Kiss of the Spider Woman

While development on Kiss of the Spider Woman was taking place in 1983, Puig wrote a stage version of his novel. It was first staged in London in an English-language production starring Mark Rylance and Simon Callow. This version, translated by Allan Baker, was revived in 2007 in London with Rupert Evans and Will Keen. In the scenes of Molina at home, particularly the one in which he makes his decision to bring the message to the revolutionaries, pictures of Rita Hayworth are prominent in some shots. Manuel Puig's first novel was titled Betrayed by Rita Hayworth. Sometimes a movie opens at a moment when a real-life event draws more attention to its subject, particularly if it's controversial. Such was the case with The China Syndrome (1979), a film about a near-disastrous incident at a nuclear power plant released less than two weeks before an accident at Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island. On the day Kiss of the Spider Woman opened in New York, July 26, 1985, the front page of the city's papers carried the story that Rock Hudson had AIDS. The movie, of course, was not remotely about AIDS, but the producers found it an odd coincidence that their film about an openly gay man, played by one of Hollywood's most sought-after leading men, would open just as this word broke about a major male star of an earlier era. In a wry comment about the awareness of AIDS raised by Rock Hudson's illness, a periodical cartoon showed two people passing a movie theater and one of them commenting, "I hear they're worried about AIDS in Hollywood." The marquee of the theater advertises the title "Handshake of the Spider Woman." Kiss of the Spider Woman was made into a stage musical with music and lyrics by John Kander and Fred Ebb and book by playwright Terrence McNally. The play ran in London's West End in 1992 and on Broadway in 1993, to mixed reviews, certainly nowhere near the praise heaped on the film version. Nevertheless, it won seven Tony Awards, including Best Musical and Best Actress in a Musical for Broadway legend Chita Rivera as the Spider Woman. Parodies of the title have turned up as episode titles for some television sitcoms, including Burt Reynolds's Evening Shade ("Kiss of the Ice Cream Woman"), Living Single ("Kiss of the Spider Man"), and Married with Children ("Kiss of the Coffee Woman"). There really was a Spider Woman in old movies but not the same as the one Molina describes in the story. She first appeared as a villain in a Sherlock Holmes movie, The Spider Woman (1944), played by Gale Sondergaard. The character in that Universal production, described as a female Moriarty, was named Adrea Spedding. The studio did a sequel of sorts, The Spider Woman Strikes Back (1946), but with a different story and no Sherlock Holmes. Sondergaard played the character again, but this time her name was Zenobia Dollard. Michael Deaver, White House deputy chief of staff in the Reagan administration, requested a print to be screened for the President and First Lady at Camp David. Nancy Reagan was shocked and horrified and insisted the movie be stopped part way through and later demanded that Deaver explain why he would even think of screening the film. Deaver pointed out that the performances were wonderful and that once you got past the subject matter, it was an incredible picture. Mrs. Reagan's response: "But how can you get past that?!" by Rob Nixon

Kiss of the Spider Woman received a huge ovation after the screening at the Cannes Film Festival in June 1985. William Hurt won Best Actor and Hector Babenco was nominated for the Palme d'Or. Even with the great word of mouth at the Cannes Film Festival, it was still difficult to find a distributor. The picture was finally picked up by Island Alive, an independent company founded in 1983 by Chris Blackwell, who established the indie record label Island Music, and FilmDallas, a venture capital company put together by Sam Grogg, director of the USA Film Festival. Kiss of the Spider Woman opened in July 1985 in New York at a single theater where it earned $109,000 in its first week. Word about the film started to spread, thanks to largely rave reviews, and soon it was seeing wider distribution around the country, even outside the urban markets where it was most likely to do well. The distributors were ill equipped to handle the international demand for the film once word got out about it. "I don't like the film. I hated the way it was done. But I love the reaction of the audiences. So I'm starting to like the film because when I saw the reaction...I was extremely surprised because they had succeeded in conveying exactly what I wanted. So I would like to complain, but I cannot." - Manuel Puig, author of the source book, somewhat cryptically soon after the picture's release In an interview with National Public Radio, William Hurt related a story about how he and a female companion, during a day off from shooting on Kiss of the Spider Woman, were abducted at gunpoint by several men in Sao Paulo. According to Hurt, the gunmen told them to face a wall, execution style, which he refused to do, resulting in a brief shouting match, after which all of the abductors simply left the scene. He told NPR he did not report the incident to the production company for fear it would cause filming to be shut down. When William Hurt arrived to see the film at Cannes, he didn't have the right credentials and security would not let him in. Finally, Hector Babenco and others came to his rescue and got him into the screening. According