First-time Director Jim Fall brings gay romance to the screen with "Trick"

By Jeff Walsh

The best movie I saw this summer was "Trick," a story about a nervous composer whose one-night stand with a go-go boy is never consummated. In what could have been very cliché and poorly executed, Trick rises above the fold due to its amazing performances and direction by first-time movie director Jim Fall.

For Fall, the movie was a labor of love that took five year to bring to the screen. Fall dropped out of NYU Film School in 1985, and worked a lot of odd television and film production jobs learning how to make a movie. In a recent interview with Oasis, Fall talked about the process, which also found him directing movie-spoof plays off-Broadway that a friend of his wrote.

"A friend of mine wrote this sci-fi spoof called Chorus Girls on Mars!, which was very funny and one of my first forays into theater, and it kept me directing, which was the important thing," he said. "Because how could I hold my head up and say I was a director if I weren't directing?"

After directing theater for another five years, Fall decided to return to his initial goal and began writing a script similar to Trick, although the characters were 10 years older.

"They were in their 30s, and it had an AIDS storyline in it," he said. "This was like '92, and that movie didn't happen. In that time, Jeffrey, Longtime Companion and Philadelphia all came and went, and people were tired of movies with an AIDS storyline."

Around that same time, people's attitudes about AIDS also changed as better drugs were invented and people started living longer with the disease. Fall stopped working on his script and started looking for a script he could direct instead.