19 years ago I did a hotel-room interview with producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer during the Crimson Tide junket. A few months earlier I’d laughed hard at Quentin Tarantino‘s “go the way way” riff in Sleep With Me (’94), in which he discussed a struggling-with-homosexuality undercurrent in Top Gun. So I proposed to Don and Jerry that they should reach out to gay moviegoers by re-marketing all their films as secret gay movies that were fraught with homosexual themes and iconography (i.e., the phallic-shaped submarines in Tide). Bruckheimer froze with a grin on his face but Simpson smirked and kicked it around. When I asked them to sign my Crimson Tide script at the end of our chat, Simpson suggested that the gay subcurrent thing was more in my head than in their films.

A draft of Robert Towne’s original Chinatown script with an entirely different texture and ending (i.e., Noah Cross is shot and killed) with signatures from Towne and Robert Evans and production designer Richard Sylbert.

Cover page of a script of Any Given Sunday.