to Burt Lancaster's biographer, Kate Buford, because of his heart condition and triple bypass surgery, which forced him out of this production, he also had to drop out of the lead in Gorky Park (1983). Buford says the role went to William Hurt, which would have been ironic, but other sources insist Lancaster's abandoned part was to have been that of the American businessman played by Lee Marvin, which seems more likely. Executive producer Francisco Ramalho's first name is spelled wrong in the credits of Kiss of the Spider Woman. The mother of costume designer and cast member Patricio Bisso appears briefly as Leni Lamaison's maid in the Nazi movie. Molina's friend Greta (Patricio Bisso) appears later in the story, after Molina has been released from prison, performing a number in drag at a gay club. He appears to be dressed as a parody of Sonia Braga as Leni Lamaison in the Nazi film fantasy, and he sings a more up-tempo version of the same number she does, "Je me moque de l'amour," composed by the film's scorer John Neschling with lyrics by producer David Weisman and Manuel Puig, author of the book on which the movie is based. Puig's novel begins with Molina's description of Cat People (1942), one of the crowning achievements of Val Lewton's horror unit at RKO, but the filmmakers could not get the rights to use scenes from the movie. A native of Argentina, Hector Babenco had been making films in his adopted country of Brazil since 1973, but he was unknown in this country until the unexpected success of Pixote (1981), a hard-hitting look at the desperate life of a ten-year-old street kid in Sao Paulo. Kiss of the Spider Woman was his first film in English. Its great success enabled him to direct the Jack Nicholson-Meryl Streep film Ironweed (1987). His next picture, At Play in the Fields of the Lord (1991), a story of Christian missionaries in South America with a largely American cast, was not a success, and he returned to Argentina and Brazil, eventually turning out other critically acclaimed films such as the prison drama, Carandiru (2003). Producer David Weisman's eclectic career began as a designer of film posters in Rome (including Fellini's 8 1/2, 1963) and creator of the title sequence for Otto Preminger's Hurry Sundown (1967). As producer, his projects prior to Kiss of the Spider Woman included the offbeat portrait of former Warhol superstar Edie Sedgwick's last days, Ciao Manhattan (1972); the Japanese-American co-production cobbled together from several Samurai movies, Shogun Assassin (1980); and a low-budget drama about orphans on the run, Growing Pains (1984). Despite the success of Spider Woman, his cinematic output since then has been somewhat limited and closely connected to this film and the Sedgwick story. His next project (although uncredited) was Hector Babenco's subsequent film, Ironweed, starring Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep, followed by Spike of Bensonhurst (1988), an indie by Warhol director Paul Morrissey, and Naked Tango (1990), an Argentine-based period drama written and directed by Spider Woman scripter Leonard Schrader. Since then, he has produced and directed three documentaries about the making of Spider Woman, included on the DVD release, and directed another Sedgwick documentary, Edie: Girl on Fire (2010). Leonard Schrader (1943-2006), who adapted Puig's novel for the screen, was the brother of Paul Schrader, who wrote Taxi Driver (1976) and Raging Bull (1980) and directed American Gigolo (1980) and Affliction (1997), among many others. The two brothers collaborated on Mishima (1985), and Blue Collar (1978). They were raised in a strict Dutch Calvinist family where they were not allowed to see any movies as children or teenagers. Leonard didn't see his first film until he was in college in the 1960s. Sonia Braga began her career in Brazil on stage in a production of the hippy musical Hair in the late 1960s. She made her film debut in 1968 and had her first big success on television in the series Vila Sésamo, her country's version of Sesame Street. She became known internationally for the hit comedy Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands (1976). Since Spider Woman, she has appeared in a number of U.S. and South America films and television shows, including stints on the series Sex and the City and Alias. Memorable Quotes from KISS OF THE SPIDER WOMAN MOLINA (William Hurt): She's... well, she's something a little strange. That's what she noticed, that she's not a woman like all the others. She seems all wrapped up in herself. Lost in a world she carries deep inside her. But surrounded by a world of luxury, a sumptuous boudoir. MOLINA: Perfect figure. Classical features. But with these big green eyes. VALENTIN (Raul Julia): They're black. MOLINA: I'm the one who saw the movie, but if that's what you want, big black eyes. MOLINA: No matter how lonely she may be, she keeps men at a distance. VALENTIN: She's probably got bad breath or something. MOLINA: If you're going to crack jokes about a film that I happen to be fond of, there's no reason to go on. VALENTIN: Don't talk about food. ... I'm serious, no food and no naked women. MOLINA: You can appreciate a good story. VALENTIN: And easily spot a cheap one. MOLINA: If you've got the keys to that door, I will gladly follow, otherwise I will escape in my own way, thank you. VALENTIN: Then your life is as trivial as your movies. VALENTIN: Molina, you would never understand. MOLINA: What I understand is me offering you a bit of my lovely avocado and you throw it back in