TRICK

In 1994, theatre director Jim Fall was looking for a film to direct. He'd just spent three frustrating years coming very close to getting his first screenplay made, and had decided it was time to move on. "I asked everybody I knew if they'd seen any scripts that they liked," Fall remembers. "Lo and behold, the actor Eric Bernat, who was in a play I directed, said he'd just done this reading of a very, very rough draft of a script by this guy named Jason Schafer. At the time, the script was called 'Gay Boy.'

"I thought, 'Well, okay, I'll read this.'"

He did read it and loved it. Schafer, who began writing musical comedy in his teens, took a page from his own experience in telling the story of an aspiring musical theatre artist looking for love in New York City. "What attracted me to the story was its simplicity and sweetness," Fall explains. "Jason's a very funny guy, and it's the kind of sophisticated humor I really love."

Fall worked with Schafer to refine the screenplay, as they and co-producers Robert Hawk and Mark L. Beigelman tried to get the movie made. "We spent three years doing readings, and they were three very valuable years. Of course, I was very frustrated at the time, because I thought 'I want to make this movie now!' But we kept working on the script, since there wasn't much else we could do," the director laughs.

By 1997, Fall, Schafer, Hawk and Beigelman knew they had a very tight, very funny piece of work. Fall enlisted the help an old friend from NYU film school, the director Andrew Fleming (Threesome, The Craft, Dick). Through Fleming, trick made its way to producer Eric d'Arbeloff, who'd just set up his own production company, Roadside Attractions. He fell in love with the script and immediately agreed to finance and produce the film. Fall and d'Arbeloff then got in touch with Ross Katz, an executive at the cutting-edge production company Good Machine (Happiness, Ice Storm, The Wedding Banquet). Katz also loved the script, and the trick team of producers came into place. The film shot for 21 days in New York in the summer of 1998.

Trick is the story of Gabriel, a young gay man who writes songs about romantic euphoria, but whose own life verges on the monastic. His dog Trixie sees more action than he does - at least Trixie can watch Gabriel's roommate Rich (Brad Beyer) disporting himself with his various girlfriends, while the accommodating Gabriel spends chilly nights in the hallway outside their one-room apartment.

In other words, Gabriel's life is "like an uninspiring play," to quote his song "Enter You." Gabriel presents "Enter You" to his Broadway songwriting workshop, to a generally tepid response. The only commentary comes from Perry (Steve Hayes), an effusive middle-aged gay man and experienced songwriter who wonders if the "Enter You" conveys the thrill of a first kiss with a potential lover.

"Perry's kind of challenging Gabriel," says Jim Fall. "'Would you sing this song after you kissed someone? Does this make sense to you?'" Ultimately, that's exactly what Gabriel will find out.

It's not easy, in part because Gabriel can't quite believe that a go-go boy would want to be with him in the first place. "This is not a normal thing for Gabriel," says Christian Campbell. "Because of his insecurity, he never thought that this was something attainable -- Mark's sort of like a gay archetype. And Gabriel doesn't feel good about his body, he doesn't think he has sex appeal. So when Mark approaches him and seems interested, it's very shocking to Gabriel."

But Gabriel goes with it. Or at least he tries to. Trick unfolds with the charmed logic and ease of classic Hollywood comedies as the would-be lovers are continually thwarted in their efforts to be alone. When they arrive at Gabriel's apartment, they find Katherine inside printing out extra copies of her resume. 150 of them. Using Gabriel's creaky daisy-wheel printer. They finally get rid of Katherine, but the window of sexual opportunity is slammed shut by the arrival of Rich and his kittenish girlfriend Judy (Lorri Bagley). And that's just the early part of the evening.

Trick sends its heroes on a colorful and happily varied tour of downtown gay Manhattan. As a songwriter, Gabriel is familiar with the West Village piano bar Eighty Eight's, where Perry, resplendent in his polka dot shirt, entertains the crowd with a riotous mock salsa heavy on the double entendre; but Eighty Eight's is a new experience for Mark. At the Tribeca dance club where Mark is a regular, the music is much louder and shirts are optional; Gabriel is clearly not a regular in a place like this.

