Out director Goran Stolevski drew raves for his 2022 film, “You Won’t Be Alone,” and he’s receiving similar praise for his new film, “Of An Age.” It’s the story of how 17-year-old Serbian-born Australian amateur ballroom dancer Kol (Elias Anton) meets his friend’s older brother Adam (Thom Green) circa 1999. As they unexpectedly spend time in a car, they start to learn more about each other.
“It was a time before technology made it easier to connect with people who are similar to you from all over the world, before there were phones and everything,” Stolevski said. “You could be the only gay in the village.”
Stolevski had a very different trajectory than Kol’s.
“I was very much out and militant about my queerness, but I was still the only gay boy I knew,” he said. “Otherwise, gay people were just on TV and not in your day-to-day life. There was a special kind of loneliness of the time in being a queer people. It was a reality that you couldn’t really find someone talk to something about and feel deeply understood. In this context, if you did run into someone who could understand you, electricity happened. Two queer people in this space would have a special connection.”
That sparked the idea: two people stuck in a car where circumstances forced them to engage with the person next to them and discover them.
“I think it’s a queer romance in many ways,” he said.
It was vital for him, yet tricky, to find the right actors. He was impressed by the natural chemistry between Anton and Green. He had also seen Green in the LGBTQ-themed “Downriver.”
Green joked that he definitely doesn’t read Kafka, but he does love cinema and can relate to Adam and his personality. Yet much was his own take on the character.
“A lot of Adam was acting,” Green said. “I am not that cool and charming.”
Anton related to Kol’s vulnerability and uncertainty in trying to find himself.
“When we spoke to Goran, we decided that Adam doesn’t change as drastically as Kol does,” he said. “He is in his early 20s and feels very confident in his own skin. With Kol, it is about accepting who he is. It was like he was looking for an instigator.”
Both actors called working with Stolevski an amazing experience and enjoyed being part of a gay-positive story.
Directed by out former Atlantan Ryan White, the new “Pamela: A Love Story” is an extraordinary and telling documentary about superstar Pamela Anderson. White admits to knowing very little about Anderson as a young man in Dunwoody.
“When I was growing up, she was the most famous person in the world,” White recalled. “When she was becoming really famous in 1991, I was 10. I was 20 by the time she [was] the most famous person in the world. She was the It Woman. I knew Playboy, ‘Baywatch,’ the stolen tape, the tabloids. I was enchanted by her as a young gay kid in kind of a Marilyn Monroe-esque way, but I didn’t know a lot about her life story.”
When he was approached by a producer, he knew right away that Anderson was a great subject — but he was hesitant.
“I thought this may not be the kind of doc I like to make, which are very personal, stripped down, bare bones, not biographies,” he said.
The producer connected White to Brandon Thomas Lee, Pamela’s son and a fellow producer, and at their lunch everything Lee said blew White’s preconceived notions of who Anderson was out of the water.
“I did not even know she was Canadian,” he said. “That alone shocked me, because to me she was the symbol of American sexuality during the ’90s and 2000s, and [the fact that] she was from an island in a small town blew my mind. She has returned to this island and is living the rest of her life there and has left fame and fortune behind and is not trying to be an actress or model for the last 15 years.”
The next day Anderson and White spoke via Zoom.
“She popped up in her little square, no makeup, no hair[styling],” White said. “She was so compelling, and I wanted to spend all day chatting with her. I thought she was so interesting and a great conversationalist. She asked me so many questions about my life.”
One of the ironies about Anderson’s sex tape scandal with ex-husband Tommy Lee is that Anderson never made any money from it. It was a situation no one had ever had to navigate before. These days, White said, people use sex tapes as career strategy.
White and Anderson have remained friends, and he was extremely proud of her for tackling one of the biggest challenges of her career — taking on the role of Roxie Hart in Broadway’s “Chicago” and facing notoriously harsh New York theater critics.
Finally, the Tony Award-winning “Tina: The Tina Turner Musical” debuts in Atlanta next week, courtesy of Broadway in Atlanta. Gay actor Geoffrey Kidwell is part of the ensemble and one of his characters is Phil Spector, who co-wrote the artist’s “River Deep — Mountain High.” Kidwell feels gay audiences will love the musical about how Turner became an all-time great recording artist.
“This show — I walk out on stage and everyone has some connection to her music,” he said. “Even kids have heard her [music], and she was one of the first women of color at a time when there [were] deep-seated racial issues in the industry. She was about living her truth.”
Two actresses alternate playing Tina here, “because it’s such a beast of a role,” Kidwell said, involved in 20+ songs each night.
“Of An Age” is in theaters February 17.
“Pamela: A Love Story” is now streaming on Netflix.
“Tina: The Tina Turner Musical” runs February 21 through 26 at the Fox Theatre.