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Sidebar:
GUS 101
Gus Van Sant was born in Kentucky in 1952 and moved to Portland in his teens. He quickly became the quirky, infamous member of his affluent family; his first great artistic love was painting. His first film was a 40-second cartoon called Fun with Blood Root, about a little flower that bites another flower. At age 15 in 1968, he bought a $500 16mm camera and the book An Introduction to Underground Film, which focused on the careers of Paul Morrissey, Kenneth Anger and Andy Warhol. After graduating from Catlin Gabel, Van Sant attended the Rhode Island School of Design, then later puttered around L.A. He eventually got a job as assistant director for Groove Tube Two, where, he says, he basically just rolled joints for cast and crew. He returned to Portland in 1983 and recorded two records: Gus Van Sant and 18 Songs about Golf, which sound something like the Talking Heads. Van Sant then worked at an advertising agency in New York to raise the $20,000 he needed to make his first feature film, Mala Noche, in 1985, which--with its storyline of a gay Portland convenience-store clerk who falls in love with a teen-age Mexican street kid--established him as a pioneering voice in gay cinema. Matt Dillon was so impressed by the film that he agreed to star in 1989's paean to pill-popping, Drugstore Cowboy, for which Van Sant was paid $150,000. It became a huge critical success, winning a number of film festival awards, and Van Sant became a sought-after new commodity and received a number of Hollywood scripts, including Sleeping with the Enemy, Cape Fear and Sea of Love. Instead of going that route, he opted to film his own independent production, 1991's My Own Private Idaho. The narcoleptic romp was highly anticipated but poorly received, despite a number of memorable scenes and performances, most notably a star turn by River Phoenix. The director's stock plunged with his calamitous adaptation of Tom Robbins' Even Cowgirls Get the Blues in 1993. Van Sant's own Bonfire of the Vanities, the film was a psychedelic picaresque that failed to plumb the goofy, philosophical soul of its terminally '70s source material. Van Sant was supposed to direct Robin Williams in The Life and Times of Harvey Milk, but bowed out due to script discrepancies with producer Oliver Stone. Just when all seemed lost, along came To Die For in 1995, a sharp black comedy starring Nicole Kidman as a ruthlessly ambitious TV weather girl patterned after Pamela Smart, the New Hampshire teacher who enticed a high schooler to kill her husband. In 1997, Van Sant directed the coming-of-age film Good Will Hunting and published a piece of "documentary fiction" called Pink. Written as if on lysergic acid-soaked blotter paper, the dumbfoundingly indulgent book about alternate dimensions and artistic compromise is of value only as a rare peek inside Van Sant's head. He has admitted to doing more than 100 hits of acid. After winning the Academy Award for Best Director in 1998, Van Sant went on to direct Terminator 3, the only mega-budget action film to star a gay character. Stars Tom Cruise and Arnold Schwarzenegger later announced that they've been secret lovers for many years. --DEB
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