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Hayley Kiyoko wants to sail the same-sex-loving high seas.
The musician, novelist and filmmaker says her dream project is a queer take on “Pirates of the Caribbean.” “I would love to do a lesbian pirate show or movie
— Keira Knightley, but gay,” she said. “Very gay and fantastical.”
Kiyoko’s remarks came Thursday night during a panel at UTA in Beverly Hills titled “Saving Queer Media.” The program also included filmmakers Angela Robinson, Adam Shankman and Wash Westmoreland. Moderated by Variety’s Marc Malkin and hosted by UTA Proud, the evening served as a fundraiser for the Los Angeles-based LGBTQ+ film festival Outfest.
Kiyoko made her directorial debut earlier this year with “Girls Like Girls,” a YA romance based on her novel and song of the same name. She said she tried to get the film greenlit based solely on the song, but financing didn’t come through until after she wrote the novel and it became a bestseller.
She’s hoping to turn her second novel, “Where There’s Room for Us,” into a film as well. “It’s a period piece, which no one wants to pay for, but they will one day,” she said to cheers and applause from the audience.
Adam Shankman, whose directorial credits include “Hairspray,” “Rock of Ages,” “Stop! That! Train!” and the upcoming Arnold Schwarzenegger and Alan Ritchson holiday action comedy “The Man With the Bag,” said his dream project is a big-screen adaptation of “Spring Awakening,” the Tony Award-winning coming-of-age rock musical set in late 19th-century Germany.
Although he doesn’t think it could ever get the go-ahead because of its intense subject matter, “where terrible things happen to these kids,” Shankman said, “I think it is such a beautiful poem and it is such a beautiful story and it lives in me in such a haunting and beautiful way. I know exactly what I would do with it, and I know exactly how I would do it. I see it completely, and I would love to make it more than any other movie. If that was my last movie, I’d be fine.”
An off-Broadway “Spring Awakening” revivalbegins previews on Nov. 27 ahead of opening night on Dec. 17.
Wash Westmoreland, the director behind Julianne Moore’s Oscar-winning work in “Still Alice” as well as the recent “Heartstopper Forever,”wants to adapt Chris Bryant’s 2020 book “The Glamour Boys: The Secret Story of the Rebels Who Fought for Britain to Defeat Hitler.”
“It’s a true story, and it’s set in Britain in the 1930s, where being queer was career-destroying, and you’d be thrown in jail. It was absolutely illegal,” Westmoreland said. “It’s about a group of queer MPs who are very repressed and very secretive about their lives, but they go to the one place in Europe where you can have a good time and a sexy weekend, which was Berlin at the time of ‘Cabaret.’ So they went there.
“They were drinking, dancing, just having a great time. It was a true expression of freedom,” he continued. “But they saw the rise of the Nazis, and it absolutely radicalized them to go back and stand up and demand that Britain confront Germany at the time.”
Westmoreland called it a story about “queer war heroes” that resonates today. “It is a powerful analogy to what’s happening now, the authoritarians they need people to beat up on and guess who’s very easy to beat up on? LGBTQ people are,” he said. “It’s this vigilance of standing up for what we believe in and preventing the pushback of our rights.”
“Professor Marsten and the Wonder Women” writer and director Angela Robinson said she’s been trying to adapt “D.E.B.S.,” her 2004 action comedy about a group of schoolgirls recruited to a secret government defense agency, as a television series. “Sometimes the stars start to align and then they don’t, but that would be really fun,” Robinson said.