my face. VALENTIN: Don't act like that! You sound just like a... MOLINA: A what? Go on, say it. Say it. Like a woman, you mean. What's wrong with being like a woman? Why do only women get to be sensitive? If more men acted like women, there wouldn't be so much violence. MOLINA (crying): If you don't stop, I will never speak to you again! VALENTIN: Stop crying! You sound just like an old woman! MOLINA: It's what I am! It's what I am! VALENTIN: What's this between your legs, huh? Tell me, "lady"! MOLINA: It's an accident. If I had the courage, I'd cut it off. VALENTIN: You'd still be a man! A man! A man in prison! Just like the faggots the Nazis shoved in the ovens! MOLINA: Do what you want with me because that's what I want. If it doesn't disgust you. MOLINA: The nicest thing about feeling happy is that you think you'll never feel unhappy again. VALENTIN: Promise me you'll never let anyone humiliate you again. VALENTIN: I love you so much. That's the one thing I never said to you, because I was afraid of losing you forever. MARTA (Sonia Braga): That can never happen now. This dream is short, but this dream is happy. compiled by Rob Nixon

The Kiss of the Spider Woman project began with producer David Weisman, described by the film's attorney, Peter Dekom, as "the kind of person who meets strange people and makes movies about even stranger people." As a young man, Weisman spent a lot of time in Brazil, becoming fluent in the language and only leaving the country when its dictatorship began to make things, as he describes it, "unpleasant" in 1968. In 1981, he decided the time was right to go back to Brazil to see what he could "cook up." There he met and became friends with Manuel Puig, a gay leftist Argentine novelist who fled the increasingly right-wing regimes of his homeland in 1973. Puig had been a film archivist and editor and once hoped to be a screenwriter, but his movie career never really took off. He turned instead to writing novels, incorporating film techniques and styles into such works as La traición de Rita Hayworth/Betrayed by Rita Hayworth (1968) and El beso de la mujer araña/Kiss of the Spider Woman (1973). The author was well known and respected in Latin countries and in Europe but not a familiar name to most U.S. readers. Puig urged Weisman to read Spider Woman. Weisman said he would but then didn't give it a second thought. A week after returning to Los Angeles, Weisman met Brazilian director Hector Babenco, who was in the States to promote his acclaimed film Pixote (1981), a starkly realistic study of the street kids of Rio de Janeiro. Babenco had an option on the successful Brazilian novel Emperor of the Amazon by Marcio Souza and spoke at length to Weisman about making a film of it. He also mentioned Kiss of the Spider Woman, a book he was eager to make into a movie even though the author was adamant about not granting him the film rights. For a year, Babenco had visited Puig in his apartment, bringing him gifts and talking for hours without being offered so much as a glass of water. "I did everything but sex to seduce him," the director later stated. Babenco and Weisman were excited about Emperor of the Amazon but couldn't stop talking about Puig's novel. They had already decided on their ideal casting for the role of Molina, an imprisoned homosexual who weaves stories taken from campy old movies to his cellmate, a leftist political prisoner. They wanted Burt Lancaster, and when they went to the talent agency ICM to find an agent to peddle Emperor, they mentioned their other planned project was Kiss of the Spider Woman with Lancaster, as though it were a done deal. Lancaster's agent Ben Benjamin happened to work for ICM, and when he caught wind of the idea he became curious. He took the idea to Lancaster who read the book and loved it. Sam Grogg, the former director of education for the American Film Institute and in the early 80s director of the USA Film Festival in Dallas, was doing a Burt Lancaster tribute at the festival. Lancaster showed him Puig's book, which Grogg says was underlined extensively. Lancaster had been thinking a lot about the story and was very enthusiastic about the attention he would get for taking on such a different and risky role. Word got back to Puig that Lancaster was interested, and the author began to change his mind about Babenco doing Kiss of the Spider Woman. His initial reluctance to grant screen rights stemmed from his feeling that Babenco, as a Latin American director, would only be able to pull off a regional success. But with Lancaster involved he saw the possibility of the international production he always hoped for. He gave the new team the go-ahead. Even with Lancaster attached, the project was a hard sell in the States due to its story of a gay man and a Marxist in a jail cell in South America. David Weisman called it "a marketing nightmare." Developing the project as a U.S.