The Guardian newspaper took artist and surviving Stonewall participant Tommy Lanigan-Schmidt to a first-night screening of Stonewall in New York. Here is his verdict:
This story really needs a series, because each character needs to be developed more. There are a lot of stupid things in it. Like when the white kid from the countryside is offered a free home-cooked meal and turns it down. No street kid would turn down dinner! You just didn’t do that. Say no like some middle-class kid? It didn’t work that way.
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They could have a done a lot better job with Ed Murphy [the Stonewall Inn manager, who the film alleges exploited gay homeless youth for financial gain]. Murphy was a very dull-looking character who had no charisma. So to make someone with no charisma look like a killer is a ridiculous. He was so good at being invisible – and he could have you killed like that. The guy they had playing him [Ron Perlman], they did that for effect I guess.
The movie was a very bad representation of the Stonewall Inn. The bar was made to be invisible. If you passed by there you wouldn’t notice it. It looked like a closed-down nothing. They didn’t have those big lights on [as they do in the film]. There were no lights the night of the riots.
The place wasn’t glamorous. The inside was mostly plywood and dark. The best thing in there was the jukebox. The walls were wet in there because the air conditioning didn’t work too well. And the place had a kind of stale beer smell going through it.
The movie is pretty accurate in terms of the street kids being the main engine of things. In one criticism of this film, someone was saying they were angry because there were so many gay stereotypes. Gay stereotypes are what made it happen. The people who passed for straight hid and didn’t want to be active at the beginning. The straighter-acting people ran away.
I thought the choice of lead character was a moronic, old-fashioned thing to do – pick a generic white character who’s supposed to be corn-fed . That’s outdated form; they shouldn’t have done it. And that whole cornball thing of him being the one to throw the first brick. I don’t think there was a first brick; there was so much happening at once.
In the movie, Danny is put there to represent all humanity – and it’s crazy that they chose a white kid to do that. Any person can represent all of humanity. They played it too safe in a ridiculous way. Even in the rest of the country, people aren’t that white anymore.
The cops were as homophobic as they’re portrayed in the film. All that beating up, that’s how it was – getting smashed for no reason. I was lucky that didn’t happen that much to me, but the cops wanting sex happened too. That felt accurate.
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