How to Be a Movie Star

by TJ Klune

  “You earned it,” Quincy said, jostling his arm a little. “It had nothing to do with what I felt about you. You were better than everyone else who auditioned—”

  Josy shook his head. “Not that, though it’s pretty awesome.”

  “Then what did I let you have?”

  Josy looked at him and shrugged. “You.”

  Quincy took a shuddering breath. “Josy.”

  “Movies are great, you know? Getting to pretend to be someone you’re not. But it’s nothing compared to what’s real. I think having something real is the best thing of all.”

  Quincy kissed him.

  And even though it wasn’t a movie, right at that moment, it started to snow.

  The orchestra swelled.

  Fireworks burst overhead.

  People sang and danced around them.

  (Nobody tasted like quiche.)

  The camera panned toward the sky, and as the bright and wonderful world filled with swirling white flakes, two words appeared across the screen.

  The End.

  Epilogue

  OKAY, JUST kidding.

  There’s still more.

  From Indie Film Digest

  December 2016

  How to Be a Movie Star

  By Jake Chambers

  HAVE YOU ever watched the Wizard of Oz and wished Dorothy was a queer dude who made out with the Cowardly Lion? Except, for the purposes of this article, the Cowardly Lion was actually the Hunky Lion and an allegory for growing up and letting go and accepting your place in the world?

  Yes?

  Well, then do I have an absolutely bonkers movie for you.

  Chances are you’ve never heard of it, or its director and stars, but if word on the gilded streets is correct, that’s about to change in a very big way.

  When I first became aware of this movie over the summer, I told myself there was no possible way it could be real. There were rumblings from the festival circuit of a film that defied all logic. It was produced by a name I hadn’t heard in a long time: Roger Fuller, or as his die-hard fans lovingly refer to him, the Queen of the Bs. Known through the seventies and eighties for having half-naked women destroying the patriarchy while growing seventy feet tall, and mostly naked men fighting aardvarks on the Titanic with deeply queer undertones, or even shot-on-a-shoestring-budget creature features that pondered a world where scientists and their grand experimentations were stand-ins for the aftermath of the Cold War (sometimes all three at the same time), Roger Fuller is something of a legend. His infamy is well known through the tiny little burg of La La Land, and no two people have the same opinion of him.

  “It’s exactly the way I like it,” he tells me from the offices of his newly formed production company, Queer Films Inc. We’re sitting at a desk surrounded by the bric-a-brac of a strange and frankly bizarre life. There are photographs hung on the wall of a much younger Roger Fuller surrounded by scream queens and leading men alike.

  Back in the spring of 2015, a young man named Quincy Moore came to him with an idea. “He was nervous,” Fuller says. “All jittery and twitchy. He usually was, but this time it felt different. He had an idea, bizarre though it was. And trust me when I say that I know bizarre.” He sounds proud, like a doting grandfather.

  Which is exactly what he is. Because the jittery and twitchy young man named Quincy Moore is Roger Fuller’s grandson. Known to a legion of fans as Q-Bert, an author in the inexplicable genre known as monster porn, Moore is no stranger to the bizarre. With books that describe in explicit detail sexual relationships between hunky men and billionaire anthropomorphic coffee cups, or the burgeoning sexuality of a frat boy with Sasquatch, he’s carved out a place for himself in a niche market that has only grown. His fans adore him and have built up a community around him that numbers in the hundreds of thousands. On any given day, his website’s message board gets tens of thousands of views and hundreds of comments. And they’re not all about coffee cups screwing a guy over a desk in his office (a sentence that actually makes sense if you’ve read the book). It’s like the Island of Misfit Toys, though some don’t like that description.

  A woman who goes by the handle Tigress is one of Moore’s forum moderators. “We’re not outcasts,” she wrote to me in an email. “We’re not abnormal or weird or strange. We’ve found a group of like-minded people from all walks of life. We support each other. We help each other. There are professionals and blue-collar workers, stay-at-home moms or dads and people with doctorates in quantum physics. Three of them, in fact.”

