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Title: Oliver Button is a Star |
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Release Date: 2001 |
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Nationality and Language: |
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Running time: 56 Minutes |
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Distributor and Production Company: TCGMC/Hunt-Scagliotti |
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Director; Writer: John Scagliotti, original music by Alan Shorter, artistic direction for TCGMC, Craig Carnahan |
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Producer: Dan Hunt (Tomie de Paola, John Scagliotti, Joann Usher) |
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Cast: Tomie de Paola, Ann Bancroft, Bill T. Jones, Kevyn Aucoin |
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Technical: video |
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Relevance to HPPUB site: |
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Review: “He was the last picked for any team. We have to have Oliver Button. Now we’ll lose for sure,” I recall an incident in sixth grade, where I didn’t get my “ups” at recess because the batter ahead of me, while I was on deck, hit into a triple play! This video is
based on Tomie de Paola’s book, “Oliver Button is a
Sussy,” which became a short stage musical put on
by the Twin Cities Gay Men’s Chorus in
2000, portions of which appear in the video. The original book was published
by Harcourt in 1979 and the information from Barnes and Noble is Format: Paperback, 43pp. For example, Ann Bancroft
would make a journey to the South Pole, as in her Maybery
award winning film Poles
Apart. African-American Bill T. Jones would become a choreogeapher,
and Kevyn Aucoin, after
recounting particularly poignant accounts of rejection in boyhood sports
activities and even speech therapy for his “lisp” would become a makeup
artists. Aucoin is interesting because his presence
in the video contradicts the “sissy boy” stereotype; he looks
broad-shouldered and forceful and the lisp is gone.
The baby Moses grows into a star. At one point in the script,
de Paola mentions the social objection to “singularity” for young men. Of
course, this is what a lot of the controversy over the supposed “sissy boy
syndrome” is about; society as a whole needs young men to grow up to fill
fungible roles and find adult individuality only through marriage and
family. Conservative authors like
George Gilder and more socially compassionate writers like Warren Farrell
have explored this problem. So,
unconventional young people “deviate” at their own risk and a few grow up to
be stars. Of course, that leads to the question, what about the rest of us? But the “sissy boy” (or
“tomboy girl”) issue is just the tip of the iceberg, of what individuality is
all about. “Why can’t I just be me?” Tomie asks, at
one point. It gets complicated because the “sissy” and “tomboy” axis hardly
characterizes the gay community as a whole. Just look at the political issues
of gays in the military and in the Boy Scouts, and the various accounts of
the contributions of gays in defending the country (starting with Mark
Bingham on Flight 93 on September 11).
We associate individualism with creativity and psychological polarity,
a topic explored elsewhere on this site as with the writings of Paul Rosenfels.
Creativity varies from the artistic, “non-competitive” temperaments
shown on this video to the manipulations of high The video goes in this
direction by several dialogues and news reports about bullying in school
systems. It is easy to extract the
point that bullying—however motivated by boys’ need for peer approval and
group belonging—is the starting point of hate, group violence, militancy, and
the horrible consequences that we have seen recently. The book and video also
make it absolutely convincing that one can make “gay-related” subject matter
suitable for younger audience, a point important to the debate over COPA. So it is possible to take the
vision started in this video much further, all the way to the meaning of
self-definition and freedom for mainstream Americans. It would seem to me that one
could put the entire musical and historical materials from this video and
make a commercially releasable film.
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Related reviews: Gilder, Rosenfels, Farrell, Ann Bancroft, After Stonewall |
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