by MATTHEW HAYS

Every year at about this time I find myself looking out for gay-related story ideas. It's an exciting venture, seeing as the Mirror is the official media sponsor of Divers/Cité, Montreal's gay pride event.

But last week I was struck by a terrifically sad gay-related moment, the kind that's really depressing to ponder. After being debilitated by a stroke two years ago, John Schlesinger, easily one of the most influential gay filmmakers who ever lived, passed away at the age of 77.

Schlesinger got his start as an actor, performing with and for the troops while doing military service during WWII. He began filmmaking in the '50s in his native Britain, where he made a number of documentaries for the BBC. One of them, Terminus, a cinéma-vérité portrait of the Waterloo tube station in London, won an award and loud praise at the Venice Film Festival. (The film is still shown in documentary film classes around the world.) Schlesinger then dove into the British kitchen sink, making films like A Kind of Loving ('62), about a working-class couple pressured into an unwanted marriage when they become pregnant.

Schlesinger would make his first major splash with Darling in '65, featuring an endearing Julie Christie as a sexy model navigating her way through swinging London. The film stands as a time capsule, as well as a perfect vehicle for Christie, who won the Oscar for Best Actress for her performance.

But what is undoubtedly Schlesinger's most important work would follow. The epic Midnight Cowboy ('69), starring Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman, brilliantly evoked the traumatic period in the striking microcosm of the two loser protagonists' strained relationship. If Darling reflected London in the '60s, Cowboy captured New York's seedy underside with an almost alarming precision. It's a devastating film that changed a great deal in Hollywood, a prime example of the counter culture percolating up into the studio system. Midnight Cowboy became the first X-rated movie to take the Oscar for Best Picture, prompting the ratings board to change its ratings system altogether. It arguably marked the beginning of the last great Hollywood studio period, a decade that brought us Chinatown, the first two Godfather movies, The Conversation and even leftist social-issue movies like The China Syndrome. It's a sorry truth: they don't make them like that anymore - at least the studios sure as hell don't.

Beyond the repressed homosexual bond between Voight and Hoffman, Schlesinger would go on to explore gay themes and relationships. In Sunday, Bloody Sunday ('71), he captured what is believed to be the first on-the-lips kiss between two men in a major feature production. Certainly, Schlesinger also took his knocks, in particular some very bitter words from author and critic Vito Russo, who penned the hugely influential tirade against cinematic homophobia, The Celluloid Closet. Schlesinger's wondrous suspense film Marathon Man - easily one of the best conspiracy movies of the '70s, a decade which produced a glut of them - featured a neutered character played by Roy Scheider. In the book, he'd been gay, and Russo slammed Schlesinger for having made the character asexual.

I was saddened to hear of Schlesinger's death last week. Certainly, he seemed to live a good and productive life, but his own demise as a working artist seems to so clearly mirror the sorry state of the studio system itself. His last film, dare I mention it, was The Next Best Thing, which starred Rupert Everett and Madonna. Rated as a bomb or worse by virtually everyone, the most devastating news emanated from the film's set. Apparently, Madonna and various other cast members were telling Schlesinger how to direct, claiming that his notes to the cast were wrongheaded. Nothing could prove a greater indication that the star system is completely out of control when such lightweight performers could tick off a filmmaker of Schlesinger's calibre.

Schlesinger acknowledged the changing times, telling the occasional interviewer that perhaps there wasn't a place for him in Hollywood anymore. It was our loss. (I was quite pleased to hear him slag Titanic more than a few times.) The good thing, of course, is that film is an art form that is captured for all time; rent Darling, Midnight Cowboy, Marathon Man, Far From the Madding Crowd, Sunday, Bloody Sunday, The Day of the Locust or even Yanks, and you'll see what Schlesinger was made of.

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