  “Sounds like a cult,” I wrote back.

  “Not at all,” she replied. “A cult implies we can’t think for ourselves. And I can tell you, for one of the first times in my life, I do just that. As we sometimes say, there’s unlimited wealth in taking care of your mental health.”

  In perusing the message boards, I see what Tigress is talking about. There are topics covering everything from how to get through panic attacks to someone available twenty-four seven if a member of the community is feeling suicidal. One topic, with thousands of comments stretching back five years, is filled with people talking about something that made them happy during their day.

  It’s remarkable. And if it’s a cult, then hand me the Kool-Aid.

  Quincy Moore went to his grandad with an idea.

  Fuller heard his pitch, even though Moore would say later he wasn’t trying to pitch anything. Little did he know, things were about to change. I get the idea that most people don’t say no to Roger Fuller.

  “Suddenly,” Moore tells me one day last month, “there was a Kickstarter page, and money was pouring in quicker than I could keep up. I hadn’t even finished the script, but Grandad didn’t care about that. In the blink of an eye, we had over two hundred grand to make a movie.”

  Moore is handsome in an unconventional way. He’s skinny and constantly moving. He can’t seem to sit still. He’s obviously nervous and doesn’t like being the center of attention. We’re sitting in his apartment, and he keeps glancing toward the kitchen as if he’s looking for someone to save him.

  Someone will come save him, but that’s still a few minutes away. I ask him why he wanted to make this film. Why he decided to step outside of what is clearly his comfort zone.

  “Do you know what the ‘bury your gays’ trope is?” he asks me.

  I do. A nasty little thing. Along with queerbaiting, bury your gays is one of the worst tropes in film and television. It stems from the idea that queer characters aren’t allowed to have happy endings. Also known as dead lesbian syndrome, it results when queer characters are introduced only to meet with catastrophe. If there are queer relationships, they end because tragic queer characters win Oscars and ratings. Even now, at the end of 2016, it’s still prevalent in film and television.

  He’s looking down at his hands when he says, “I hated it. I still do. I mean, what do we have? Brokeback Mountain? Great! Two straight actors playing queer and then one of them dies. Philadelphia? Oh look, a straight actor playing queer and dying of AIDS. And apparently it’s not possible to get an actual trans actor to play a trans character.”

  I remind him that these movies are at least a decade old.

  “Right. But tell me the last time a queer actor played a queer character and lived happily ever after.”

  I admit that I can’t, at least not off the top of my head.

  He’s not smug about it. If anything, he looks upset. “That’s exactly why,” he says quietly. “I just wanted people to be happy, you know? Something I didn’t think I’d get to have for a long time. My head didn’t let me. That’s the rub when it comes to anxiety and depression. I tell myself I’m worth something, and then that voice in my head tells me I’m not. And it doesn’t help when I look to books or television or movies and see people like me not getting to have what everyone else does. It’s why I started writing in the first place. And why I wanted to make the movie. Maybe I went about trying to change the status quo in an absurd way, but at least I’
m trying.”

  Absurd might be an understatement.

  There is a scene in The Stories of My Father (a title that Fuller tells me he warmed to, given that it sounds so innocuous) where the character of Liam is talking to a gigantic cucumber named Dill (natch) who is an imaginary character from his youth. And the kicker? He’s played by the same actor—Mason Grazer—who plays Dante, Liam’s love interest. Grazer also happens to play a talking sunflower, a centaur-type thing that’s half zebra, and also the aforementioned Hunky Lion known as Grady.

  Sounds crazy, right?

  But it all works.

  Grazer plays all the roles with gusto. And between himself and the other lead actor, it’s obviously the flashier role. After all, not everyone can be a talking cucumber and be sympathetic about it.

  But it’s the other lead that has everyone talking. In the past couple of weeks, he’s even started popping up on Best Of lists by film critics in New York and Los Angeles, seemingly out of nowhere.

  His name is Josiah Erickson.

  And I guarantee you he’s going to be a star.

