “Culture and society at large, for the vast majority of human existence, [did] not want to talk about the private lives of gay people and L.G.B.T.Q. people,” he says. Plus, the staff writer Katy Waldman talks with the prolific novelist Joyce Carol Oates about the new film adaptation of her novel “Blonde,” which premières on Netflix this week. Directed by Andrew Dominick, it’s a fictionalized account of the life of Marilyn Monroe. Oates tells Waldman that she enjoyed the production but found it “extremely emotionally exhausting” and “not for the faint of heart.” New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. You probably came across the comedian and actor, Billy Eichner, the same way I did. Somebody probably sent you a video of this manic guy running around New York City, quizzing passers-by on questions like, is this a real Tyler the creator lyric or not? Did you hear that Madonna died? And would you have sex with Paul Rudd? for a dollar.

Let's go. Miss, for a dollar. Would you have sex with Paul Rudd? That's Paul Rudd? Yes, thank you. Here's a dollar. Miss for a dollar. Would you have sex with Paul Rudd?

Yes, here's a dollar. Billy on the street was designed to go viral, and it did. Madonna even had the good sense not to sue him. A decade later, Billy Eichner is starring in a form of comedy that by contrast, you'd almost call serious and respectable. A romantic comedy called bros. I loved Romero. coms. I grew up in New York City in Queens, and my parents and I, one of the ways we bonded is by going

to movies. And I loved entertainment, loved Hollywood from a very young age. I don't know how that happened, but it just happened. I can't remember my life before I wasn't interested in that. And there was a period of my life when my parents and I would go to the movies every single Saturday night, Regardless of whether there was even something we really wanted to see or not, like we were just big moviegoers and I loved romantic comedies. Those were honestly some of the movies I looked forward to seeing most and the movies I have returned to again and again over the years. What were some of your favorites?

I saw, if you're old enough like me, to remember when the major studios used to do sneak previews of movies. which they don't do anymore, but they would show you the whole movie a week before it came out. And so my parents and I went to see a sneak preview of when Harry met Sally at the Fresh Meadow Cineplex Odeon in Queens. I remember seeing Moonstruck. I remember seeing Working Girl. I remember watching broadcast news and Tootsie and just so many movies like that, which I love, the Nora Ephron movies, Sleepless in Seattle. As I got older, you've got male. my best friend's wedding. Oh, I remember I saw a pretty woman at the Lowe's Trilon in Queens on Queens Boulevard.

I don't know why I have a, I can like tell you, I don't only remember the movies, but for some reason, especially with those movies, because I love them so much, I remember where I saw them. In some cases, I remember where I was sitting in the movie theater. I was always a kid who, I don't know if it was because I was gay or smart or a bit of an overachiever. I always wanted to be an adult, and those movies made me feel like I was an adult, even though there were never any gay people in them. Well, this is what we're heading toward, obviously. You're watching all these movies, one after the other, dozens of them, and at the same time, you're a young gay kid growing up and getting older, and as they say now, constantly,

you're not seeing yourself on screen. Right. How does that make you feel one way? or neither. Well, as a kid, I wasn't really thinking about that. You know, I mean, this was the 80s and the 90s. I didn't come out until I was in college. I obviously knew I was gay before that, but it wasn't something that was front of mind. But at the time, I can say I sat around and thought as a 12-year-old, why aren't there any gay people in sleepless in Seattle? You know, I was just following the story, and but I was feeling it, you know, and now looking back, it's true, because in those movies,

as much as I love them, you know, you're not, if you're a gay guy or an LGBTQ person watching Sleepless in Seattle, for one example, you're not quite the Tom Hanks and you're not quite the Meg Ryan, and yet you're longing to feel the way that those characters do and to have those experiences. And even though there weren't LGBTQ characters present in those movies at that time, it's still, they made me feel like there would be a world of smart adults out there, going through complicated things involving love and relationships and affairs. And I just really wanted to be a part of that. And even though I wasn't seeing gay characters, I was seeing adults. And I guess in my mind, I connected that to a more sophisticated world than the one I was

living in where there would probably be a spot for me, even though I was. wasn't seeing myself specifically. Billy, tell me about how this movie came about and why. Well, strangely enough, bros started with two straight men, the director and my co-writer, Nick Stoller, who I'd worked with as an actor a couple of times, but never as a co-writer. He emailed me in the, I believe, the fall of 2017 and said, I want my next movie to be a romantic comedy because he loves rom-coms. But he said he thought it would be cool if it was about a gay couple because he knew we

