Еще одна версия на английском:"It was an extremely distressing experience trying to cast Brian, because of what we discovered to be the massive amount of homophobia [in Hollywood]," says Cowen. There are still traces of the pain clearly evident in his voice. "We were so shocked, and so upset, because we went into this thinking that in the years since An Early Frost things had changed. And what we had discovered was that things hadn't changed one iota."Late on a Friday afternoon, with a meeting the following Monday at 8:30 a.m. scheduled with the Showtime executives, ostensibly to introduce their cast, Lipman and Cowen still didn't have their Brian Kinney. There were two more actors to read for the part, and at the last minute one of them had dropped out."It was a test of faith, and by Friday at 5:00 p.m. faith was running out," Lipman says ruefully. At 5:45 p.m., their casting director called. "She said, 'Come on over right now, he's here!' We raced over to the office." The casting director ushered in one last actor. "In walks Gale Harold," Lipman remembers, "and we're looking at him, and he's reading the scene, and Ron and I are looking at each other, and it's like, 'Is he fucking fabulous?'""He fell out of the sky," Cowen breathes. "There's truly no other explanation."~*~Lipman asked Harold to be at the Showtime offices in Westwood at 8:00 a.m. on Monday morning. "He lit up a cigarette and, very Brian-esque, he said, 'I'm with this repertory company, and we have to strike a set on Sunday night, and I don't think I can make it.' And we're thinking, Is he for real? Who says that? We've been in Hollywood too long. What do you say to that?" Lipman laughs, shaking his head in disbelief. He pressed a copy of the script into Harold's arms, and asked him to read it and call them at home the next day."I was standing in the kitchen," Cowen remembers, "and the phone rang, and a voice said, 'Hi, this is Brian Kinney.'""What helped me recover," says Cowen, describing the aftermath of the casting disaster averted in the eleventh hour, an experience that clearly devastated him, both as a film maker and as a gay man, "was that Gale was brave enough to take the part. It was the same way with Aidan Quinn [who was one of the few actors willing to consider An Early Frost, in which he starred as a gay man with AIDS.] You need the one actor who is not afraid, and who is very politically committed to what he's doing. In a way, that was the emotional salvation.""There was an attraction," Harold concedes, when asked if the chance to play a sexual hunter-gatherer like Brian Kinney--as far from the 'gay upstairs neighbor' as possible--appealed to him. "Another attraction was that it was an interesting story. It wasn't West Hollywood 90210, which I never would have been called in for. I'm not that 'type.'"