Gosford's spark: actor Bob Balaban bridges the gap in his career between servicing Jon Voight in Midnight Cowboy and coming on to Ryan Phillippe in Gosford Park, the Oscar-nominated mystery he also produced. (The Hollywood Issue).

Morris Weissman--the Charlie Chan producer with a soft spot for his young valet (Ryan Phillippe) in Gosford Park--is only the second gay role Bob Balaban has ever played, and a lot has changed in the years between the two. For while he is most famous as a popular character actor in the films of Christopher Guest and Woody Allen, Balaban's first brush with fame came when he made his film debut as the nerdy student who gives Joe Buck (Jon Voight) a blow job in a movie theater balcony in John Schlesinger's Midnight Cowboy.

"My performance in that movie created the X rating for that film," recalls Balaban, "and the rating was downgraded to an R when it won the Best Picture Academy Award. There was a picture of me in Playboy when they did an issue about sex in the '70s. Isn't it funny that in 2002 I can play a gay part and nobody even cares, yet in 1969 I played a gay part which almost stopped the movie getting released?"

Of course, when he took the part, Balaban had no idea that he would become a small but significant emblem of the new permissiveness and of the acceptance of homosexuality in contemporary film. "I came from New York theater, and when you come from theater you tend to ask whether it was an interesting part or whether it was well-written," he says. "It never occurred to me that it would cause such a stir, and I was hardly nervous about whether my image could afford it, I was still in college and so excited about getting a film."

Thirty-two years later, Balaban was cooking up Gosford Park with his old pal Robert Airman, and Altman was looking to throw in some details about the myriad characters. "So he came up with the gay thing for my character," Balaban explains. "I actually had a scene with Ivor Novello, played by Jeremy Northam [see stow, page 55], where the two of us tacitly let each other know that we're gay, but the scene was really about something else and ended up getting cut out. The point is that the character's gay but the audience doesn't blink an eye. There's nothing unusual about that. I like that because it makes the religious right a little uncomfortable. People can identify with a gay character who does not fit into their stereotype. He's in front of you, and he's not wearing a dress."

Balaban, who is straight and married with children, has certainly never shied away from a challenge, including directing the cult horror favorite Parents and episodes of TV series including Amazing Stories, Now and Again, and Oz. "Oz was most strange. In my episode a white Aryan supremacist had a swastika carved into his chest and was then hung naked in the gym. You can't believe they can get away with it."

With all this directing experience under his belt, the eloquent and witty Balaban is now embarking on his biggest challenge to date--his own half-hour TV series for NBC as well as the publication of a children's book, McGrowl, and the reissue of his popular diaries from the set of Close Encounters of the Third Kind (he played Francois Truffaut's interpreter). But before that all begins, he is basking in the praise being heaped on Gosford Park and the glow of his first-ever Oscar nomination--one of the film's seven--as producer.

"When I sat down to watch the Academy Award nominations in my apartment, I felt as if I was birthing septuplets," Balaban says. "After the first one was announced, I couldn't believe there was a number 2 or number 3, and after the fourth one, I said to myself, Could there be room for another? To find that we had seven was overwhelming."

Goodridge is U.S. film editor for Screen International.