hadn't got many of those. But he acknowledged, which I knew, that he was a straight man and married to a woman for many years and they have three young daughters and leading what we would now refer to as a very heteronormative lifestyle. But he said, I love working with you and do you want to write it with me? And if all goes well, you could star on it. I'll direct it. and he mentioned that Judd Apatow, sort of this blockbuster comedy producer,

would hopefully probably come on board as our producer because Judd had also been looking for a story like this. And those two guys have made some of the biggest comedy blockbusters of the past 25 years between the two of them, bridesmaids and, you know, 40-year-old virgin knocked up for getting Sarah Marshall neighbors super bad. The list goes on and on. Tell me about the process of writing the film. What was your intent? What you wanted to make sure was there? Because this is not just when Harry met Sally becomes when Harry met Harry or, you know, with the chromosome. It's different things happen. Sexually, socially, it's different. Absolutely. And honestly, that's exactly one of the first things I said to Nick when he came to me with the invitation. I said, I'm very flattered. I've never started a movie before. I've never written a movie before. I don't know why you think. I can do this. I obviously want to take you up on it. It's a huge opportunity for me and for the LGBTQ community because Judd and Nick are two guys on an increasingly short list that can get

an R-rated comedy greenlit at a major studio and released in theaters. So I knew it was a huge opportunity, but I told him right off the bat. I said, the main thing is that the movie is laugh out loud, funny. We're all comedy guys and that's our job. But also it has to be honest, and it has to be authentic. And I love to. literally said to him, if you think we can just do when Harry Met Sally and slip into guys and have the story play out the same way, I'm not interested. What is that, but what does that mean when Harry Met Sally? In other words, what is, it's because it's too polite, it's too sedate.

I would say there's marginally more group sex in your film than when Harry met Sally. I don't remember any orgies in that film. No, no. I just think, you know, two men together is different. By the way, I think even for a lot of straight couples, especially a lot of younger straight couples, the old rules of those romantic comedies don't apply to them either. You know, we are a more liberated society, and I love those movies, and I still love them, even though they read to me is a bit old-fashioned. So what we were trying to do with bros is give you that same uplifting, warm, comforting feeling that you get from the best of those movies, but update it, you know, and make it about a more modern, contemporary couple. right? You know, and also we have to be careful. You can talk about gay men or LGBT

people as a monolithic group. In any way. Yeah, in any way. But a lot of, you know, the gay men I know, especially compared to straight people or at least straight people as they're portrayed in the media and in culture, we do, you know, we play by our own rules sometimes, you know. So give me an example of that. Give me a scene that's an example of that you would, there's no way you would find in a, you know, when Harry met Sally. You know, at one point early in the movie, movie, two of my best friends who have been dating for a while, they reveal that they're now in a thruple, that they are now as a couple dating a third person. And, you know, and my character isn't necessarily judgmental of throuples. My character is judgmental of romantic relationships

in general. And, you know, underneath there, there's a bit of a bitterness. You know, I think there was once a line in the movie, wow, you found two, I can't find one. You know what I mean? I love the part. I love the one. There's a moment when one of the members of the Thruple calls his parents, imaginatively or otherwise, and informs them that I'm now, a verb that I can't use on the airwaves necessarily, two other guys. And the parents react with absolute acceptance and glee. Fantastic. Oh, they're so thrilled. They're like, oh, you're finally in a thruple. We're so happy. You know, now that's a bit of a, that's like almost like an Annie Hall inspired fantasy sequence. But it's also a reflection of an evolving world. I mean, I know a lot of throuples in real life. My best friends in the world are a married couple, two gay men. I was the witness at their wedding.

They're two lifelong friends. They've been together 18 years, married 10 years, but have now been in a thruple with a third man for about six or seven years, which I always tell them as three times as long as I've ever been in a relationship with one other person. There's also a great joke. There's also the notion of a gender reveal orgy. Yes, my boyfriend tells me that he's going to a gender reveal orgy. That a married gay couple he knows is having a baby through a surrogate and they're announcing the gender to the world by having a gender reveal orgy, not just a party.

You know, and, you know, we are both mocking and spoofing and celebrating what I tend to think is of a very sexually liberated gay population. Now, I also know tons of gay friends in monogamous relationships with each other that, you know, you could call it heteronormative or old-fashioned or traditional, whatever word. I know plenty of those, too. I don't want to paint a picture here as gay men as these like, you know, out of control, promiscuous, crazy people. But here's what happens.

