On his own terms: for director James L. Brooks, authentic gay content has always been a priority.

When James L. Brooks was casting the gay role of Simon Nye in As Good As It Gets, he set out in search of a gay actor. "I just wanted it to have integrity," he says. "I didn't want it to be glib. I didn't want to treat it the way it's always been treated."

In fact, when Brooks chose Greg Kinnear for the part, he thought the actor was gay. Once filming began, however, Kinnear informed Brooks of his wedding plans. "It was a bummer for me," the director recalls, laughing. "I guess I didn't look as enthusiastic as I should have when a guy tells me he's in love."

Simon may be played by a straight man, but Brooks still believes Simon's spirit is genuinely gay. He's modeled, in part, after Brooks's longtime associate Robert Moore, who died in 1984. "Bob was key in my life," Brooks says of Moore, who directed the original 1968 off-Broadway production of The Boys in the Band as well as Brooks's first made-for-TV movie, Thursday's Game. "I'd think of Bob often during the filming of this. He was the first person I ever knew who died of AIDS."

Despite Moore's impact on him, Brooks relied on more than memory to flesh out Simon's role. "I'm big on research," he says. "I had conversations with gay friends and colleagues of mine that I would never have had, had I not been doing this movie. Because of the requirement to ask the unaskable, they were remarkable conversations."

Some of those conversations wound up in the film. At one point, Jack Nicholson's character, Melvin Udall, asks Simon, "Do you ever get a hard-on for a woman?" Brooks posed that question to many of his gay friends. But he couldn't use his favorite response: "Once, on ecstasy."

As his track record shows, Brooks's openness has helped him create convincing gay characters for years. Before directing such popular movies as 1987's Broadcast News (which originally contained a gay subplot) and 1983's Oscar-winning Terms of Endearment, Brooks was one of television's most successful sitcom producers.

In fact, as executive producer of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Brooks was responsible for what may have been the first gay joke ever to be told on a situation comedy. In a 1972 episode Phyllis (Cloris Leachman) panics when Rhoda (Valerie Harper) begins dating Phyllis's brother. Phyllis gets even more upset when Rhoda rejects the brother (played, coincidentally, by Robert Moore). Says Brooks: "It was rewrite night, and we were looking for an end to the show. Bob was gay' and we said, `What if we just: use that?'" They did.

PHYLLIS: But he's handsome, he's

witty, he's charming...

RHODA: He's gay.

PHYLLIS: Oh, thank God it's just that.

Brooks went on to create and produce another classic sitcom, Taxi, and oversaw the production of two gay episodes of the series, the second of which featured Ted Danson as an etteminate hairstylist. Ironically, Danson's gay portrayal may have landed him the role of supermacho straight guy Sam Malone on Cheers. Not it it was planned that way. "We were in trouble," says Brooks. "We were playing it politically correct--not too gay or flamboyant."

On the night of the taping, however, Brooks pushed Danson to play the part larger than life. Taking Brooks's advice, Danson proved his versatility. "Two of my colleagues on Taxi who went on to do Cheers said it was that night that; they knew Ted was a candidate for Sam."

These days, with the success of films such as In & Out and My Best Friend's Wedding, Brooks sees Hollywood's attitude toward gay content changing at a rapid pace: "When you do it in a movie, its starting not to be such a big deal. And I think that is a big deal--that it's it's not such a big deal."