A wonderful gay-themed 2014 movie — sweet, very hot, touching, and funny — from the same people who brought us Were the World Mine (posted on here) back in 2008. Getting Go was done on an even more minuscule budget than the earlier movie, and with only two characters (called here Go — he’s a gogo dancer, among other things (like a painter) — and Doc — he’s a writer about to graduate from college and go on studying from there); Tanner Cohen, who plays Doc, was the star of the earlier movie, and Matthew Camp, who plays Go, is a designer and performance artist now retired from a solid career as a gogo dancer in NYC.
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The movie is not a porn flick, though it does have serious man-man sex scenes, as well as a lot of romance.
You can watch the trailer for the movie here.
(Deep thanks to my friends Ph and L, who gave me a shopping bag full of gay DVDs — dramatic movies like this one, documentaries, and a fair amount of porn — as a present on Frday.)
The movie: was produced by Tom Gustafson and Cory Krueckeberg (who are both business and romantic partners), and was written, directed, and edited by Krueckeberg. Most of it was shot, amazingly, on a iPhone, which gives it a loose, documentary feel. Apparently, a lot of the dialogue was improvised by the two actors.
Cohen is quite tall (6 ft. 4 by some reports) and very cute (Go calls Doc “adorable” fairly often), while Camp is much shorter and muscle-hunkily handsome, so they’re an interesting pairing physically. The two of them kissing:
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The characters are also presented as an interesting pairing temperamentally. Doc claims to subscribe to gay heteronormativity, by which he doesn’t mean what many people do, as in my 1/12 posting “The wages of heteronormativity” (the belief “that heterosexuality is the only sexual orientation or only norm, and … that sexual and marital relations are most (or only) fitting between people of opposite sexes”), but instead the position that homosexual relationships should mirror the practices of heterosexual relationships; We should look just like They do. Go, in contrast, has an open, rebellious, sexually libertarian, politicized view of gay identity and gay relationships.
From Queerty, about a 2014 interview with Camp, “Flawless Go-Go Legend Matthew Camp Spills His Heart In New “Gay Times” Interview”:
After years of making his living dancing on New York City’s bar tops, go-go legend Matthew Camp is making his foray into film acting in a very unique way.
In a new interview with the UK’s Gay Times, Camp says his only acting experience comes from a short-lived stage acting career as a child in San Francisco, but that didn’t stop him from jumping at the chance to stretch his acting muscle again as an adult. Once he was approached by Were the World Mine filmmakers about playing himself in a new lost-footage style docudrama inspired by him, the decision was easy. [The film was mostly shot on an iPhone, on a minuscule budget.]
Months later, Getting Go: The Go Doc Project became a reality. Also starring Tanner Cohen, the film follows the story of a boy who makes contact with his idol and muse, an accomplished go-go boy, in order to film him and become a part of his everyday life. But this is Hollywood, so they obviously wind up falling in love.
Though his character “Go” was inspired directly by his dancing alter-ego, Camp says he’s actually pretty different from what most believe him to be behind closed doors — he’s quite reserved, completely monogamous, an artist, a perfumer, and nothing like what you’d assume a New York City bar star to be.
“What you see in Getting Go is a rough representation of me,” he says. “I mean, I do run around shirtless all the time, Go and I are both not afraid of a lot of things, and we danced in our underwear, so we’re both confident. But I wouldn’t have handled most of the situations in the same way Go did. I’m not as sexual as him… I don’t go on a lot of dates, I’m very reclusive, hanging out at my house. Go-go dancing was very much a job for me and after I’d perform, I’d leave right away rather than hang out at the club.”
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Now 30, Camp reveals that he began go-go dancing when he moved to the city at 21 in order to pay his bills. “I’ve never felt I should be embarrassed by go-go dancing,” he says. “It’s not prostitution – which I’m not judgmental about – but I view dancing more as performance. I don’t like opening myself up to people, so with go-go dancing, people get to just see my body, they don’t see what’s going on in my head.”
Both Camp and his character Go love displaying their bodies:
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Among the things Camp designs are custom leather jackets and perfumes, and especially fragrances for men (like his fragrace 8.5, with the scent of cocoa butter, leather, and tobacco, reproducing something of the experiece of going to a gay bar). (Camp maintains that the name has nothing to do with his dick size, which is a quite satisfactory 7.5 inches.)
Wikipedia on Cohen (who’s now about 29):
Tanner Cohen is an American stage, film and television actor, and singer.
In 2006, Cohen appeared as Tad Becker in five episodes of the American soap opera As the World Turns. He appeared alongside Uma Thurman and Evan Rachel Wood in the 2007 thriller The Life Before Her Eyes. In 2008, he made his leading film debut as Timothy in Were the World Mine, an independent musical film, based on A Midsummer Night’s Dream. He also contributed to the soundtrack…
In 2010, Cohen appeared opposite Andy Ridings in “Over and Over”, a play produced as part of the New York International Fringe Festival (FringeNYC)…
In 2013, Cohen appeared in his second movie Getting Go: The Go Doc Project [2014] taking the role of a shy college grad who devises to shoot a documentary about the New York City nightlife scene to meet the go-go guy Matthew Camp he’s obsessed with.
Cohen is Jewish. He graduated from UCLA in 2009, and is openly gay. His brother, David Oliver Cohen, is a television actor.
February 21, 2016 at 11:20 pm |
Ken Rudolph’s review in his film diary (3.5 stars):
http://letterboxd.com/kenru/film/getting-go-the-go-doc-project/