-based film was daunting for Babenco, who did not speak English. His first step was to take a crash course at Berlitz while Weisman and others went around Brazil looking for investors. Babenco decided to have the first draft done in his native Portuguese by the screenwriter of Pixote, Jorge Durán. That helped get the script moving forward. David Weisman then brought in his good friend Leonard Schrader, brother of writer director Paul Schrader. Leonard had worked on Sydney Pollack's Tokyo-based crime drama The Yakuza (1974) and a few solely Japanese productions, as well as his brother's film Blue Collar (1978). Schrader was a slow and meticulous writer, which could be frustrating under the best of circumstances, but on top of it, Burt Lancaster, who was used to having things done exactly his way, was not at all pleased with his work. Weisman took Schrader's new scenes to Lancaster's office every Saturday. Each time, Lancaster paced furiously, outlining his objections, and at one point, almost hit Weisman with Puig's book. By 1983, Lancaster had his own version of the script and insisted that was how the movie would be done. Everyone else loved Schrader's script but Lancaster kept rejecting it in favor of his own approach. Babenco was able to communicate one-on-one with the star in Italian and with Weisman in Brazilian but felt that during development and planning meetings, all the others involved were ignoring him while they rattled on in English. Nervous that things were beginning to get out of his control, Babenco insisted on casting a Latin American for the role of Valentin, someone who would be both convincing as a fervent revolutionary and able to speak to him. He instructed Weisman to get in touch with Raul Julia, a Puerto Rico-born actor whose greatest successes to this point had been on stage. Julia said yes, even though there was no money involved, simply because he loved the story and what he had seen of Schrader's script. Weisman, Babenco, and Lancaster watched three of Julia's films. Lancaster approved the casting but was still against the script. In March 1983, Weisman got a call from Gene Parseghian, who had gotten hold of the script through his business partner, Julia's agent. Parseghian saw in it the perfect vehicle for his client, William Hurt, then a hot commercial property after the success of Body Heat (1981) and The Big Chill (1983). Hurt was considered the thinking-man's leading man, and Parseghian knew the actor was looking for something more challenging and out of the ordinary, so he asked Weisman to consider Hurt if things didn't work out with Lancaster. Leonard Schrader loved the idea of Hurt playing Molina. Finally, Burt Lancaster's completed script arrived, and it was clear to everyone involved that he was on a different track from the rest of them. Babenco later said the main problem was that Lancaster saw the relationship between the two cellmates as that between the older madame (Molina) and a kid (Valentin). "It was difficult to make him see that they were equals." Babenco also became worried about Lancaster's take on the character after the actor dressed in full drag for him and showed him how he thought Molina should look. It was now obvious the differences would never be worked out, so after 14 months attached to the project, Burt Lancaster dropped out, citing health reasons. (He underwent triple bypass surgery that year.) At this point, fed up with the Hollywood game and tired of all the delays and conflicts, Babenco decided to just do Kiss of the Spider Woman as a Brazilian production with an all-Brazilian cast. Desperate to salvage the project on its original terms, Weisman called Parseghian and told him Babenco really wanted Hurt, a lie because Babenco didn't even know who Hurt was. Hurt says he was in Sweden on location for Gorky Park (1983) when Parseghian sent him Schrader's Spider Woman script. He called the agent after only 20 pages to tell him to clear his schedule so that he'd be free to play Molina. According to Babenco, Hurt called him from Finland saying, "Briefly and short, I read the screenplay and like it very much," to which Babenco replied, "Thank you very much, but briefly and short, I am tired of you Americans." Hurt insisted he wanted to do it, even with the knowledge that there was no money to back it and not likely ever to be enough for his usual salary. Babenco agreed to fly to New York one more time to meet with him and Raul Julia. On the plane to New York, Babenco encountered Sonia Braga, a major star in Brazil and Europe but known only slightly in America for her art house hit Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands (1976), which was loosely remade as the Sally Field comedy Kiss Me Goodbye (1982). According to Braga, she had been playing leads for years and welcomed the opportunity to do the tiny supporting role of Maria, Valentin's upper-class girlfriend. Hurt and Julia knew each other for a long time and wanted to work together. They agreed to do Kiss of the Spider Woman for very little money in exchange for a share of the profits. Hurt was eager, if intimidated about filling the shoes of one his idols, Lancaster. In spite of having Hurt attached, Weisman still had trouble getting financing. "I have a wonderful collection of rejection letters." He got some initial start-up funds from his friend Michael Maiello, who had helped back Weisman's earlier films. Maiello brought in Jane Holzer, the former Warhol Factory fixture known as "Baby Jane," who had appeared in Weisman's Ciao Manhattan (1972). The rest of the financing came from a private group of Brazilian investors, the first time such extensive film backing had come from someplace other than that country's usual source, the government. by Rob Nixon

