Prospects for the next gay blockbuster movie

Now that mainstream movie audiences have finally begun to acquire a taste for intriguing gay love stories, what will be the next film to ride the coattails of Brokeback Mountain? We can look forward to a future of decent gay themed films--not like some of those crappy low-budget art house films that I used to feel obligated to see just because they were gay themed.

Unfortunately, it's going to take awhile before any make it to the local megaplex. Few, if any, gay-themed movies are currently in the pipeline.

As Brokeback Mountain approaches the $100 million mark in worldwide box office returns, screenplays long sitting on the shelf now have a chance of getting produced.

The best prospect seems to be Peter Lefcourt's The Dreyfus Affair, a story of two major league baseball players who fall in love and the scandal that ensues when their affair is discovered. The Advocate optimistically reported--way back in 1998--that the popular novel was bound to become a feature film. Now the project may actually get the long-awaited green light.

Thanks to the fact that attitudes in pro sports have hardly progressed, the story is just as plausible today as it was more than a decade ago when the novel was written. Lefcourt's website offers the following synopsis:

Very loosely based on "The Dreyfus Affair" in France, this is the story of the love affair between the star shortstop and second baseman of a major league baseball team and how organized baseball deals with this public relations Chernobyl.

Randy Dreyfus is a blond, blue eyed, six-foot-four-inch future Hall of Famer with The Los Angeles Valley Vikings, an expansion team in, at the time the book was written, the near future. He is married to a former Miss California, Susie Dreyfus, has two twin-eight-year old daughters, a hyperactive Dalmatian named Calvin, whom he puts a contract out on in a fit of madness, and a 5600 square foot house in the San Fernando Valley.

Everything is wonderful in Randy's life until he falls in love with his second baseman, D.J. Pickett, an African American gay man, who has spent his life in the closet. Randy does his best to deny his feelings, secretly consulting an Egyptian psychiatrist, who counsels him to just go with the pitch. Eventually he does, and manages to live a dangerous life trying to hide his affair with D.J. while staying married to Susie and hit over 300.

Randy and D.J. eventually get caught by a hidden surveillance camera kissing in a Neiman-Marcus changing booth in Dallas. When this picture is made public, America is shaken with a scandal that rivals the real Dreyfus Affair a hundred years ago in France.

The affair is the biggest story in America -- cluttering the tabloids and the talk shows. Its worst nightmare come true, Organized Baseball goes into extreme damage control mode by trying to explain Randy and D.J.'s love affair as a substance abuse problem. The media circus continues, reaching its climax when a hard-boiled reporter named Milt Zola, smelling a hoax, exposes baseball by writing the present day version of Emile Zola's J'Accuse!.

While this sounds like a great story, the close parallels to Brokeback Mountain might brand the project as simply a copycat. But rather than a heartbreaking story, this would be a romantic comedy. I'll pick up the book soon and promise to post a review.

My early casting choices are Brad Pitt (since he's suddenly apparently itching to play gay, though he'll need to wear elevator cleats) opposite Taye Diggs. You heard it here first.