The obstacles that prevent Gabriel and Mark from completing their lustful mission are at once comic, believable and surprising, and are sometimes a function of their own personalities as well as outside circumstance. In a key scene, they are walking down the street with Perry, who has agreed to let them use his apartment in Chelsea. As Perry is bemoaning his recent breakup with his long-time boyfriend, he spots his ex walking their way. Grabbing Mark, Perry pretends that he and the go-go boy are an item, and Mark brilliantly plays along to help bring about a reconciliation between Perry and his ex. Gabriel and Mark forfeit a love-nest so the couple can go home and patch up their differences.

"That scene was why I loved the script to begin with, and it's pretty much intact," says Jim Fall. The only difference is that originally, Perry and his ex were contemporaries of Gabriel and Mark, not separated by a generation or so as they are in the film. "I think there's something really powerful about having an older couple there. I'm really glad we stuck to that."

The scene also offers a different perspective on the go-go boy, who may just be smarter, as well as nicer, than initial appearances would let on. But Mark's true nature remains in doubt almost until the very end of the movie, thanks in no small part to the slanderous efforts of Miss Coco Peru (Clinton Leupp), a drag queen for whom the standard descriptive "fierce" hardly seems adequate.

"People tell me that they don't know if Mark is going to turn out to be this jerk, or is he gonna chase after Gabriel to try to make this thing work, this whatever that's happening," says J.P. Pitoc.

Of course, something is happening between Gabriel and Mark, and it's gone beyond hormones. As Fall puts it, "The movie ultimately isn't about these two boys having sex; it's about the fact that that's what they want at the beginning but not at the end. The irony of it is that they both really see something in each other, and are caught off guard by what they're feeling. It ends up that there may be more here and it's worth waiting for. And personally, I think there's something really great about giving something time, especially living in this city, where things happen so fast."

Many real-life locations play themselves in trick, including the West Village cabaret Eighty Eight's and the go-go bar Twirl in Chelsea. As Jim Fall describes it, "It's this little road picture inside New York. I love that neighborhood feel, especially in the West Village. What I like the most about this city, is that despite how big and scary it can be, it's really a very small town."

That's never more true than when the increasingly infatuated couple run into Katherine and her theatre pals at a Village diner, where Katherine turns Gabriel's angry plea for privacy into a hysterical referendum on her own sexuality. When she and Gabriel make up, though, it's clear that more lies beneath her actress-y self-absorption.

"Katherine cares about Gabriel, and she still has romantic feelings for him," Tori Spelling believes. She thinks Katherine's tantrum has a tinge of jealousy, though not of Mark, per se. "I think she'd probably have a response to anybody Gabriel was with. She wants Gabriel to be with her, and if not be with her, at least have all his attention as a friend."

In the end, of course, it's sorted out. "It's a true friendship between them," Campbell remarks. "The scene outside the diner encapsulates that right there, the understanding between two friends that they can blow up and blow out with each other and have that catharsis and then breathe, and say, 'Okay, still friends?' 'Yeah.' 'Okay.'"

Alone at last, Gabriel and Mark have one more opportunity to have sex. This time, they themselves put the kibosh on it, deliberately. "I loved that part of the story, which developed along the way," Fall says. "It made so much more sense to not even have them kiss until the very last moment in the movie."

But what a moment. New York has rarely looked so beautiful as in trick's final shot, a heart-stopping overview of Greenwich Village. As Gabriel walks down the street, humming "Enter You," there is sense that love is possible for anyone that wants it.

That Gabriel is singing his own song is no small victory, the director points out. "A big part of what the movie is, too, is Gabriel realizing his talent, and coming into his own. He realizes that his song is his song, and it's good and he needs to believe it's good or he's never going to progress. Then he discovers this missing lyric at the end and it all kind of comes together."