Preparation for the Kiss of the Spider Woman shoot began with four weeks of rehearsal, two in New York and two in Sao Paulo. At first, Babenco was not convinced about Hurt's ability. From the moment he got out of his taxi in New York and saw Hurt, he thought, "This man, too American for my Latin American eyes, a Montana boy could never play this man I love." [Hurt, in fact, was from Washington, D.C., and trained at Juilliard.] Suddenly, after the first page and a half of the read-through, Hurt was like a wounded bird, and tears came to the director's eyes. He was convinced Hurt was up to the task. Despite accepting Hurt in the role after the read-through, Babenco agonized all through rehearsals over how the heterosexual actor would ever find the gay character in himself. To help Hurt tackle the part, and because author Manuel Puig was not available, Babenco put him with Patricio Bisso, who was set to play the small role of Molina's friend Greta and design the film's costumes. Bisso is gay, had been in jail himself, and was close to his mother, like Molina in many ways. Hurt toured Sao Paulo with him, often visiting gay cinemas, looking for clues to the character. Bisso got fed up translating the films for him and started making up the stories instead. Bisso later said Hurt used him as a "sacrificial lamb" for his process, playing cat and mouse games with him to get a sense of how Molina would react in similar circumstances. During one such session, Hurt took Bisso to a nice restaurant, but Bisso couldn't eat because Hurt's prodding and game-playing had made him cry. Raul Julia lost weight for the role. Babenco arranged for both actors to meet people who had been victims of political torture, but Hurt decided at the last minute not to go and waited to hear what his co-star thought. Tensions started early on in the process between Hurt and Babenco. David Weisman later remarked that Hurt had a wonderful mastery of language and spoke in "great metaphorical ellipses that are hard to follow even if English is your native language." For Babenco it was impossible. He became frustrated by Hurt talking "for hours" and learned to just nod and pretend to agree in order to keep the conversations relatively short. By his own admission, Hurt was already gaining a reputation for being difficult. He often pushed too hard and was not always diplomatic, but said, "Raul never saw any of the pushing I did as being offensive." The two men would work all hours, even coming in on Sundays. Later in the process, they went to the studio where the jail set was being constructed. According to Hurt, the crew stayed out of sight and just watched the actors rehearse for four hours, visibly touched that they put so much effort and passion into their work. "I don't know two men who got into each other's souls as thoroughly as these two guys," Weisman said. Hurt and Julia switched roles for a day to get insight from each other about what the other needed. Hurt suggested to Babenco they make the switch permanent. Weisman warned the director not to agree, that Hurt was just suggesting it to see if Babenco still had confidence in him. Hurt says he never meant to make the switch and that it was only his way of letting Babenco know he was dissatisfied with what they had done to that point and to "light a fire" under him. In any case, Babenco refused the idea. On a visit to the star's dressing room, Babenco found Hurt in full make-up and costume, trying to get at the gist of the character. Babenco told him he had the body of a boxer and to use that to imagine himself as someone with his physique who wanted to be a very elegant dancer. The director told the "freaked out" star that when he understood the character from that contradiction, "then we'll talk about the ponytail, pancake, beauty mark," and the rest of the outward appearances. To push Hurt to find his feminine side, and also to loosen up his body and make him more flexible and fluid, Babenco had him work with choreographer Mara Borba, who was set to play the Spider Woman. William Hurt: "She was the core of Molina; she helped me find him in my body." Hurt would walk behind her down the street, watching and analyzing her movements. Borba helped him throughout shooting as well, especially when he had trouble finding the right lightness. At one point, she suggested he take a scarf down from the wall and use it "to make believe your head is like a full moon floating high above the clouds." Borba also became the bridge between Hurt and Braga, who at a certain point in the production was asked to play Leni Lamaison in the Nazi film in addition to Valentin's girlfriend. Since Braga never went to the prison set to watch Hurt work as Molina, Borba would observe all his gestures and movements and bring them back to Braga when the film-within-the-film scenes were shot later so she could replicate them. Manuel Puig came to Sao Paulo to work with Leonard Schrader on the script of Kiss of the Spider Woman. He put a lot of humor back into the story and came up with the idea for how Molina would first be introduced to the audience, wrapping a towel around his head while he related the Nazi film story to Valentin. Just days before principal photography began on the movie, Hurt told Babenco, "You've been very patient, and I have a surprise for you." On the first day of shooting, there was Molina, just as the director had hoped. Principal photography took place between October 1983 and March 1984. The schedule was initially set for 60 days, but interiors took so much longer to shoot than planned, it ended up taking more than 100 days. The jail cell interiors were filmed at Vera Cruz Studios outside Sao Paulo. The walls of the cell were constructed to be raised and lowered to facilitate tracking, crane, and dolly shots. The cell block scenes were filmed in a prison that had been shut down. Scenes outside the prison were filmed on location in Sao Paulo. The filmmakers originally planned to use Cat People (1942) as one of the films Molina