When culture and society at large for the very, vast majority of human existence does not want to talk about the private lives of gay people and LGBT people and essentially erases us from the mainstream narrative, from textbooks, from history. What happens is two things happen. A, it can traumatize that population to a certain degree. That's the negative. If there is a positive that comes out of society ignoring you or scapegoating you or vilifying you,

or vilifying you or whatever you want to say, it means that you end up saying, you know what, okay, I don't want to curse. You know, forget it. We're going to go make up our own rules. You know, we're going to do what feels good to us. Marriage may not be the answer. It's lovely to have the ability to marry each other now,

and we certainly all deserve equal protection under the law. But maybe we don't want to get married, ever. Maybe we want to get married and continue to have sex with other people, and that works for us. You know, maybe we have an open relationship without getting married. You know, maybe we're polyamorous. The culture ignoring us for a long time gave us the ability to sort of go in a dark corner and decide what felt good to us.

And I think that's a wonderful thing about being part of the queer community because those old-fashioned rules of those rom-coms that I grew up loving, I love watching them, and they maybe work for some people, but even among straight people they don't work. we all know how many straight relationships fall apart. And so I think that's what we're reflecting in bros. And the premise that Judd Apatow and Nick Stoller and I started off with was what happens when two 40-something-year-old gay men who have both been out their whole lives are very sexually active, but have put romance and intimacy at arm's length.

These characters, both me and my love interest, Aaron, played by Luke McFarlane, we at the beginning of the movie pride ourselves on being impenetrable. They're both learning to be vulnerable. And the idea that we started off with was what happens when two men who pride themselves on not needing romance, who pride themselves on being self-reliant, which is something that LGBTQ folks have always had to be, what happens when those two men in the middle of their lives meet someone for the first time and really fall in love? Honestly, I was impressed. You may be more emotionally unavailable than I am.

Well, maybe we can be emotionally unavailable together. Maybe we can be emotionally unavailable together. Who's writing your texts, Maroon 5? Fuck off. Kidding. We can go out. Are you asking me out? I'm done for whatever.

Yeah, same. Cool. Sounds good. So tomorrow? Or we can do whatever. Yeah, I can do whenever and I can do whatever. I don't care what we do. Billy, at a certain point, Hollywood felt very proud of itself for having movies with, as it were, gay themes.

Philadelphia came out, broke back mountain. They use straight actors, Tom Hanks and the rest. It seemed to me that even though you were working with a co-writer and a director who's straight, with Judd Apato, who is as well, that casting was another matter. Talk to me about your decisions about casting, because I believe the vast majority of the cast that you work with is gay, queer, with the exception of Deborah Messing and Kristen Genowitz. Yes, with the exception of a few celebrity cameos, which are really some of the highlights of the movie.

They just crush it so funny. But yeah, all the main and supporting roles in the movie are all played by openly LGBTQ actors. Even the straight characters in the movie are played by openly LGBTQ actors. And that's something that with this particular movie being the first of its kind, you know, the first R-rated gay rom-com from a major studio, it's going to be playing in movie theaters, you know, in big multiplexes, the same ones that play back. Batman and Spider-Man are going to have this Judd Apatow produced R-rated gay rom-com playing in them. That is enormous amount of access and reach that movies like this have never gotten before, and it took way too long to get here. But I wanted to take advantage of that moment and to say, hey, LGBTQ actors have been left out of this equation for so long.

And no one's making any rules about, oh, gay should play gay and straight should play straight. It's acting, right? It's art. art is a liberating force. You don't want to put any strict rules on it and the whole fun of acting for both actors and the audience is to watch actors transform into someone else. That's all true. I don't think there should be any strict regulations on who plays what. However, art, especially major studio films, are a big business. They are not made in a vacuum. And historically, the most high profile LGBTQ role, the ones that were visible, the ones that did get marketing, the ones that did get a lot of media attention, the ones that got big awards campaigns built around them. In almost all those scenarios, all those roles are played by straight movie stars. Right. And some of those performances were magnificent, right?

