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BEVERLY HILLS, CALIF. — This interview with Happy Endings writer/director Don Roos starts on a light note and soon moves into such serious topics as teen sexuality, gayness in America and career fulfillment. Just as his film does.
I begin by mentioning to him that I spied a framed poster in the room of one of the film’s main characters, a young gay musician named Otis, which lists Cincinnati neighborhoods. How did that get into a film set in and very much about Los Angeles?
He laughs, leaning back on the couch in his hotel suite, and replies: “That’s set decoration. That has nothing to do with me. My sister-in-law picked that. She’s the art director on the film.” Mystery unsolved.
Happy Endings uses an ensemble cast and loosely interconnected stories to create a portrait of schemers, dreamers and strivers in upper-middle-class Los Angeles. In one story, Maggie Gyllenhaal plays a cunning young singer who beds a panicked gay drummer (Jason Ritter) to get into bed with his rich father (Tom Arnold).
In another, two gay men (Steve Coogan and David Sutcliffe) quarrel with their two lesbian friends (Laura Dern and Sarah Clarke) over the paternity of the women’s baby. And in the third, a lonely abortion counselor (Lisa Kudrow), who as a teen gave up a baby for adoption, becomes involved with an obnoxious young filmmaker (Jesse Bradford) who says he knows what happened to the child.
Roos uses irony, wittily acerbic repartee and cinematic distancing techniques to protect his humane, optimistic outlook on life from appearing too sentimental. Thus while the title indicates (most of) the characters’ ultimate outcomes, it also jokingly refers to the way Kudrow’s massage-therapist boyfriend (Bobby Cannavale) pleases his more aroused clients.
But it’s a genuinely happy film, because Roos is happy living in L.A.
“For me, Los Angeles is the greatest city in the world, and I wanted to do a story about the fertility that I have personally found to be creative and to be gay,” he says. “To me, it is a Garden of Eden. I thought this was best served by doing multiple stories about multiple Angelenos.”
Roos, 46, looks like he’s found not only the Garden of Eden but also the Fountain of Youth in Los Angeles. Tanned and trim, with his blonde hair in a modified rooster cut, he looks like the younger brother of Jan & Dean’s surf-loving Dean Torrence — himself a symbol of all that’s vital about Southern California. Roos wears a sport coat over his tucked-out, blue-checked shirt and sandals with his blue jeans.
Like his first independent film as a writer/director, 1998’s ensemble-cast The Opposite of Sex, Happy Endings applies humor and pathos to the societal concerns and sexual feelings of its intermingled straight and gay characters. Roos believes this is the reason it’s an art-house film rather than a mainstream release — Hollywood is scared of his approach. (In between Opposite and this, he wrote and directed the flop Bounce, starring Ben Affleck and Gwyneth Paltrow.)
“Hollywood likes a gay movie if a guy is dying of AIDS or is in a dress or the whole point of the movie is coming out of the closet,” he says. “But to actually take being gay as a given, and then have the character deal with the normal questions of human life, is very difficult for Hollywood to accept.”
“They’d rather make that character straight and thus appeal to a larger audience,” he says. “You can see why, of course. There aren’t as many gay people as straight people, and it’s a business. They think a large part of the audience will stay away if they hear there are gay characters, because they can’t possible speak to their experiences as straight people.”
Another trademark of Roos’ two films is their frank, unsentimental depiction of teen sexuality. In Opposite, Christina Ricci plays a conniving pregnant teenager who exploits her gay half-brother. In Happy Endings, a teenage girl has sex with her stepbrother (who later decides he’s gay) and then becomes pregnant.
“To me, what’s interesting about teen sexuality is pregnancy,” Roos says. “It’s that incredible ability to create consciousness when you’re only a child yourself. You haven’t begun to understand what it is to be a conscious human being, yet you have this incredible power to create a whole other new self in the universe. It’s amazing.
“I don’t have teens having sex in my films who don’t encounter pregnancy — that’s not interesting to me,” he says. “But I’m not doing sociological tracts. I’m trying to write a story that interests me. To me, a 16-year-old pregnant girl is the most powerful figure in the world, and also the most victimized at the same time. It’s like being a fertility goddess. They’re very potent symbols.”
Roos was raised in upstate New York and came to L.A. after graduating from Notre Dame. He’s never left. Working on television shows like Hart to Hart, Paper Dolls and Simon and Simon throughout the 1980s, he started writing for the movies in the 1990s — Love Field, Single White Female, Boys on the Side, and others. He still is an in-demand Hollywood script doctor and uses that money to underwrite his work on independent films.
“The kind of films I wrote were very much women’s pictures,” he says. “I wasn’t particularly pleased by the films that came out because they were different from how I imagined them. So out of frustration and ignorance, I thought I could do better than what I’d seen. That’s how I got into it.
“I still call myself a writer and directing is my way of getting those stories, those people I created, in front of an audience.” ©
This article appears in Jul 27 – Aug 2, 2005.