  He’s also extraordinarily ridiculous in the best way possible and happens to be Moore’s boyfriend.

  Moore relaxes almost immediately when Erickson comes back from the kitchen, rejoining our interview. He’s loose and affable, wearing a shirt declaring him to be part of the 1989 Wichita Lions Club and socks with cartoon cows on them. I asked him when I first arrived if he’d ever been to Wichita. He told me no, he’s never been to Canada. That about sums up Josiah Erickson in a nutshell.

  “Hey, man,” he says, sitting back down next to Moore. “Sorry that took so long. I forgot we were talking and started making ravioli. Weird, right?”

  Erickson is funny. And a stoner. And sometimes I think he might be smarter than I could ever be, even if he thinks Wichita is in Canada. He’s also one of the most charismatic and mesmerizing actors I’ve seen in years. Watching him in The Stories of My Father is a kinetic, enthralling experience, one that I’m not alone in singling out. It’s almost startling to think of Erickson as Liam versus Erickson as… well, Erickson.

  When I first got to their home (one Erickson proudly told me they’ve shared for exactly twenty-six days), he made it clear that he was following Moore’s lead. It’s obvious to anyone with eyes (and maybe even to those without) the love these two share. They are aware of each other in ways that I haven’t quite seen before. If I’d met them separately, without knowledge of their relationship, I would have never placed them together. But now that I see them together in front of me, it makes sense in ways I can’t do justice. They just are.

  Erickson puts his arm around Moore’s shoulders and pulls him close. He kisses the top of his head without even the slightest hint of artifice and then grins at me. “What’s up, man?” he says like we haven’t been chatting for the past two hours.

  I’m helpless to say anything but hey back. He has that effect on people.

  “What were we talking about?”

  I ask him about the rumors of his potential Golden Globe nomination in the coming weeks.

  He shrugs. “That’d be cool.”

  But…?

  “But that kind of stuff really doesn’t matter to me anymore. I mean, it’s neat and all. And my agent really likes it. But I’m just happy acting, man. Being in front of the camera and playing all these different types of people, that’s all I ever wanted. Like, a couple of years ago I’d have given my left nut for a blue check mark next to my name on Instagram. I got one a few weeks ago, and I was all like, ‘Oh. Fun.’ And then I forgot all about it until right this second.”

  He’s completely serious. If it were anyone else, I might think it’s some kind of PR-spun bullshit, but from Erickson? The thought doesn’t even cross my mind.

  I tell him word on the street is that he’s about to blow up.

  For the first time, he looks uncomfortable. “You think so?”

  Maybe.

  “That’s rad, I guess. But who cares?”

  It takes me a moment to recover. I tell him a lot of people would kill to be in his position.

  “Whoa. Do you think I need to hire a bodyguard? I don’t want to get murdered.”

  Reminding myself not to go off on a tangent (it’s so damn easy to do just that with him), I ask him how one becomes a movie star.

  He looks over at Moore, and his expression softens. He says, “I don’t know, man. I don’t think it matters. I’m pretty good with what I’ve got already. You know? Happiness isn’t little statues given to you by pretty people, though I suppose that isn’t the worst thing in the world. Getting it would be nice if it happens, but I don’t need it. I’ve got what I want already right here. Anything else is just cake.” His eyes widen. “Oh man, I could really go for some cake. Like, with frosting and crap.”

  It’s treacly bullshit. But it’s believable treacly bullshit. Not necessarily because I believe it but because Erickson does.

  I tell him that it can’t hurt, though. He’s just finished filming a supporting role in a film for Sir Ridley Scott (“He’s, like, super cool”), and rumor is that he’s being pursued for the lead in Michael Bay’s latest installment of metal robots fighting other metal robots.

  “Nah,” he says, looking back at me. “I’ve already turned that down. My best friend would murder me. Michael Bay is his greatest enemy. I wouldn’t do that to him.”