describes, just as the character does in the novel, but they had trouble with Universal over the rights, forcing rewrites after shooting began to construct the fictional Nazi film. There were constant revisions from Schrader and Puig throughout every day. William Hurt began to complain that he felt like he was working on a television soap opera, and tensions on set began to rise. The main conflicts on the set grew between Hurt and Babenco. Their relationship steadily deteriorated to the point where they didn't even speak to each other any more. Assistant Director Amilcar Claro became the go-between, since he spoke both English and Brazilian Portuguese. Claro said the tension was terrible but actually good for the film because it helped Hurt with his performance. "There are still stories around Brazil about how hard William Hurt was to work with," Claro noted years later. "That's not true. He's a marvelously sensitive actor, and he never engaged in any movie star behavior." Despite all the problems during the shooting of Kiss of the Spider Woman, according to Claro, Hurt earned such respect and affection from the crew that they all accompanied him to the airport when his part in the shooting was done to bid him farewell. "He [won them over] with his personality and integrity, his sincerity and commitment to his work," Claro said. Cinematographer Rodolfo Sanchez: "I never worked with a film crew that became so emotionally involved in a project." "One thing you could never accuse Hector Babenco of was a lack of passion," noted the production's attorney, Peter Dekom, who worked on spec for three years never knowing if Kiss of the Spider Woman would even get made. "He's somewhere between a hustler, a salesman, a teddy bear, and a visionary." Patricio Bisso added that the director "was like a tightrope walker without a net." With the main story in the can, it was time to start on the film-within-a-film sequences. The producers were counting on a co-production deal with Gaumont to shoot the Nazi movie in Paris, but the French studio backed out at the last minute. This necessitated a lot of scrambling and re-budgeting to do the work in Buenos Aires, which has the most European feel of any South American city. But they couldn't even afford that, so they decided to use downtown Sao Paulo. Patricio Bisso was a drag performer and actor without much experience as a film costume designer, but Babenco took a gamble on him anyway and was pleased with the results. Molina's fantasies came alive from Bisso's detailed drawings. Babenco by this point had asked Braga to play Leni Lamaison in the Nazi film. "I cannot sing, I cannot sing in French," she recalled of her nervousness about doing the role. "It was like, to some people who were there [on set], a torture." Puig helped Braga find the soul of Leni, playing the entire part for her, demonstrating the movements of a 1940s film diva. He told her to move through the nightclub with both hands on one hip "and think of liver trouble." The Nazi film shoot was completed the last day of February 1984. Choreographer Mara Borba was originally set to play the Spider Woman. (Shots exist of her in costume.) At the last minute, Braga suggested that she play the part since it would cause confusion for the audience to see her as Valentin's girlfriend and Leni Lamaison but not the third female. She called Borba first with the idea before taking it to Babenco. Borba said she was sad at first to lose the part but realized Braga was right and that playing the part was much less important than her true role in the film, which was her collaboration with William Hurt. With many hours of footage in the can, Weisman became worried about Babenco's ability to handle the edit since his English was still not very good, so he stepped in to oversee post-production. By the time principal photography wrapped, Weisman had culled through the footage and reduced the usable takes to three hours of film. The budget was almost entirely used on shooting and there wasn't much left for post. In addition, the producers had only planned on two months to complete the work, but editing in fact went on almost a year in a dismal little cement block building in Los Angeles. The most difficult task was figuring out how to integrate the fantasy film segments into the main story. Weisman and Babenco fought constantly during editing, sometimes to the point of physical confrontations, making things very difficult for the people cutting the picture. Leonard Schrader had to come back from Tokyo, where he was working on his brother Paul's film Mishima (1985), to act as go-between. In July 1984, Babenco went back to Sao Paulo to supervise work on the score. While there, he discovered he had non-Hodgkins Lymphoma and had to begin a long treatment process. Weisman continued editing in California. Initial screenings of Kiss of the Spider Woman did not go well. Raul Julia was furious after watching the first cut: "What happened to the movie? What happened to all our great work?!" After seven months of post-production, Spider Woman was sent to the New York Film Festival. The selection committee rejected it without even watching the whole movie. William Hurt wasn't too concerned about this until he saw the first cut himself and realized why they dismissed it so abruptly. The fantasy film sequences were too long and overwhelmed the story of the relationship between the two men. He wanted to buy the print and burn it so it would never be released. Weisman drove the footage across country to New York to re-cut it and work