Last summer, as Lynn Shelton’s Sundance fave “Humpday” was about to open in theaters, Dan Savage, the founder of Seattle amateur porn festival “HUMP!” called out Shelton on his blog.
“He demanded that I show HUMP! some love because, as he pointed out, without the existence of HUMP!, there would have been no ‘Humpday,'” Shelton told indieWIRE today. “I had to agree.”
“Humpday” follows two heterosexual guys (played by Joshua Leonard and Mark Duplass) who take their relationship to whole other level when they decide to participate in an art film project that involves the two of them having sex. That project was initiated as a potential submission for HUMP!
In fulfillment of her promise to Savage, Shelton decided to make a quasi-sequel to “Humpday” to screen at HUMP! Entitled “Beyond Gay,” the short film follows a gay man and a lesbian who attempt to get it on one particularly randy morning.
“I came up with the concept for ‘Beyond Gay’ pretty quickly but shooting it was a little more of a challenge as I was in the midst of production on ‘$5 Cover Seattle’, a web series based around the local indie music scene, coming online via MTV.com in January 2010,” Shelton explained. “I ended up shooting it the day that a good friend of mine (Jennifer Maas, director of ‘Wheedle’s Groove’) was getting married. We shot it in my DPs apartment in about two hours, then I raced to the wedding where I changed clothes in the wine cellar before the ceremony. I ducked out of the reception for about an hour and a half to do the editing and turned it in to the festival the next day.”
The film was received very well at HUMP!, and Shelton admitted the experience gave her an odd sense of completion.
“It was my first time at HUMP! and the experience was kind of extraordinary,” Shelton said. “Sure, it’s kind of uncomfortable to watch porn with a bunch of strangers but it also felt like this really sweet, really fun celebration of the diversity and complexity of human sexuality. Everyone laughed their heads off at ‘Beyond Gay,’ which was awesome and I was completely honored to take home the prize for Funniest porn. I have to say that winning HUMP! also felt like the completion of a weird and beautiful circle.”
In celebration of “Humpday”‘s release on DVD today, indieWIRE is proud to present “Beyond Gay”:
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