Too much gay sex?

1. Steven Soderbergh is asserting that all the movie studios turned down his Liberace biopic "Behind the Candelabra" (now playing on HBO) because it was "too gay." This is a story of a wealthy 58-year-old entertainer going after an 18-year-old guy and it includes explicit scenes depicting anal intercourse — 2 elements that major studios might reject even in heterosexual love stories, but crying homophobia may work to lure in the very viewers who would be repelled by old+young and anal sex in a heterosexual love story.

2. Meanwhile, at the Cannes Film Festival, the Palme D'Or went to "Blue Is the Warmest Color," which has "intensely erotic, incredibly realistic, quite lengthy, and almost certainly unsimulated sex scenes" with 2 women:

I clocked the first sex scene between Adèle and Emma — replete with fingering, licking, and, as a friend called it, "impressive scissoring" — at an approximate ten minutes. Audience walkouts began around minute nine. That turned into spontaneous applause (and relieved laughter), when the women climaxed and finished a minute later. Was that scene, and the many other graphic, erotic moments to follow, "necessary to tell the story?" Film.com's Jordan Hoffman asked in his review. "Please believe the part of my brain that doesn’t house a lecherous voyeur when I say yes, absolutely."

What's going on?

ADDED: The more a movie approaches pornography, the more viewers are justified in deciding what they want to watch based on their own sexual proclivities.

AND: There's a point — and it may be different for different viewers — where a movie becomes pornography. At that point, you might walk out, as some people did at "Blue Is the Warmest Color." But let's say you like watching pornography. Still, you might prefer to watch it at home and in private. And you might get impatient with the excessive dramatic scenes around the sexually explicit parts. In "Blue Is the Warmest Color," I see that "[t]heir relationship falls apart because of subtle differences in social class and ambition." Well, that sounds awfully tedious by porn standards! And if it's porn, of course, you get to reject the actors — like Michael Douglas as Liberace — whose bodies are not sexually stimulating to you. That's not anti-gay. That's your own sexual preference, which you are entitled to.

IN THE COMMENTS: Misinforminimalism says it's "worth noting":

1. The protagonist is 15.
2. This is based on a graphic novel (i.e., a comic) that was far less graphic than the movie. Tells you something about the director.
3. The movie's 183 minutes long, so perhaps the ten minute sex scene leaves nearly 3 hours to develop the plot so it's all ok?
4. Did I mention the protagonist is 15? 

I had not noticed the age in this movie. As I said up there at #1, accusations of homophobia may be used to pressure us not to numb ourselves to something that we would otherwise object to.

Al Pacino avoided meeting Phil Spector, whom he's portraying in an HBO movie.

"It would have been meeting a different person. Now he’s been convicted and he’s in prison. I play him before his first trial."

After doing the film role, said Pacino, he didn’t feel he knew Spector much better – but that it didn’t matter, because his job was to explore the film character, not the real-life person.

“The play’s the thing,” said Pacino. “I was looking for the truth of the drama.”

It's not an impersonation, but something much deeper.  Or that's the PR for the HBO movie. Maybe it's a preemptive defense against the criticism that he doesn't seem like Spector at all.

ADDED: In other HBO celebrity impersonation news:

HBO’s new Liberace biopic was “too gay” for every studio in Hollywood, director Steven Soderbergh says.

What big name actor will be probing the depths of the truth of the drama of Liberace? Matt Damon? No. Damon's playing Liberace's younger lover. Liberace will be... Michael Douglas!

Aw, give me a break. The studios turned down this movie because it was (whine) too gay? It's obviously insufficiently commercial.

Promos of the film screened for TV critic in Los Angeles yesterday contain numerous scenes of the two male stars shirtless and about to kiss.

No one wants to see that. It's not anti-gay to say I don't want to see that. Who wants to see Michael Douglas shirtless and about to... do anything?