While researching this article I came across an older, similar piece on Entertainment Weekly about the difficulty in getting gay movies greenlit in Hollywood. It lists some gay movies stuck in perpetual development hell and some at the starting block.

One of the gay movies that EW namedrops as being ready to roll is a celluloid biopic of murdered San Francisco politician, Harvey Milk, with Gus Van Sant in the director’s chair. The article on EW.com was published in 1996 – it took another 12 years of struggling for Van Sant to get his cherished project realised, on top of the years beforehand stuck in the development process. It must have felt a long walk to the Oscars last year when Milk won for ‘Best Picture’.

In the Entertainment Weekly article some gay, Hollywood producers and writers are optimistic that the situation is about to improve for gay themed, studio movies. They were wrong, Brokeback Mountain and Milk notwithstanding.

Fourteen years later, The Dreyfus Affair, a baseball comedy about two professional players on the same team who fall in love, remains unmade. It’s just one example in a pile of unmade gay movies, a pile that includes The Front Runner, based on Patricia Nell Warren’s classic novel about a college cross-country coach who falls in love with his star student, and While England Sleeps, a story of ‘upstairs, downstairs’ homo love in pre-war England from the writer of The Lost Language of Cranes. I could go on…

So why do a handful of gay movies pass through the Hollywood machinery (and win acclaim) while most projects fall by the wayside? The theory that there just aren’t the good scripts out there doesn’t hold water because so many great movies come from great novels, and there’s no shortage of classic homo literature – I recently reported that Hollywood is keen to adapt Irish writer Colm Tóibín’s novel Brooklyn. Fine, but why none of the successful author’s many gay themed books?

The gay movies that do get made tend to rely on star power – A Single Man would not have seen daylight without Tom Ford. In fact, several gay-friendly names (Streisand and Jodie Foster included) expressed an interested in producing a movie version of The Dreyfus Affair, but eventually passed.

Hollywood also can’t use the excuse that there’s a lack of audience interest in gay stories because, as is proved time and time again, nobody knows anything in Hollywood, and cinemagoers aren’t just statistics, they like stuff that’s original and a little different. But, above all, they just want good stories and what’s a better source of love overcoming adversity than gay relationships? Plus gay characters are becoming more and more popular (and visible) on TV.

There seems to be a strongly defined two-tier system when it comes to gay movies: there’s the occasional, studio-level release that only gets made because it’s got the whiff of awards about it (and an ‘A’ list name attached); and then there’s the production line of niche movies made on the cheap with no aspiration beyond a small, gay DVD market – I recently read that the latest film in a successful gay movie franchise was made in 11 days, which was a luxury for the filmmakers. You don’t make quality in 11 days.

Of course there are gay movies that fall between the two stalls, but it does seem that Hollywood aims too high and the indies think too small. There’s plenty of gay interest stories out there with crossover appeal, including many of the unproduced screenplays.

A good example is I Love You Phillip Morris, a movie based on an incredible true story that just happens to be gay. It has no pretensions, just a desire to make a wide audience laugh and maybe cry a little. But, despite a big budget, star names and success abroad, the movie is still yet to see the light of day in its home market. After having its release date pushed pushed back four times, I Love You Phillip Morris is now set to bow in the U.S. on August 6. Don’t hold your breath.

If a movie project like the one Hollywood director Wayne Wang was developing at Columbia in the early ’00s – based on the huge-selling, No.1 bestseller Me Talk Pretty One Day – can’t get off the ground, what chance is there for the rest?

I really hope that someone reading this article fourteen years into the future will chuckle at a time when gay movie projects were considered risky and they won’t still be waiting for The Dreyfus Affair to be greenlit by Hollywood.