By BetteAndTinaForever

Read Part 1-- The Interview

Part 2

Before the evening began, Raelle Myrick-Hodges, who was just recently appointed as the second Artistic Director for Brava, talked to us about the theater and Brava’s mission and then introduced Ilene Chaiken to the audience.

Ilene began by saying that first she will talk to us about her life and career, and how she finally got to do The L Word and tell our stories, and after her talk we would have a chance to ask her questions. I read a lot of Ilene’s interviews over the last few years, especially regarding the creation and realization of The L Word but listening Ilene speaking about it had quite a different feel to it. She talked to us for almost 30 minutes so I will give you just some highlights of Ilene’s talk. It’s not verbatim but I tried to make it as close to what she said as possible

Ilene’s Talk

- Making movies and telling stories has always been for Ilene a combination of a really great way to spend more time with fabulous women.

- In her senior year at the film school she made a thesis film that was pretty much autobiographical and it was before she realized that she was gay. The movie was made from the point of view of a woman but she wasn’t telling gay stories, she was pushing out the issues of sexuality and how women fit into the culture. The movie was sort of a version of “Sex, lies and videotapes”, and it was controversial and shocking. Ilene’s thesis advisor looked at the film and said, “You’re gonna go to Hollywood”, which wasn’t a compliment.

- Ilene did go to Hollywood and she wanted to write and direct movies. Her first job in Hollywood was at a theatrical agency called TAA. One of her jobs was taking her boss’s Ferrari to the gas station and gassing it up.

- She began working in Hollywood before the sexual harassment laws and before sex changed for everyone with the advent of AIDS.

- After a few years Ilene got a job with a few Hollywood producers who wanted to make a movie and Ilene wrote a treatment for a movie about a bunch of girlfriends who were about to graduate from high school and looking forward to go into the world, explore their sexuality and become adults. It was a personal story for Ilene in a lot of ways. One of the producers liked the treatment and he took it…he actually took took it. He took it to some guy at Warner Brothers and they made a movie out of it about a 40-year old man having an affair with an 18-year old girl. In the background there were a few girlfriends and some nod to a relationship between women but the movie itself was different. It was called “Satisfaction” with Liam Neeson, Justine Bateman as the main character and Julia Roberts as one of the friends.

- After that Ilene worked as an executive, developing movies and then she went to work for a production company where she met Aaron Spelling. She ended up working for him for five years developing television shows.

- While working for Aaron Spelling she learned a lot about television and worked as a development executive on a Pilot for the show that featured the first ever lesbian character on the network television. At that time Ilene was already out and she was completely out in her work. The show was called “Heartbeat” (1988) and it was about a group of women gynecologists in Los Angeles. All women doctors were straight but there was one lesbian played by Gail Strickland who told Ilene that she didn’t know how to play gay and she asked if she could come over to hang out at Ilene’s house and learn how to be gay. The show wasn’t picked up.

- After that Ilene went to work for Quincy Jones’s production company at Warner Brothers for three years. Most famous show that she worked on with Quincy Jones was “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.” It was very successful and represented different stories told on television but it wasn’t something that would help Ilene to tell her stories.

- Ilene got fed up with everything and tired of not being able to tell her stories and really get her work out there. Finally, after ten years of working in the movie business and not being able to do what she wanted to do, Ilene locked herself in a cabin and wrote a script. It was angry and really fun action movie. It was homage to “Seven Samurai” but it was all-girls action movie. It was very cool, at least for Ilene. She took the script to an agent she’s been working with and said, “I’m a writer now, here’s my script.”

- Ilene got another writing job and worked on a script for a more conventional movie but after that she got a really cool job adopting a comic book. It was a perfect job because she always wanted to do an action movie, showing girls’ power. She was hired to write a script based on a comic book called “Barb Wire.” The comic was great and she wrote a more subversive script than the comic itself. Ilene’s script was a blown-out action movie with great characters and she thought it would be the coolest movie ever made. She turned in the script and it was pretty much re-written and even though Ilene got the credit as a writer, it wasn’t exactly what she wrote. “Barb Wire” was made in 1996 with Pamela Anderson as a main character. Ilene actually shown us the opening credits for the show and it looked like a soft porn movie.

- Ilene was now a screenwriter and she loved to write commercial movies and she liked to make mainstream entertainment but she always tried to find stories that featured her themes and her people.

- It was a number of years before she had another movie made. She wrote a movie about a young woman with multiple personality disorder who struggled to remain her true self. Ilene wrote it but it didn’t work out and just recently she found out that someone dug it out and made a movie out of it with Halle Berry and it titled “Frankie and Alice”; it’s coming out later this year.

- Finally, Ilene met folks at Showtime and they were working with a very interesting project. They tried to figure out how to make a movie about the work of Robert Mapplethorpe and about events that occurred in 1990 when a museum director in Cincinnati went on trial for showing Mapplethorpe’s work in his museum. The theme was very interesting to Ilene and she read everything about the real events. The movie was called “Dirty Pictures” (2000).

- Showtime executives were really supportive of Ilene’s work and then she wrote an article for LA Magazine based on her urge to tell her stories. At that time Ilene and her then partner had twin girls and they were two years old. She looked around and saw that a lot of her gay and lesbian friends in West Hollywood were having babies and she wanted to talk about it. She wanted to write something about the lives of gay and lesbians in Los Angeles and LA Magazine liked her story and published it. Ilene decided that maybe she could try to make it into a movie and took her article to Showtime. She pitched it to a few people in production that she worked with before and they said, “No way, the guy down the hall in the corner office will never go for this.”

- So Ilene went to work on another movie and then “Dirty Pictures” got nominated for the Golden Globe. And something happened then. Showtime got the rights to a British TV series “Queer as Folk” and they put it on air and it was the most successful show that Showtime ever did before. And just before the Golden Globe Awards Ilene said that they doing this queer boys show and not just long ago she pitched a lesbian show but it was rejected. During the Golden Globe the same guy from the corner office came up to Ilene and whispered in her ear, “I think we’re going to try your lesbian show.” And that night “Dirty Pictures” actually won the Golden Globe.

- This was a truly great moment in history, especially for Ilene because she was finally able to tell her stories the way she always wanted it. Showtime was very supportive and there was never a moment when they said that she had to change something, or tone it down, or not to tell some stories because they were too controversial.

- Ilene ended her talk on a slightly bittersweet note. She said that it was their mutual decision to end The L Word after six beautiful seasons and she felt that they would go out on a high note. Ilene already pitched her spin-off to Showtime (during that event on March 20, Showtime hadn’t made their decision yet but we already have news that “The Farm”, as the spin-off was called, was not picked up by Showtime). Ilene always thought that they will have The L Word on the air for five-six years and by the time it will end there will be many shows, waiting to be made and taking off where TLW left off. And Ilene said that she doesn’t know what happened because we find ourselves once again not represented on the television. She was really disappointed that with the ending of The L Word there’s nothing out there right now representing gay and lesbian characters.

Continued >>