A few weeks ago we saw initial stills from Roland Emmerich’s upcoming film Stonewall, and today the trailer was released.
Since New York’s Greenwich Village has changed considerably in the four-plus decades since queer people fought back against police brutality, Emmerich’s film was shot on elaborately-detailed sound stages in Montreal. With a screenplay by Jon Robin Baitz, known for many acclaimed plays and TV series such as Brothers and Sisters, the movie titled simply Stonewall chronicles:
a fictional young man caught up during the 1969 Stonewall riots. Danny Winters (Jeremy Irvine) is forced to leave behind friends and loved ones when he is kicked out of his parent’s home and flees to New York. Alone in Greenwich Village, homeless and destitute, he befriends a group of street kids who soon introduce him to the local watering hole The Stonewall Inn; however, this shady, mafia-run club is far from a safe-haven. As Danny and his friends experience discrimination, endure atrocities and are repeatedly harassed by the police, we see a rage begin to build. This emotion runs through Danny and the entire community of young gays, lesbians and drag queens who populate the Stonewall Inn and erupts in a storm of anger. With the toss of a single brick, a riot ensues and a crusade for equality is born.
The movie, which will be in theaters September 25, also stars Jonny Beauchamp, Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Ron Perlman.
Watch below:
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Jim Fortier
Can’t wait!!!
redcarpet30
Something about this just seems…off.
It’s better than nothing though, I guess. Which is what 90 percent of americans know about Stonewall or any of the gay liberation happening in the 60s and 70’s.
sportyguy1983
Looks like it might be good. Never have been a fan of movies set in the late ’60s, early ’70s era though.
xamthor
not one POC as a major character… its the white washing of Queer history….. lovely.
Andrew Howard-Williams
Looks brilliant want it on DVD when it comes out. Pride is always important. The fight never ends.
Desert Boy
Things were so different back in the days of Stonewall. I have trouble imagining how difficult it must have been for my gay and lesbian elders. They paved the way for us.
Harley
Funny. I didn’t see any drag queens in the trailer. Weren’t the drag queens front and center in all that?
MarionPaige
I just recognized Jeremy Irvine, he is in that recent movie with Michael Douglas, “Beyond The Reach”. The highlight of Beyond The Reach is when Douglas’ character forces Irvine’s character to strip, hoping he will die in the heat of the desert. Irvine does quite of bit of running around and stumbling around the desert in these little green boxer briefs.
Irvine looks so “all American Boy” in Beyond The Reach but I think he’s English. He’s easy on the eyes and I wish him luck in this movie
MarionPaige
btw, if Milk could get away with claiming someone people even in San Francisco didn’t know was some kind of Gay Martin Luther King, maybe Stonewall should be given some slack for not having highly visible drag Queens. Maybe I’m wrong but isn’t that who appeared in drag in Penny Dreadful in the Stonewall trailer?
Before Milk, Harvey Milk’s claim to fame was in re the twinkie defense
Bromancer7
It looks exactly like that other Stonewall movie from 1995.
BRYANinSF
Director Roland Emmerich is best known for B movies — entertaining blockbusters. but not exactly great cinema. I think he’s a strange choice, but maybe his name and success were influential in getting this movie made.
The trailer is sort of “meh…” and filled with some very boring images; the most stereotypical is the one of the beautiful, innocent “waif” staring out the bus window at big, ol’ amazing, intimidating New York. And we’ve seen similar bar patrons in so many other gay films. They just look very silly and foolish and kind of scary.
I’m hoping that I’m wrong and that this movie is more imaginative and effective than I fear it is not, because being there at Stonewall or witnessing the White Night Riots in San Francisco must have seemed completely surreal.
And why was the riot filmed on sound stages? It makes it look like a Gene Kelly musical.
pcourt
It is exactly like the Stonewall film from 1995 but looks like it’s missing some of the crucial drag history of the Stonewall riots!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bop98c-Tfr4
animaux
@BRYANinSF:
animaux
BRYANinSF,
He was not chosen for the movie. This wasn’t a regular process in which a studio decided to make a Stonewall movie and they picked a director. No studio would make this movie even today. The film was Emmerich’s passion project which he financed himself. Without him there would be no Stonewall movie.
He is also a dedicated LGBT activist who donated large sums of money for various LGBT causes.
These are the reasons why I think all this cynicism is unfair and unwarranted. No one believed Spielberg was able to make a drama because he was making Indiana Jones movies, but look what came out of his passion for the Holocaust subject matter.
san39730
Yay! More gay-themed movies about attractive gay white men because we don’t have enough of those. I think there’s a law stating that all gay themed movies must surrounded, focus on, and star pretty white boys. Because they are ALL like this.
lauraspencer
@xamthor:
Did you watch the same trailer that I watched? I saw Latino and African American characters. Asians were lacking, but what was the Asian population in NYC in 1969?
It does feel a lot like the indi film from 1995. Why remake the same movie 20 years later?
jay_dub
Cut the guy some slack? For what? Yet another cis-white guy makes a movie transforming an event that little to do with cis white guys into a movie in which cis white guys are front and center.
