Steven Soderbergh: Studios scared of ‘too gay’ Liberace film

BY NATASHA BARSOTTI — The director of Traffic and Erin Brockovich says his upcoming film about Liberace was deemed “too gay” by studios and will air instead on HBO, Salon reports.

In interviews with The Wrap and The New York Post, Oscar winner Steven Soderbergh says his attempts to pitch the upcoming biopic Behind the Candelabra, with Michael Douglas as Liberace and Matt Damon as the late entertainer’s lover, to Hollywood studios came up empty.

“‘Nobody would make it,’ Soderbergh says. ‘We went to everybody in town. They all said it was too gay.’

Natasha Barsotti is originally from Trinidad and Tobago in the Caribbean. She had high aspirations of representing her country in Olympic Games sprint events, but after a while the firing of the starting gun proved too much for her nerves. So she went off to university instead. Her first professional love has always been journalism. After pursuing a Master of Journalism at UBC , she began freelancing at Xtra West — now Xtra Vancouver — in 2006, becoming a full-time reporter there in 2008.

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