Given that trick is a character-driven romantic comedy, it was clear that the film would rise or fall on the strength of its actors. Christian Campbell, a theatre-trained actor who was a regular on the television series "Malibu Shores" and "Tek War," was cast as Gabriel. In casting the part, Fall notes, "We had to find someone we could hang the whole movie on, who would be sweet enough and a good enough actor to pull all this off. I'm really happy with Christian."

Producer Eric d'Arbeloff gave the script to Campbell. "I thought that it was really charming and funny," the actor recalls, "and I liked the universality of it. It was about two people who were falling for one another, and it was never made an issue of, that they were gay men. That appealed to me, I thought that that was important."

Good Machine got the script to Tori Spelling, who was on Fall's wish list for Katherine. Fall had never actually seen Spelling's hit series "Beverly Hills 90210." "The only thing I had seen her in was The House of Yes, and I thought she was really good. Tori has this sympathetic and goofy sort of quality to her in that film that I thought could really work for Katherine. I met with her in L.A., and she was so sweet. She practically had that whole diner monologue memorized and did it for me right there. She completely cracked me up, and that was without any direction, just winging it."

With her props and Busby Berkeley choreography, Katherine treats even a simple workshop performance as if she were auditioning for a revival of "42nd Street." When she met with Fall, Spelling pretended the number was no big deal. "Jim asked me if I could sing, which I couldn't. But I assured him that I could. I asked him how well does she sing, and he said, 'Well, you know, it's supposed to be kind of campy and fun but she should be able to carry a tune. That's fine, right?'

"And I said, 'Oh, yeah, yeah. You don't have to listen to me sing. It'll be good,'" she laughs. She immediately signed up for singing lessons. "Then they called and said I was going to have to tap dance. So I took tap dancing lessons. It was two or three weeks of just straight lessons."

Mark the go-go boy was the toughest role to cast. "We had to find someone with an amazing body, who was worth watching in a thong but wasn't like some GQ model, because that's not what a go-go boy is," Fall explains. "And he had to be someone who would ultimately be sympathetic and sweet enough to be worth this whole night."

Idly thumbing through one of the city's free gay newspapers, the director came across an ad for a play, with a picture of J.P. Pitoc in his underwear. Fall went to the play; Pitoc's character was a less-than-bright guy obsessed with Antonio Sabato Jr. "The play was god-awful. But J.P. got up and did this monologue in his underwear, and he was funny and charming and he had those ears that stuck out."

Once he was cast, the Stella Adler-trained Pitoc did what any good actor does: research, at various downtown clubs. "Here's a great opportunity. You're given a role and there are things about it, obviously, that are like you. But then there are things that you have to go outside for. I had to go look at go-go boys. I didn't know what a go-go boy danced like, I didn't know what these guys did after hours, I didn't know what would bring them to this line of work.

"I was all about getting as much information on it as I could because I knew nothing about it,' Pitoc continues. "That was a lot of the fun of the role, learning all that. Having an excuse to shake your stuff in a thong. And, by the way, you feel very naked in a thong!"

Both Campbell and Pitoc are straight, for which Fall makes no apologies. "The funny thing is, most of the boys in the movie are straight, as far as I know. But, you know, it's not even an issue to me. Christian and J.P. were the just best guys for the roles. They completely jumped into the parts, and there was no baggage attached to it. I'm very proud of them, I think they did a really wonderful job."

"I enjoyed being the clay for someone who definitely has a vision," Campbell says cheerfully. "Jim knew exactly what he wanted. I really enjoyed him, screaming out over the set, 'THIS IS A COMEDY!!' Telling us to lighten up."

Ultimately, Fall says, "I was really just trying to make a good little movie that functioned whether or not it was gay or straight." Trick is already being discussed as a departure from the darkness of early 90s queer cinema. As engaging entertainment, though, Fall sees trick as having its own power. "I think it's sort of subversively political, because hopefully it ropes you in and before you know it, you're rooting for these two gay boys to get together, as opposed to having issues shoved in your face. Some people have criticized it as just a fluffy romantic comedy, but I think if it reaches a wider audience than just the gay audience, then that is kind of political. It's kind of great."