NEWS

The campaign for marriage equality has had a lot of things, but one thing it hasn’t had up until now is a full-on movie musical! However two straight Aussie guys are determined to set that right, as they’ve written Super Awesome!, and hope to shoot it early next year in Australia and the UK.

While they have the cash for the Aussie part, they need a bit of help for the West End of London set finale, so they’ve set up an IndieGoGo crowdfunding campaign to help raise $50,000 to fund it. This will allow them to bring a skeleton crew to Britain and get their big ending in the can.

Super Awesome! is ‘A comedy feature film about a couple of down and out buds, Mark and Gary, given one last shot at achieving their dreams. Out of the blue Mark and Gary find themselves with 250K to headline the opening night of a massive international festival. It’s Rocky meets SuperBad set against the hilarious backdrop of two straight guys doing their best to write a musical about an issue they know nothing about – Gay Marriage. As the clock ticks down to opening night and the whole production inches towards collapsing, Mark and Gary ultimately are illuminated to the significance of gay marriage and the potential their musical has to make a change…but is it too little too late?’

Writers/directors Guy Edmonds and Matt Zeremes met a decade when they appeared in  London and Australian productions of Holding the Man, based on Timothy Conigrave’s memoir about the love between two HIV positive men. Through that they met many gay people who told them their stories, and with the current fight for marriage equality they felt moved to come up with something that might be able to change hearts and minds. As they say in the film’s IndieGogo campaign, ‘Marriage inequality sucks! This film speaks about it’s suckiness but does it through humour!’

Take a look at the campaign video above, and head over to IndieGoGo to find out more.

It’s your chance once more to help get an interesting sounding gay-themed movie into cinemas by giving a bit of cash to a Kickstarter campaign to help fund Facing East, a movie adaptation of Carol Lynn’s acclaimed stage play, which Tony nominated Broadway actor and director Will Swenson is hoping to bring to the screen.

Guinevere Turner (Go Fish, American Psycho, The Notorious Bettie Page) has written the screenplay, which follows ‘Alex and Ruth McCormick, an upstanding Mormon couple who have done everything right. He is a well-known radio personality, “One-Minute Dad,” giving great ideas on how to be a good father. She is a mother who has sacrificed everything for her family and is determined to lead each of her three children into God’s “celestial kingdom”, where they will be together as a family for all eternity. Theirs is an ideal life. Except for one flaw, which has brought them now to a point of crisis.

‘Their gay son Andrew, who had not been “healed” from his homosexuality despite every effort, and who had for a year been living with a man that he loved… has taken his own life in a flower bed beside the Salt Lake Mormon temple.’

While Ruth is relieved that her tortured boy is in God’s healing hands and feels the less said about unpleasant things, the better, Alex is desperate to understand what went wrong. This brings them into contact with Marcus, Andrew’s partner, which forces Ruth and Alex come to know their son in a way they never had before.

Will Swenson grew up in the Mormon faith himself and is well aware of the pressures this can cause, and so he’s well positioned to bring this story to the screen. He and his wife, five time Tony winner Audra MacDonald, were recently honoured by PFLAG for their efforts to promote marriage equality with the 2012 Straight for Equality in Entertainment Award.

There’s a great team already put together for the movie, with plans already in place to shoot the film towards the end of 2013. While most of the production budget is already in place, that cash won’t be available until near the time of production, and so they’re looking for $65,000 to get them to that point. And that’s where you can help. You can find out more over at Kickstarter. And as always with this sort of crowd-sourcing campaign, various different rewards are available depending on how much you give.

Will Swenson and Audra Mcdonald

Ian McKellen has long been at the front of the fight for gay rights (he even co-founded Stonewall) and he’s certainly not been leaving the battle for marriage equality to others. His latest action is to make a video to support a New Zealand equal marriage campaign.

Of course McKellen is no stranger to the country, having spent a lot of time there playing Gandalf in Lord Of The Rings and now The Hobbit. As he says in the video, “I hope that by the time I get back to Middle Earth I might even be able to get married.”

The antipodean nation is currently debating The New Zealand Marriage Amendment Bill, which would legalise equal marriage. It passed its first reading back in August, with a majority of 80 votes to 40 in parliament in support of the change. However it has yet to become law.

McKellen filmed his video for New Zealand Green Party on the set of ITV’s Loose Women, saying “New Zealand gave women the vote before every other country in the world, the rest of the world has looked towards New Zealand for social advance and here we are again- this time at the exciting prospect of two people of the same gender being able to get married and to join the rest of the population.

“It will be a popular move, I know, and I’m glad your major political parties have embraced it, supported too by the younger generation who see things a lot more clearly than people of my age.”