But then again, this is America, a country which produces film after film about the Civil Rights Movement in which white characters are at the center. White people can’t just settle for being at the center of almost everything. They’ve got to steal other people’s stories too. (And I’m a white cis gay dude, for the record.)
Jacob23
Looks great and I will definitely see it. And as an added benefit, the trailer is pissing off trans activists and crossdressers. Yay!
99.8% of the US is “cisgender” (aka, normal) and in 1969 nearly 80% of New York City was white. So it ain’t that shocking that most of the Stonewall rioters were normal white people and a sizable minority of the rioters were normal Black and Latino people. There were only a few drag queens there, despite all the desperate attempts to claim otherwise. Every single photo of the event and every second of footage destroys the claim that Stonewall was a cross-dressers’ event. And it’s even worse for the trans activists eager to appropriate gay history for themselves. Since the tr@nnies have disavowed drag queens as part of their wacky collective, they don’t even get credit for the very few drag queens who were there.
jay_dub
@Jacob23: Your response is precisely the problem with this film. While the majority of NYC may have been white, the majority of Stonewall rioters were drag queens and trans folks, a majority of whom were people of color. When people watch films that turn white folks into the center of a story they were on the margins of, people end up believing that’s what actually happened. When that’s just a lie. Or, rather, in the vocabulary of film, a fictionalized account.
As for cis folks being “normal,” everyone is normal for who they are. Language suggesting that transfolks are abnormal has no place in this forum. (And remember, trans folks played a key role in the Stonewall riots that so many cis white gay men take pride in as part of their history.)
UltimateSin
@Jacob23: biological majority of New York City or also straight people so maybe a majority of the people portrayed in this film should also be straight.
BRYANinSF
Animaux,
Thanks for setting me “straight,” so to speak, regarding the circumstances of Emmercih’s being the director. I know he’s gay, but I didn’t know it was a passion of his to film this story.
I do hope it’s good, but like a lot of people who love movies, when I hear about a project I start imagining how it should be done. Of course, I don’t have a clue about the complexities of the process, and it’s impossible to satisfy everyone, but I am eager to see it.
lykeitiz
Seriously…..what trailer are you people watching? In the 2+ minutes, those who had speaking parts were: 2 latinos, 1 black, & 3 whites. And the background players were a mix.
Some people see what they want to see.
That said, I do wish this movie were about actual people, not a fictional (yes, white boy). Some survivors of Stonewall are still alive. I’d love to see their stories portrayed.
Jacob23
@jay_dub: “the majority of Stonewall rioters were drag queens and trans folks, a majority of whom were people of color.”
Well, that’s really at the heart of all this SJW wailing and gnashing of teeth. You believe what you wrote to be a fact. But it isn’t. It’s a myth which has been built up over time and which some people believe because it makes them feel good. And when you challenge that myth, it evokes hostility. It’s no different than if you were to go to a fundie church and start questioning the Garden of Eden or the Resurrection. In a few minutes, you’d have a lot of people yelling at you. If the majority of Stonewall rioters were drag queens, then there should be evidence of that. There’s not. There isn’t a single photograph of a large group – or a group of any size – of drag queens. There is one single drag queen in one pic. If there’s evidence, show it and I’ll change my mind. Otherwise, you are just evangelizing a religion.
@UltimateSin – Argument doesn’t work b/c Stonewall was a private club exclusive to homosexuals. By definition, it would not be representative of NYC as a whole as to sexual orientation. However, it was not similarly exclusive when it came to race or drag. If it had been a Black-only or drag-only bar, then you would have a point and the general population demographics wouldn’t be relevant. But it wasn’t exclusive on those other bases, so it is relevant to consider the general population of the city at the time. Also, the crowd which later formed came from the surrounding neighborhood, not the bar itself, so again those folks would be overwhelmingly white and overwhelmingly non-trans. They also would be mostly straight, and sure enough, there were straights at the riot, including a straight white guy named David Van Ronk, who later in life became a successful singer. Apparently, he was seized by the police, hauled inside the bar, beaten and then charged with assault. In contrast to all of these phantom transgenders whose presence is unsupported by evidence, Van Ronk’s presence and his mistreatment by police were reported by the Village Voice at the time.
jay_dub
What photos are you talking about? There were people taking pictures *inside* the bar that night when the patrons started to fight back? Or ones taken after the riots were in full swing?
And you’ve actually read one or more of the histories written by scholars, based on personal accounts/interviews of people who were actually there, the ones written years ago and which served to upend the myth that the original riot started as white gay men who had had enough? Or you’re just speculating? The well-researched histories I’ve read lay out a compelling case that the people who originally fought back were drag queens and trans folks, mostly of color. That others eventually joined in is another matter. Martin Duberman’s book _Stonewall_ has a pretty detailed account of the beginning of the riots told from various perspectives, including white gay men, who were there but who were not the people who first started to fight back. And it’s quite a good read. Even if this filmmaker were going for truth over making a story that’s going to appeal to as many viewers as possible, nothing’s likely to get as close to the real story as in-depth, well-researched histories.
Cam
Didn’t they already do a Stonewall movie with far more emphasis on the drag queens a few years ago? Everyone is acting like this is the first one.
Sluggo2007
@xamthor: Enough with the race card already! Not everything is about POC’s. Get a life!