Censors on The Street

Inside San Francisco's venerable Tosca Cafe, filming for the mystery thriller Basic Instinct, starring Michael Douglas, was proceeding smoothly. But on the street a drama of another sort was unfolding: a crowd of gay activists carried signs, shouted slogans and continued their efforts to disrupt the action. The number of arrests mounted last week as they violated a temporary restraining order to stay 100 ft. away. In what moviemakers see as a dangerous form of politically correct censorship, the protesters are demanding that the script be changed because it depicts lesbians as murderers and contains a scene in which they claim a woman is date-raped.

The story was done by Hollywood's megahot scriptwriter Joe Eszterhas (Jagged Edge), who was paid a record $3 million for his work. It casts Douglas as a cop with a reckless past who falls in love with a bisexual novelist, one of three women suspected of the ice-pick killing of an aging rock star. Each of the women, a lesbian, a bisexual and a heterosexual, has a motive for the crime.

Shortly after shooting began, representatives of the Queer Nation and other gay groups met with Eszterhas, director Paul Verhoeven (Robocop) and producer Alan Marshall. They asked for script revisions and proposed that Douglas' cop character be played by a woman. Basic Instinct, they charged, is a "clearly homophobic, lesbophobic film that once again inverts the realities of our lives." Eszterhas, sympathetic, proposed some revisions, which he said would have resulted in "a more socially responsible and creative movie."

But the director and producer demurred, saying the changes would "undermine the strength of the original material, weaken the characters and lessen the integrity of the picture itself." Executives at Carolco and Tri-Star Pictures likewise took a strong stand against what could be a Hollywood nightmare: the vetting of entertainment by special-interest groups. "Censorship by street action will not be tolerated," they said. Queer Nation members replied that they are tired of Hollywood's "censorship" of their lives. Said one gay leader: "Hollywood has once again decided to sacrifice the lives of gay men and lesbians in order to make money." A previously scheduled fund-raising lunch with Douglas on the Basic Instinct set for an AIDS organization is not expected to quell the controversy.