on sound. There was no insurance and no back-up footage. If something had happened on the road, the film might have been lost. Hurt and Julia spent five weeks in post-production dubbing Kiss of the Spider Woman. This gave Schrader the chance to rewrite most of the off-screen dialogue for the actors to record, giving the film a totally different feel and bringing the original intentions back into focus. After 14 months of post-production, the film was finished. Even with the reworking, Kiss of the Spider Woman was rejected by distributors everywhere. The producers submitted it to the Cannes Film Festival. It was selected on one condition, that more editing be done to tighten up the ending. The re-cutting was done on the run, and the finished product barely made it back to Cannes in time for a screening. In fact, Weisman delivered it with the sound on separate magnetic tracks because there was no time to make a composite print. by Rob Nixon

Awards & Honors Academy Award to William Hurt as Best Actor; nominations for Best Director, Picture, Adapted Screenplay BAFTA (British Academy) Award for Best Actor (William Hurt) Golden Globe nominees: Best Motion Picture - Drama, Actor (Hurt and Raul Julia), Supporting Actress (Sonia Braga) William Hurt won Best Actor awards from the London Critics Circle and the Los Angeles Film Critics; he and Raul Julia shared the National Board of Review Award. Hurt also received Italy's David di Donatello Award for Best Foreign Actor. Kiss of the Spider Woman won the Special Distinction Award for Best Foreign Film at the first Independent Spirit Awards in 1986. Best Film, Seattle International Film Festival; Special Jury Distinguished Award to Hector Babenco at the Tokyo International Film Festival Critic Reviews: KISS OF THE SPIDER WOMAN "William Hurt's magnificent performance elevates the art of make-believe to greatness." - Rex Reed, New York Post, July 1985 "If Mr. Hurt has never been so daringly extroverted on the screen before, Mr. Julia has never been so restrained. And they meet halfway in a manner that is electrifying. Their teamwork, choreographed with a relentless, escalating rhythm by Mr. Babenco, never falters...." - Janet Maslin, New York Times, July 26, 1985 "William Hurt...creates a character utterly unlike anyone else he has ever played--a frankly theatrical character, exaggerated and mannered--yet he never seems to be reaching for effects. Raul Julia, sweaty and physical in the early scenes, gradually reveals a poetry that makes the whole movie work. And Sonia Braga, called upon to satirize bad acting, makes a perfect Spider Woman." - Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times, August 9, 1985 "Individual reactions to the work overall will depend to a great extent on feelings about Hurt's performance. Some will find him mesmerizing, others artificially lowkeyed. By contrast, Julia delivers a very strong, straight and believable performance as an activist who at first has little patience with Hurt's predilection for escapism, but finally meets him halfway. After the raw street power of Pixote [1981], Babenco has employed a slicker, more choreographed style here. Shot entirely in Sao Paulo, film boasts fine lensing." - Variety, 1985 "Essentially a homosexual wish fantasy about how the love of a real man, however brief, can be transforming--purifying." - J. Walcott, Texas Monthly, 1985 "The picture tries and fails to create...the transformation of a gay man and a straight man through their understanding of one another. ... Audiences feel safe because this is not just a story of two men who fall in love and have sex. There is redeeming political significance to justify the affair. The film version leaves out perhaps the most crucial aspect of Puig's novel, Valentin's realization that homosexual men needn't adopt the sexist attitudes widely held by heterosexual men about women." - Vito Russo, The Celluloid Closet (Revised edition, Harper & Row, 1987) "The performances of Hurt and Julia win votes by the minute, Babenco directs their growing relationship with subtlety and depth.... A film of fine balance and tone, not least in the dramatic turnaround ending." - JG, Time Out Film Guide (2000) "Reissued for no particular reason--unless its 16th anniversary is an occasion of note--Hector Babenco's uninspired film is a literal-minded tribute to the power of escapism. Babenco has no gift for staging Molina's fantasies, despite the on-target casting of Sonia Braga as Molina's movie-self; they're flat, wavering between evocations of old movies and parodies thereof. And Hurt's performance--which might be the best example of why one should never mistake Oscar® bait for art--is appallingly self-congratulatory, every pause choked over, every heavenward eye-flutter a study in deceit. True, he's playing a character whose life is a performance, but Hurt's so caught up in Molina's faded-belle theatrics he can't be bothered to show us the man beneath the mask." - Sam Adams, Philadelphia City Paper, July 12-19, 2001 "Some distance has only improved 1985's Kiss of the Spider Woman. At the time, the film created something of a sensation, pro and con, mostly for its politics, perceived as shallow onscreen and off. It can be seen clearly now for what it is, a melodrama and a good one. Think of it as a gay Casablanca [1942]." - Bob Graham, San Francisco Chronicle, July 27, 2001 Compiled by Rob Nixon