No one's arguing with how wonderful Sean Penn was in Milk or Tom Hanks in Philadelphia or Heath Ledger and Brokeback Mountain. The list goes on. However, we never got to play our own roles, ever. You know, maybe in indie films we did, but those films were never given the financial support that they needed to get to a wider audience, to get the type of distribution that a brokeback mountain or a Philadelphia or even a milk would get, right? And so we took this as an opportunity with bros to say, first of all, so many of the movies you made Hollywood were about the tragedy of being. gay, the suffering, the closet, AIDS, you know, I think actors were drawn to those roles, especially straight actors, because, you know, giving them the benefit of the doubt, they wanted to bring gay stories to the screen. And also, I think they saw them as ways that they could really prove

their acting chops with. Watch me as a straight man that you all know transform myself into this gay victim, right? And everyone won awards and got acclaim and all of this stuff. And we were left out. Was that maddening to you? Over time, to the degree that it happened, yes, because it never worked in the reverse. Openly, LGBTQ actors never got to play the main straight roles in big movies. And then we're also not getting to play the main gay roles. Unless they were closeted, unless it was Rock Hudson. Well, sure, but that's a different thing, you know.

And that's tragic in its own way. Tragic in its own way. And, you know, for so long, LGBTQ people in Hollywood actors and also even people behind the writers, directors, especially if you wanted to work on films or TV shows of a certain scale that weren't small, low budget films. You had two choices up until, I don't know, 10 years ago. You could be bold enough to come out of the closet and everyone would pat you on the back and say, oh, that's so brave and so bold, and then they wouldn't give you a job, right? Or you could stay in the closet like Rock Hudson's and many of those guys and women and trans people.

that you could stay in the closet and you could maybe work and become a movie star if you were lucky like Rock Hudson did, but you had to lead some strange double life. Those guys were being set up in fake relationships with women, or the public thought they were straight so they could continue to pursue their professional and artistic dreams.

Those were the two options, and those are terrible options. That's not a humane thing to do to a person. Billy, I know you've been staying, I know because I've read it, that you've been staying up worrying that the film might not appeal to a huge audience because this is not a cheap movie. You didn't make it with a video camera and two light bulbs. Universal's got a rom-com coming out soon called Ticket to Paradise. It's got George Clooney and Julia Roberts.

And nobody's going to be asking Julia Roberts and George Clooney in their interviews, are they worried that gay people are going to come to see their movie? Right, exactly. What's your concern here and what do you think is going to happen? I don't worry about whether the movie appeals to straight people. We just had our world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in a theater full of 1,700 people, the vast majority of whom we're straight because the vast majority of the audience is still straight. You don't hear about it much, but straight people are still out there and thriving. and we've had so many screenings across the country over the past few months, test screenings and screenings for press, and they love the movie.

For some reason, because of COVID and maybe just a change in the way content is served up, Hollywood decided a few years ago that comedy is something that you watch at home by yourself. And all these comedy films are now getting released to streaming platforms. And yes, that's very convenient and lovely. and of course I watch a lot of stuff at home too, as we all do. But I am telling you we have forgotten how much fun it is to sit with other people and laugh and cry and be moved together as a group. I don't worry about it appealing to straight audiences. What I worry about is whether a straight audience sees the trailer for bros and thinks, oh, wow, a movie about a gay couple, that's for me.

I'll be able to relate to that. when I know that they will, but I hope that they realize that, because Hollywood has not conditioned them to think these movies are for everyone, because they never made movies like this that were for everyone and given this level of distribution. So that's what I worry about. I hope that straight people, anyone who wants to see a good comedy and laugh out loud embraces this, even if you're not seeing yourself reflected specifically because, like I said, as a kid from and as an adult even all the rom-coms I saw were always about straight people and yet I related I laughed I cried I wanted to be up on screen and there's no reason to think straight

people shouldn't have that same experience when it's a gay couple but there's not much of a precedent for it that's where the fear comes in right so you know I I hope that I'm worrying for no reason but I'd be lying to say I wasn't worried. Billy Eichner thank you so much thank you very much for having me. Rose is opening in theaters this weekend, and this is the New Yorker Radio Hour. More to come. The novelist Joyce Carroll Oates has the literary energy of a 19th century figure like Charles Dickens or Anthony Trollope. She's the author of 60 novels and hundreds of short stories and countless enigmatic, often controversial tweets. Lately, one volume in particular has gotten renewed attention. It's a book called Blonde about Norma Jean Baker, who became

Marilyn Monroe. It's widely considered to be her masterwork. It's more than 700 pages. I think it clocks at like 738, so it's her longest book, and apparently the draft was twice as long. Katie Waldman is a staff writer for the New Yorker who covers books and culture.

