9 FOR '99.

NINE FILMMAKER GET READY TO HIT THE BIGTIME 

LISA CHOLODENKO

High Art, writer-director Lisa Cholodenko's dark tale of ambition, addiction, and lesbian love, last year won honors at Sundance and Cannes and a shared best actress award from the Los Angeles film critics for leading lady Ally Sheedy. It also opened film industry doors to Cholodenko. "I was amazed at how interested people were to meet with me," she says, "and what kind of scripts got sent to me. I've been offered or involved in conversations about a whole range of projects." These days Cholodenko, 34, is writing Laurel Canyon, which follows a conservative young man and his girlfriend, staying at his mother's L.A. home. So is Cholodenko done portraying lesbian life onscreen? For now, maybe. "I don't have anxiety about being identified [as lesbian] or doing work that has lesbian content," she says. "But as an artist, I feel it's important to me to go beyond the scope of my own experience and my own desire, it's a personal kind of challenge."

Anne Stockwell

P.J. CASTELLANETA

P.J. Castellaneta raised eyebrows while at film school with a silent short about campus bathroom sex. He did it again with his 1992 debut feature, Together Alone, a two-character encounter that's been described as My Trick with Andre. With his latest movie, the just-out Relax ... It's Just Sex, the 38-year-old writer-director had the gala opening night crowd at Los Angeles's Outfest '98 arguing over a gay-on-straight rape scene in what is essentially a romantic ensemble comedy.

"[The movie] really upsets the straight money men, be* cause it's not a her world," says Castellaneta, referring to his long search for a distributor. "The fact that a straight man gets raped by a gay man goes to the core of hetero male fear and homophobia."

Even so, Relax, starring Jennifer Tilly and Mitchell Anderson, may finally nudge Castellaneta into the front rank of out directors ready to make a break from the indie world. With a three-picture deal at Warner Bros., he remains philosophical.

"None of those films will probably get made. I'm tired of going to meetings where they say, 'We love it, but can yon make them less gay?' My inner Paul Rudnick is fighting my inner Larry Kramer about how to deal with all this."

--Eric Gutierrez

CHERYL DUNYE

When filmmaker Cheryl Dunye served as a juror at the Sundance Film Festival in January, conversation inevitably turned to her work. "[Being there] brought back interest in what's going on with black lesbian and straight women's work," says Dunye, 32, writer-director-star of 1996's The Watepmelen Woman. "There's nothing in the sense of features out there by African-American women. Whether black, white, red, green, gay, or lesbian, they're starving for those images."

Dunye is working to feed that hunger. She has cowritten one screenplay with gay African-American writer Robert Reid-Pharr, Bad as She Wanna Be (a sort of hip-hop Victop/Victoria), and is writing another about a young African-American woman in prison. "it will be like my other work, walking a fine line between truth and fiction," Dunye says. "There will be lesbian characters and lesbian experiences."

She also teaches at two California colleges and juggles all these projects with a growing family: daughter Simone, born a year ago, and partner Alexandra Juhasz, 34, who's expecting a son this summer.

Having children "makes things more precious," Dunye says. "Now there's something at the end of the tunnel that I'm doing all this crazy work for."

--Laurie K. Schenden

DAN IRELAND

Director Dan Ireland's cinematic lip locks portray not just the characters' ardor but his own. "it's an intensity that is very much what I believe in," says Ireland, 48. "it's the kind of passion gay people are tuned in to."

The kiss between Vincent D'Onofrio and Thomas Jane in Ireland's The Velocity of Gary, due in April, functions as a set piece, offering a juicy embrace between the film's male leads--cast respectively as a porn star and a hustler--while also exploring the love triangle involving a feisty waitress (Salma Hayek). Ireland has a long producer's resume but came to the director's chair only three years ago with the critically lauded The Whole Wide World. Just as that film helped launch Renee Zellweger's career, Gary could boost Jane's visibility. Ireland chuckles as he recalls coaching his star on gay ways: "1 shaved his chest and took him to the gym." Ireland's next project is Whenever/t Rains, another smoldering love story, and he hope soon to work on a psychological thriller. "My parents took me to see North by Northwest when I was 5," he says. "That was it. I was hooked."

--Max Harrold

STEPHEN M. KATZ

Can an artist be the flavor of the month more than 20 years into his career? If his latest project is the gorgeous sleeper hit Gods and Monsters, the answer is yes. Cinematographer Stephen M. Katz, 52, has shot Roger Corman exploitation tricks and Hollywood blockbusters (from The Blues Brothers to the new Baby Geniuses), but it's his stunning work behind the camera on the Oscar-nominated Bill Condan film that has reignited his film career.

"People are finally taking notice of me as a cinematographer to be reckoned with," Katz says, "someone with a personal style who's doing wonderful work that no one ever noticed."

Since Gods, Katz has completed I Remember April, a coming-of-age story set in California during World War II, and he begins work on Elves, a Bob Clark movie filming in Canada, in April. But his real passion is Rude Katz hopes to direct George Bloom's original screenplay about a gay shopkeeper in Brooklyn who ends up raising a friend's son.

