LOS ANGELES TIMES

By Kevin Thomas
Times Staff Writer

April 23 2004

While working as a writer-producer on "Six Feet Under," Christian Taylor decided to pursue a childhood dream while chronicling it on film. The result is the slyly amusing yet poignant "Showboy," which Taylor describes as "faction." This means he knew how his film would begin and end but the getting there would be discovered in the making. The result is a deliberate conflation of fact and fiction that yields unexpected emotional impact.

The film opens on a fictional note: While "Six Feet Under" is shooting a sequence in Las Vegas, the HBO series' creator Alan Ball calls Taylor into his trailer. A BBC-TV crew that is following him around for a series on Brits working in Hollywood overhears Ball telling Taylor that he's not picking up his option for the next season, which in reality did not happen. However, this purported development is enough to get the story going. Taylor will stay in Las Vegas to try to become a chorus boy and will persuade the BBC's Lindy Heymann to continue filming him, telling her that he's staying for the summer, researching a script for a project of his own. As co-directors of "Showboy," Taylor and Heymann are good enough actors to persuade the viewer to go along with this premise.

Settling in the home of an acquaintance, Erich Miller, an ex-chorus boy, Taylor goes about fulfilling his dream, seeking all the advice he can get, taking dance classes, putting together a résumé with photos and going to auditions. Taylor is young, has classical good looks and light brown curly hair. He is slim but not buffed out — no six-pack abs and a hint of a stomach that drives him to investigate liposuction. At the same time he has a natural grace, loves to dance and, with a crash course with experts, just might land a minor, not-too-demanding spot.

In the process there are some wry and amusing encounters. Siegfried & Roy discover swiftly that he can't do splits and are a bit taken aback by his sheer audacity. Whoopi Goldberg offers to put him in touch with a contact at the "Boylesque" show and remarks, "No dream is crazy if you want to live it." He even auditions as a male stripper.

What makes "Showboy" intriguing is its subtext, suggesting, as does the current fictional Italian movie "Adored: Diary of a Porn Star," that the sense of loneliness and alienation that gays sometimes experience can feed self-absorption.

Taylor knows how to come across as a nice guy, but the pursuit of his chorus boy dream becomes obsessive and therefore much more important to him than he ever thought it would. Being constantly made aware that his body is less than perfect by Vegas standards only makes him all the more self-preoccupied. Yet when he reaches out to another dancer who attracts him, he gets absolutely nowhere.

Taylor takes an amusingly detached look at himself and his predicaments, but that he is so striking and charismatic drives home all the more acutely just how isolated even the most personable gay man can feel — and by extension, how isolated anyone can feel. Because "Showboy" has such a light, witty touch, the serious chord it strikes resonates all the more deeply.

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Showboy

Since the days of Edison, Porter and Méliès, movies have generally fallen into a handful of categories with neatly definable intentions. Horror is designed to frighten, comedy to elicit laughter, drama to stir the soul. In the motion picture family, feature films are the eldest sons, the ones with the varsity jackets, the winning smiles and the can’t-miss arms that seem able to throw four touchdowns every game. They almost always entertain, but they’re usually more concerned with conference tourneys than Ivy Leagues. Documentaries are the middle children, the brainy ones who spend a good deal of time alone in their rooms. While feature films dream, documentaries try to understand life.

A nice little nuclear family. Until, of course, docudramas—with their long, greasy hair, leather jackets, and nonconformist attitudes—stop by the house to mooch some food and stir up trouble.

The merging of reality and fiction is not a new concept, but fare such as Showboy can confuse genre expectations in the same way that the modern family, with its countless step-parents and half-siblings, can make for tricky introductions at reunions. Showboy is the story of Christian Taylor, a writer on HBO’s Six Feet Under, and Lindy Heymann, a BBC documentarian doing a behind-the-scenes piece on Taylor. When Taylor is abruptly fired from the show and then splits town for Las Vegas, Heymann is forced to follow in order to finish her piece. What she’s not expecting, however, is to find Taylor in denial and training to became a Vegas chorus boy under the auspices of research for a phantom script. Heymann’s curiosity about where Taylor’s apparent mental crisis might lead keeps the BBC cameras rolling. The would-be exposé of a television writing staff becomes a living record of a man chasing a dream he never knew he had.

Composed entirely from Heymann’s footage, Showboy succeeds in blurring the line between fiction and reality. Christian Taylor’s raw and honest performance is nothing short of daring; embarrassment lurks behind every shadow-dancing screen and the odds against Taylor making it are overwhelming. Showboy is terrifically funny with just enough moments of poignancy to remind the audience that it is not simply a comedy. Truly, Showboy is not simply anything, but rather a blend of farce and soul-search, of feature film and documentary, of dreams and disenfranchisement. (Josh Grigsby, Entertainment Today)