Luca Guadagnino Leads Unusual Team-Up With Seth Rogen And Evan Goldberg To Make A Gay Hustler Epic
In the history of unusual Hollywood combinations, this one may take the cake. Luca Guadagnino, known for arthouse movies like Call Me By Your Name and Suspiria, is teaming up with funnyman duo Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, who gave us raunchy comedy hits like Pineapple Express, to make a narrative film based on the documentary Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood. Guadagnino is set to direct this Scotty Bowers biopic, about the legendary bisexual male hustler, while Rogen and Goldberg will write the script.
Searchlight has set Rogen and Goldberg to pen the script for the Scotty Bowers film directed by Guadagnino, based on the Matt Tyrnauer documentary Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood, which chronicled the exploits of the World War II Marine combat veteran-turned-hustler who secretly arranged dates for gay Hollywood movie stars from the 1940s until the beginning of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, Deadline reports.
The yet-untitled feature film will center on Scotty Bowers, who became a legendary Hollywood pimp for closeted gay movie stars, arranging dates for celebrities from the 1940s through the 1980s. The documentary, which was released in 2017, is based on Bowers' tell-all book Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex Lives of the Stars, which revealed how Bowers arranged these liaisons from a gas station he ran. Despite the salacious details, Bowers was beloved "because he created a safe environment for gay members of the showbiz community to hook up in secret in what otherwise would have been a much more dangerous and possibly deadly pursuit."
Bowers' story helped inspire Ryan Murphy's alternate-history Netflix series Hollywood, but Searchlight's movie will likely be a more straightforward biopic, though with the creative team behind it, there's no telling how typical it could actually be. Guadagnino excels at the intoxicating arthouse drama, with his LGBTQ summer romance film Call Me By Your Name probably the closest indication as to how he would approach a Scotty Bowers film. But then you add in the element of Rogen and Goldberg, whose collaborations have mostly generated raunchy stoner comedies, and I have no clue what to expect from this film. Will it be a hazy romance? A crude comedy? Something in between? Whatever the case, Guadagnino, Rogen, and Goldberg certainly make for a fascinating threesome, especially as Guadagnino has begun to break free from his arthouse designation to helm projects like the Scarface remake, The Lord of the Flies, and the upcoming HBO miniseries We Are Who We Are.
Tyrnauer and his Altimeter Films partner Corey Reeser will also produce the film alongside Point Grey Pictures.