Kiss of the Spider Woman was a rather unlikely film to have received so many mainstream honors. As an independent, foreign-based production (albeit starring American actors) with no major studio connections, telling a story with great compassion about the relationship between a flamboyant gay man and his radical political prisoner cellmate, it was considered a long shot for Academy Award nominations. But it received four, including Best Picture, Director, and Adapted Screenplay, and won the Best Actor award for William Hurt's performance as Luis, the first time anyone had won an Oscar® for playing an openly gay character. Hurt swept many of the major international awards that year, winning Best Actor at Cannes, BAFTA, Italy's Donatello Awards, and the Los Angeles Film Critics. He tied in the category with his co-star Raul Julia for the National Board of Review citation and with Bob Hoskins (Mona Lisa, 1985) for the London Film Critics Circle honor. Both Hurt and Julia were praised by the critics for their sensitive and powerful portrayals of two unhappy prisoners of a repressive South American regime, a reflection of the social and political turmoil of Argentina, the native country of Manuel Puig, who wrote the novel on which the film is based. Hurt plays Luis Molina, who retreats into weaving escapist fantasies to endure his incarceration on morals charges. He is put in a cell with Valentin, a Marxist who despises Molina at first, not only for his homosexuality but for his refusal to engage in a society where people must take sides and fight for their causes. Over time, as Luis unfolds the cinematic stories of several movies he remembers, including one about a fictional femme fatale, the Spider Woman, the two men come to respect and care for each other. The story not only brings together two very divergent people on a personal level but also argues for the necessity, even the positive subversive effects, of both political activism and aesthetic fantasy to deal with the world's harshest realities and injustices. At first, the two actors had difficulty achieving the right tone and chemistry for their performances, so William Hurt suggested they switch roles during rehearsal to get a better understanding of each other's characters. The experiment worked exceptionally well, so much so that Hurt even suggested to director Hector Babenco that they retain the switch for the filming. That didn't happen, but the process did help each grasp their individual roles better and added greatly to their intense interactions with each other. Brazilian actress Sonia Braga did not receive any acting honors, but hers was a notable feat as well. As the titular Spider Woman and another character from a different film memory Molina relates, she has to walk a fine line, giving a depiction of cheesy melodramatic acting without crossing into laughable parody. Her effort is even more remarkable considering the fact that, despite working with an Argentine-born, naturalized Brazilian director on location in her own homeland, she had to perform in English, a language she was not yet fluent in, forcing her to learn lines phonetically. She also plays a third role outside of Molina's fantasies, a surprise cameo that helps make even stronger thematic and character connections to the story. Hector Babenco was unknown in this country until the unexpected success of his film Pixote (1981), a hard-hitting look at the desperate life of a ten-year-old street kid in Sao Paulo. Kiss of the Spider Woman was his first film in English. Its great success enabled him to direct the Jack Nicholson-Meryl Streep film Ironweed (1987). His next picture, At Play in the Fields of the Lord (1991), with a largely American cast, was not a success, and he returned to South America, turning out more films of much acclaim, including another prison drama, Carandiru (2003). In an interview with National Public Radio, William Hurt related a story about how he and a female companion, during a day off from shooting, were abducted at gunpoint by several men in Sao Paulo. According to Hurt, the gunmen told them to face a wall, execution style, which he refused to do, resulting in a brief shouting match, after which all of the abductors simply left the scene. He told NPR he did not report the incident to the production company for fear it would cause filming to be shut down. Leonard Schrader (1943-2006), who adapted Puig's novel for the screen, was the brother of Paul Schrader, who wrote Taxi Driver (1976) and Raging Bull (1980) and directed American Gigolo (1980) and Affliction (1997), among many others. The two brothers collaborated on Mishima (1985), and Blue Collar (1978). They were raised in a strict Dutch Calvinist family where they were not allowed to see any movies as kids. Leonard didn't see his first film until he was in college in the 1960s. Kiss of the Spider Woman was made into a stage musical with music and lyrics by John Kander and Fred Ebb and book by playwright Terrence McNally. The play ran in London's West End in 1992 and on Broadway in 1993, to mixed reviews, certainly nowhere near the praise heaped on the film version. Nevertheless, it won seven Tony Awards, including Best Musical and Best Actress in a Musical for Broadway legend Chita Rivera as the Spider Woman. Director: Hector Babenco Producer: David Weisman Screenplay: Leonard Schrader, based on the novel by Manuel Puig Cinematography: Rodolfo Sanchez Editing: Mauro Alice Art Direction: Clovis Bueno Original Music: Nando Cordeiro, John Neschling Cast: William Hurt (Luis Molina), Raul Julia (Valentin Arregui), Sonia Braga (Leni Lamaison, Marta, Spider Woman), Jose Lewgoy (Warden), Milton Goncalves (Secret Policeman). C-120m. by Rob Nixon