  It’s weird, really. This whole thing. People like Josiah Erickson shouldn’t exist. This movie shouldn’t exist. But they do, and I think we’re all better for it. The Stories of My Father is brash and contemplative and in-your-face and so far beyond what we expect from our film-going experience that it defies proper description. When I went to my first screening, I didn’t know what to expect. When the credits started rolling, I didn’t know what the hell I’d just experienced. It was stupid. And wonderful. And I was filled with joy, this odd and cathartic joy, that a movie like this was real. It warmed this old queer’s heart to think the younger generation could have something I didn’t when I was their age.

  It was happy. Oh yes, there are tears and angst, but goddammit, that’s life. And it’s not perfect by any means. There are some pacing issues, especially in the beginning, and parts of it are a little hokey, but I don’t ever want to live in a world where the perfect film exists. The Stories of My Father was shot guerrilla-style in the fall of 2015 with a bare-bones crew and a bunch of locals in the small town where they filmed filling out most of the smaller roles, and yet it works.

  I ask them both how this is possible, because it’s a question I’m still grappling with.

  Erickson and Moore share a look before Erickson says, “I guess it comes down to what my friend Serge taught me after he spent eight months in India. Do or do not. There is no try.”

  You read that right. He quoted Yoda and attributed it to his friend named Serge, who went to India.

  And, god help me, it makes sense.

  Do or do not. Because there is no try.

  Here, in this movie, we don’t bury our gays. We let them breathe and move with such artful grace. They make mistakes but become better people because of them. Quincy Moore made them real in a screenplay that should be getting more attention than it is. Roger Fuller plays the role of the sick and dying father with a gravitas I didn’t think he was capable of. Mason Grazer moves from role to role with effortless ease.

  And Josiah Erickson.

  Josy.

  Whether he wants to believe it or not (or even wants it), this is how you become a movie star.

  And I, for one, can’t wait to see just how far he goes.

  THE ALARM went off at six in the morning.

  Josy groaned, pulling the blanket up and over his head. “Whyyyy. Why is this happening to me?”

  He waited for the beeping to stop, but it kept going.

  He shoved the comforter off and blinked at the empty space in the bed beside him. He reached over and slapped the top of the digital clock until it di
ed a deserved death. He slumped back against his pillow, stretching his arms up and over his head as he yawned. He didn’t know why he had to be up so early. He didn’t start filming for the adaptation of Casey’s second postapocalyptic werewolf/vampire book-turned-movie until after the holidays, and—

  Oh.

  Oh crap.

  He sat up.

  He reminded himself that shit like this didn’t matter. And even if it did, it was nothing to get worked up about. If he didn’t get it, it would be fine. He never thought he’d get to this point, anyway. He wasn’t lying when he’d told that reporter the rest was just cake.

  “And now I want cake again,” he muttered, scratching his stomach.

  “Your trainer would murder you if you had cake,” a sleepy voice said from the bedroom doorway.

  Josy’s heart stumbled in his chest at the sight of a disheveled Quincy moving slowly toward the bed carrying two steaming mugs. One would be coffee and the other tea. He was wearing low-slung sweats, and his bony feet shuffled against the carpet.

  “Oh man,” Josy said in a rough voice. “Are you a sight for sore eyes.” He frowned. “What does that even mean? Why would that make sore eyes better? You’re not Visine. I don’t get it.”

  Quincy set the mugs down on the nightstand before he leaned down and kissed Josy. He tasted like toothpaste and Josy most likely tasted like ass, but that was okay. Quincy didn’t seem to mind. “It’s too early for you to be talking about anything.”

  Josy grunted as he pulled Quincy down on top of him. He liked being the blanket, but sometimes he needed Quincy to be. Quincy didn’t seem to mind about that either. “I don’t know why we have to be up.”

  Quincy reached up and thumped him on the forehead. “You know why.”

  “Yeah, but it doesn’t matter.”

  “Of course it does. Maybe not to you, but think about some queer kid in Wooster, Ohio, who dreams of moments like this. That’s why it’s important.”

  Josy sighed as he wrapped his arms around Quincy’s bare back. “I like it when you make sense.”