Whatever you may think about lesbianism, gamine dynamo Anne Heche and a few of her screen sisters are about to give you more to think about (and even more to look at) as concerns same-sex amour.
Heche makes her TV directorial debut this weekend with a three-segment special called “If These Walls Could Talk 2.” The lesbian-themed program goes light years beyond Ellen Degeneres’ world-famous screen kiss on the now-defunct sitcom “Ellen.”
“We are growing,” Heche said in an interview. “We are taking steps toward more understanding and tolerance.”
In this case, gargantuan steps.
The women taking part in this epochal enterprise include Sharon Stone, Vanessa Redgrave, Chloe Sevigny, Michelle Williams and Marian Seldes. There is a very heavy-breathing nude lovemaking scene between Degeneres, who is Heche’s real-life life partner, and the not at all bashful Stone.
The star of yesteryear’s bisexual scorcher “Basic Instinct,” Stone plays a fluffy-slippered lesbian wannabe mom in the Heche & Co. project, staggeringly complex artificial-insemination paraphernalia and all.
“I gave the script to my mom and she said, `You have to do this,'” Stone said.
With this project, the ever daring and broad-minded HBO network is once again pushing back the boundaries of screen tolerance. The original “If These Walls Could Talk” — a dramatized treatment of issues concerning what HBO called unintended pregnancies, which is to say abortion — aired in 1996.
With “Walls 2,” on screen at 8 p.m. Sunday, HBO explores virtually every major issue attendant upon lesbianism in American society — and in its bedrooms.
In the profoundly moving first section, set in 1961, Redgrave and Seldes star as two elderly “spinster” schoolteachers whose passionate secret life as a lesbian couple ends with the sudden death of Seldes’ character. With no spousal rights, Redgrave’s character’s life more or less ends too.
The second segment, set in 1972 and featuring a performance by Sevigny that is almost as remarkable as Redgrave’s, pits hippie-era campus feminism against campus lesbianism, as well as “butch” lesbiansim vs. the more feminine kind.
The third, written and directed by Heche (who starred in “Walls 1”), features Stone and Degeneres as a happily wed contemporary lesbian couple going through the throes of father selection (choosing a sperm donor), and prospective childbirth. No one in the heterosexual world seems much concerned about it save a shocked male-female couple at a fertility clinic (who must have thought the fertility doctor could work wonders, indeed).
“I had to force Ellen to do this,” said Heche. “[Though] I did write it as kind of a love letter to Ellen. How did I get Sharon? Well, I picked up the phone and called her. I thought it was a long shot, but Sharon of course is so interested in human rights and doing things that are different and expanding her wings as an actress.”
Is Stone as a lesbian sex symbol a little bit too much for audiences — including male audiences — even in the new millennium?
“I feel we can discuss these issues now, which you couldn’t do in the other time periods,” Heche said. “I definitely knew I was writing my piece for 2000. I wanted to give an energy of hopefulness and joy and understanding of what’s happening for the audience watching — that we are healing, that we as a nation are growing and expanding our consciousness through all things, not just with this.”
American society, she said, has moved far from the attitudes prevalent during the last episodes of Degeneres’ sitcom — which, though involving pretty mild stuff, was reportedly canceled because of viewer disdain for its lesbian content.
Though “Walls 2” is a long step from that show, Heche said, “I don’t think we could have taken it without her show.”
“Without a doubt there are going to be some people who won’t want to watch it,” Heche said of the HBO special. “That’s their right. But hopefully it will evoke a curiosity for people and maybe open up their hearts a little bit.”
The lesbian parenting theme definitely prompts a certain amount of curiosity about whether Degeneres and Heche are headed in that direction.
“When I decided on the [parenting] issue, my main goal was to show a loving relationship,” said Heche, whose next project, after two new movies, is a documentary about Degeneres’ returning to the road as a standup comic. “But when I started writing it, I became obsessed with having a child. We would talk all the time, during the process of this, and we were talking about having a child. But once it was over, we realized that this [television project] was our child and we looked very forward to having our time alone.”