I think it's the best version of a lot of themes that she's been toying with and unpacking for her entire career. Marilyn Monroe is just, in a way, she's just a succession of, incredible stills or photographs, right? She's this iconic figure who is both woman and so much more than woman, myth, blonde, fairy tale princess, symbol of Hollywood. Blonde was published in 2000, and it's just now become the basis for a film on Netflix, written and directed by Andrew Dominic.

Miss Monroe, it's time. You told your biographer that you were inspired to write the book after seeing a photo of the 15-year-old Norma Jean Baker. Yes. And you said, this young, hopefully smiling girl, so very American, reminded me powerfully of girls of my childhood, some of them from broken homes.

Oh, yes. Well, I came from upstate New York, western New York, north of Buffalo. It was not a very prosperous community that I lived in, and there were broken homes, and there was a good deal of brutality. So my family was actually quite unusual.

My parents and my brother and I live with my mother's parents. So we had like a multi-generational farmhouse, and we were more of a stable family. But I went to school with these other girls who were often victimized. Their fathers may have been drinking or they may have been ill or they abandoned the family. There was a lot of poverty. Yeah. Norma Jean Baker is one of those girls. She was in many foster homes, but she was not an orphan because her mother was alive. It's just that her mother couldn't take care of her.

I was thinking about Marilyn Monroe and about Hannah, the rich, elegant blonde at the heart of babysitter, your most recent novel. Some of your most iconic creations have been seemingly pure blonde women who may be dispoiled. The depictions are so evocative. It seems like it must have some sort of special fascination for you. Well, it's hard to say. I'm probably drawn to writing about relative underdogs or people who've been marginalized or impoverished or disenfranchised. They don't necessarily have to be blonde girls or women.

They could also be men. I mean, I've written about boxing. Right, right. These are like working claims. Americans who had no unions to protect them. And basically I'm sort of interested, I think predominantly, there might be a theme where I'm interested in marginalized people who've been exploited by the establishment.

Yeah. I was probably drawn to writing about Marilyn Monroe because she did exemplify the kind of person who was a victim. who really didn't have any protection. She was like a girl in a fairy tale, like the beggar maid. And she had to make her own way. So she was working in a factory when she was only about 16. And she was doing a kind of work where she was breathing in fumes.

So I guess the point I'm making is that Norma Jean Baker, had she not become a starlet and then Marilyn Monroe, she would have been sort of used up by the world, you know, of capitalism. So that's probably what I'm drawn to more than there being a blonde woman. Everything's all right. Norma Jean, what were you thinking of? I wasn't thinking. Maybe I was remembering.

How did the film come about? Well, Andrew Dominic wrote a screenplay, which he sent to me a long time ago. I was very impressed with that because he had distilled about 800 pages down until, you know, like a two-hour movie. Were you pleased with how it turned out? Oh, yes, it's a work of art. Andrew Dominic is a very idiosyncratic director, so he appropriated the subject and made it into his own vision. It's extremely emotionally exhausting. It's not a feel-good movie. It's not at all.

Like most movies about Meryl Monroe are kind of upbeat. This one really is probably what she was actually experiencing. I did have to stop watching it and go away for a couple of hours. And then come back, it's very demanding of the viewer. The last quarter of it, perhaps, is very hallucinatory. as Marilyn Monroe at this point is addicted to barbiturates. Please come. She's coming.

That's quite astonishingly vivid and realistic. And you sort of feel that you're losing your own mind, you know. Yeah. So I think it's a movie not for the faint of heart. But, you know, the real things that happen to Marilyn Monroe much worse than anything in this movie. It's a superb job of acting. Honor to Armis becomes Marilyn Monroe.

I mean, some actors are really like chameleons. Well, Norman Jane Baker was a chameleon, too. I guess there was no Marilyn Monroe, who wasn't sort of a performance. Yeah, yes, that's true. That's just a bit of Katie Waldman's conversation with Joyce Carol Oates, and you can read the entire interview at New Yorker.com. I'm David Remnick, and that's our episode for today. Thanks so much for listening.

See you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Arts, with additional music by Louis Mitchell. This episode was produced by Emily Boutin, Breda Green, Callalia, David Krasnow, Louis-Mitchell, and Gauphin and Putubuele. Along with Jeffrey Masters, Will Coley, Jenny Lawton, and Michael May. and we had assistance from Harrison Keithline, Scott Gurianne, and James Napoli.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Trurina Endowment Fund.