Katz attributes his involvement with Gods to his late lover, Ronald Bechard, who brought the material to his attention. "Ronald [who died on New Year's Eve, 1995] never saw the movie made, but it's dedicated to him," Katz says. "After the Sundance premiere, I was in such tears, I ran out into the snow and tore my shirt off and just stood there crying. It was so cathartic. I did it for Ronald."

--Bruce C. Steele

GUINEVERE TURNER

Guinevere Turner doesn't get much sleep. Best known for setting baby dykes' hearts all aflutter in 1994's Go Fish--which she coscripted with director Rose Troche--the 30-year-old writer-actress knows how to keep busy. When she's not taking roles in hot indie movies (Sundance award-winner Treasure Island, Kevin Smith's Chasing Amy and his upcoming Dogma), Turner's busy building her rep as one of the hottest scribes in Hollywood in a high-profile media Mitz, she and director-cowriter Mary Harron fought to keep their adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis's controversial novel American Psycho out of the hands of industry heavyweights like Oliver Stone and Leonardo DiCaprio.

"There was potential for this complex social satire to become a stupid 'sluts get slashed' movie," Turner says. "And I thought, Fuck, I don't want my name on this thing."

Fortunately, Turner and Harron won out: DiCaprio and Stone moved on; the film, which stars Christian Bale and Reese Witherspoon, is currently shooting in Toronto; and Turner's on a roll. Next she'll reteam with Harron to star in a long-in-the-works biopic of kinky '50s pinup Bettie Page, and she's adapting the Jerzy Kosinski novel Pinball for A-list director Gary Fleder (Kiss the Girls). Just don't make Turner choose between her dueling careers.

"[Acting and writing] satisfy completely different things for me," she says. "Writing is such a solitary process, and I'm compulsively social. If I fall in the woods and no hears me, I'm so depressed."

--Kevin Maynard

JOHN OTTMAN

By age 30, John Ottman had won the British Academy Award for film editing and the Saturn Award for musical score, both for Bryan Singer's The Usual Suspects. Now 34, Ottman is sought out by many directors besides film-school friend Singer.

But after again both editing and scoring Singer's Apt Pupil last year, Ottman now faces the expectation he'll do the same for Singer's comic book-inspired The X-Men, shooting this summer. "You make college promises, and they come back to haunt you," he says. "It's hard for me to confront people, but I hate editing. It keeps me from scoring, which I completely love."

That love can be heard next in the wry thriller Goodbye, Love, an Ellen DeGeneres vehicle due in April, and in the upcoming Lake Placid. And, yes, Ottman will score The X-Men. "it's been my fantasy to score a sci-fi Dances With Wolves, with ail those nice, long, beautiful notes," he says. "If I ever do double duty on a film again, though, I'd rather direct and score my own. But it's nice to have a fallback career if scoring takes a nosedive."

---Eric Gutierrez

TOMMY O'HAVER

Tommy O'Haver had low expectations for the Sundance premiere of his Billy's Hollywood Screen Kiss in 1998. "My main goal was to just get a writing assignment to pay some bills," he remembers. Universal went one better, commissioning him to pen a script based on the Archie comic books. "I pitched them my idea, and they hired me just like that," says O'Haver, 30. "it was a dream come true."

Meanwhile, The WB TV network is developing O'Haver's pitch for a TV series following the lives of five Indiana preteens set in the '80s. "It's a bit like The Wonder Years," he says, "but more twisted."

Currently O'Haver spends most of his time writing in his apartment in the beachside community of Venice, Calif., with his inappropriately named cat, Tiny--a far cry from the mail room at New Line, where he slogged away while making short films. "Archie is a logical step from Billy's," he says, "but I don't want to keep going in that direction. I really want to do a horror movie."

As for Archie: No, Jughead will not be gay, O'Haver reveals. "I'm trying to be as true to the comic as possible," he says. "But the film will have a campy quality, mostly because Betty and Veronica are like drag queens in disguise. They have a couple good catfights."

--Jeffrey Epstein

JAN OXENBERG

Now that a writing and coproducing job on Chicago Hope has Jan Oxenberg's career in stable condition, is the feminist lesbian filmmaker (Thank You and Goodnight, 1991) ready to trade her pioneering spirit for job security? Hardly.

For her first Hope episode, Oxenberg penned the story of a gay Hasidic boy, and her lesbian-themed scripts are getting shopped all over Hollywood. Indeed, it was her independent film work that led to her first TV writing job, on the 1996 drama Relativity, for which she wrote in the first lesbian kiss on networkTV.

"I wondered what would be the consequences of coming out so publicly," she says of being openly lesbian in media coverage of the episode. "But if you want the world to change, you might have a fear or hesitation, but you do what you need to do." True to form, her next gig was Nothing Sacred, the controversial series about a Catholic priest that covered gay clergy and AIDS.

Oxenberg's latest film project is distinctly nongay, based on James Eliroy's memoir about the unsolved murder of his mother, My Dark Places. But in other work she'll continue to reflect her life and experiences. "I definitely expect to have lesbians in my future," she says, "creatively as well as in every other way."

--Laurie K. Schenden