Author Matthew Rettenmund and director Q. Allan Brocka are aiming to reboot their gay cult film for a new audience, and they’re looking for help.
Based on Rettenmund’s book of the same name, 2006’s “Boy Culture” centered on a handsome gay hustler named X (Derek Magyar). Years of sex work leave X emotionally guarded with lovers and friends, but an unlikely kinship with an older client (Patrick Bauchau) forces him to confront his fear of intimacy.
Directed by Brocka, “Boy Culture” received praise from critics after making the festival rounds. The New York Times praised the movie’s “cerebral blend of insight, wit and raunchy self-awareness,” while The Chicago Tribune called it “a better-than-average gay relationship film.”
Rettenmund and Brocka want to parlay that success into “Boy Culture: The Series,” which they’ve deemed “an innovative, sizzling hot, funny love story” that takes place 10 years after the original film. The web series, which will comprise six 15-minute stories, catches up with X (played by Matthew Wilkas) as he returns to hustling in his mid-30s. As it turns out, sex work has changed a lot since X’s early days, thanks to marriage equality, social media and the advent of HIV/AIDS prevention drugs like pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP. (Watch a teaser for the series above.)
Popular vlogger and model Matt Crawford will star alongside Wilkas as a younger, social media-savvy hustler who challenges X, while Stephen Guarino and singer-songwriter Steve Grand round out the cast. Darryl Stephens, who starred in the original film, will return to play X’s former roommate and on-again, off-again love interest, Andrew.
The creative partners have launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise money for the production of “Boy Culture: The Series,” which can be found here.
Rettenmund told HuffPost that he and Brocka began tossing around the idea of revisiting “Boy Culture” as the film’s 10th anniversary approached, taking into account advances in technology and LGBTQ rights that have occurred in the interim. “It’s always interesting to explore the end game of someone working in any industry that requires youth and good looks,” he said.
Watch the trailer for the original “Boy Culture” below.
Viewers can should expect the series to offer “edgy and occasionally outrageous humor,” along with plenty of “sexy guys,” Rettenmund, who is also the author of the 1995 Madonna fan bible Encyclopedia Madonnica and its 2015 follow-up, Encyclopedia Madonnica 20: Madonna from A to Z, said. But the story will also feature a deep emotional undercurrent to keep audiences engaged.
“I conceived the novel as being a fun beach read that could double as a study of gay tropes and what’s really beneath them, and the series is all about that,” he explained. “You may sign up for the skin, but there’s more going on psychologically.”
For more information on “Boy Culture: The Series,” head here.
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