from table of contents
Xena's out producer was once a queer rights radical. Now she put her fiery energy into the making of our favorite battling babe. Are we imagining a lesbian love between Xena and Gabrielle or are there innuendos written into the script?
You'll never guess how Liz Friedman landed her job as the producer of Xena: Warrior Princess. While attending Wesleyan University, Friedman I sealed her fate when she wrote her thesis, "a feminist and class-based analysis of slasher films." It won an award. Hoping for a job in the film industry, Friedman raced off to Hollywood after graduation. "I thought I'd just move to Los Angeles," she laughs. "Even though I didn't know anyone and all my friends were moving to New York. So I did the AB 101 riots and bumped around for awhile doing some temp work."That's not all she did. Upon her arrival, Friedman mailed her thesis to a handful of her favorite horror flick producers, including Evil Dead's Sam Raimi and Scream's Wes Craven. Sam Raimi's office loved it. They hired her to be Raimi's assistant at Universal-owned Renaissance Pictures. Friedman quickly scooted up the corporate ladder, something she attributes to a combination of obsession, ambition and luck. Raimi chose Friedman as associate producer of Renaissance's Hercules: The Legendary Journey and then as producer of Xena: Warrior Princess.
Persistence is another virtue Friedman could add to her list for success. "Nobody in Hollywood holds a job for five years," she explains. "And to be an assistant and become more is pretty rare."
Hollywood is changing, but Friedman's lesbian visibility remains rare. The first time she met Raimi, she wore a Queer Nation sticker emblazoned on her leather jacket. "I took the strategy in my life early on that I was going to be as out as I possibly could." Being out, Friedman maintains, "takes away something that people can use against you as a weapon."
Friedman has since traded in her radical threads for power lunch attire. These days she often finds herself in meetings where she is, overwhelmingly, the only gay person in the room - "certainly the only out gay person." What's more, she is often the only woman. "I work with great people but sometimes it can be a little isolating," Friedman reflects. "You spend five days a week in a room with [the writers] and they tend to talk about what they did that weekend or who they are dating, all that personal stuff. I just refuse to lie or be a non-participant."
Happily, there is a growing network of people out in Hollywood, explains Friedman. She has found this small, tightly-knit group to be very helpful and validating. "We can share the experience of being the one lesbian in the room," she confides.
Friedman also finds that being out in the workplace eliminates all the homophobes. "I don't have to go through the process of making friends with straight people and then losing them as a friends because they can't handle it....if they know, they just won't become friends with me in the first place."
But let's talk Xena. Friedman was brought to the project right away after Universal asked Raimi and partner, Rob Tapert, if they could do a series based on the character Xena. (The powerful swordwielding warrior's debut on Hercules had proven to be a smashing success.) "A lot of people were really skeptical about doing a female superhero," Friedman says. "There were not a lot of historically successful predecessors."
And those who were successful, like Wonder Woman and the Bionic Woman, left us cringing each time they had to be rescued by a mere mortal man. To protect Xena from this tragic fate, Friedman assures CURVE, "I sit in on every story and script meeting and I often find myself on hero patrol." Meaning, she has to remind the writers that heroes don't do things that are stupid and are always a step ahead of the game. "I want Xena to be somebody who is smarter than me, cooler than me and stronger than me," says Friedman. "I don't want to watch myself up there."
Friedman also doesn't want to watch the stereotypical female action hero. "The fact that Xena is a woman is almost an afterthought in the way we handle her," says Friedman. "There has never been thing like 'oh, she is a woman so she can communicate with nature.' We have never written a 'Xena cries scene.' You would never do it with an action hero that happened to be male."
It's easy to see why our beloved warrior princess is such an ass-kicker. There is little doubt that Friedman is largely responsible for giving Xena her indestructible integrity.
But what about all those innuendoes? How influential is Friedman there? Those long stares between Xena and her loyal traveling companion, Gabrielle, not to mention "The Kiss" episode where Xena and Gabrielle almost kiss but, no wait, it's really just actor Bruce Campbell's body with Xena's soul trapped inside. Please don't try to tell us that wasn't an intentional tease to the show's faithful lesbian audience! "Intent is irrelevant," quips Friedman. 'Yes, there are some things that are intentional but we didn't plan on that initially. There is a Xena audience that has no registering of [the lesbian] subtext and that is fine. They are not misreading the show."
In other words, we aren't either.
According to Friedman, fans first speculated about the lesbian relationship between Xena and Gabrielle on the Internet. "It took us by surprise, it was really wild," says Friedman. "Women do things in pairs all the time and society thinks nothing of it. I can't tell you how many times I've been in the grocery store with my girlfriend and people try to find other ways to explain it. She's Creole and I'm white. No, we are not sisters!"
"The Kiss" episode, claims Friedman, came about because Lucy Lawless, the New Zealand actress who plays Xena, was injured when she fell from a horse while taping the Jay Leno Show. They were to begin shooting in a week. With no Xena (except for a few scenes, including the kiss shot), Friedman and the writers knew they had to come up with a winning plot. "The kiss really flowed out of a purely emotional moment between the characters," she says. "It never occurred to us that we were making a statement."
The lesbian fans who crowded in dyke bars nationwide to watch the highly-publicized episode were left wanting. But Friedman contends, "I know it sounds either fake or naive but we never thought the lesbian audience would read into it."
Read into it we did. And there's no mistake that the writers have since run with it. Where Grandma and Grandpa watching in Minnesota see sisterly love, we see passion and intensity. That's the beauty of the show, really. It's our little secret.
ONCE A WEEK NOT ENOUGH?
Hey all you Xena fans, it's time to rejoice - The Official Xena Fanclub is finally here!
For around twenty bucks, you can become an official club member.
Membership includes a Xena kit chock-full of the following wonders:
• your very own personalized membership card and certificate
• a tape of Xena bloopers (can you believe Lucy actually screws up?)
• a poster and four photos of the warrior princess
• a subscription to the quarterly newsletter. It includes a seven-page interview with Lucy Lawless.
Write to:
The Official Xena Fanclub
411 North Central Ave., Suite 300
Glendale, CA 91203
Ms. Lawless asks that all of her fan mail be sent directly to the fanclub.
For all you cyberdykes out there, check out these hot Xena websites:
www.mca.com/tv/xena
www.u.arizona.edu/~meister/xg.html
www.inlink.com/~artemis/xena.html
www.aracnet.com/~dmd/xena.html
www.shelbynet.net/~tony/xena.htm
ourworid.compuserve.com/homepages/racoon/xena.htm
(The above all begin with http://)
[my note - remember this article is from 1997 and the web links in this section may be outdated]
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