Stephen Kijak Talks Tracing The Life of Rock Hudson

Photo: Universal Pictures Content Group

At the height of his stardom, Rock Hudson was an exemplar of the Golden Age movie star. He was handsome, masculine, dapper, and could fit neatly into various genres. It was like he was engineered in a lab to be a bankable heartthrob. And to an extent, that was true — Rock Hudson was very much a persona. Studios pushed a narrative that he was an eligible bachelor a lucky woman could tie down when, in reality, he was a gay man who went along with the facade to protect his career. But later in life, when Hudson announced he had contracted AIDS, an open secret in Hollywood circles turned into full-blown public discourse. When he died not long after, many wrestled with the notion that the man presented to them was in great contrast to who he actually was.

Hudson's dual lives have been charted in a new documentary titled Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed. It is directed by Stephen Kijak, a filmmaker who has chronicled the careers of multiple celebrities, ranging from Lynyrd Skynyrd to Judy Garland to the Backstreet Boys. His approach to Hudson is twofold. Firstly, he gives many of Hudson's lovers the floor to share anecdotes of their time together. Secondly, he inserts some truly astounding archive material of Hudson behind the curtain. When these elements are married to his films, it makes for a beautiful portrait. People have wanted to understand Hudson for so long, and while we can never expect to entirely, Kijak does an admirable job of allowing us to know him better.

Before the film launches on digital services this week, I spoke with Kijak about his dealings with the Rock Hudson Estate Collection, unearthing a cheeky phone call, and why he believes Hudson's story needs to be told, regardless of whether he would have wanted it or not. This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity. 

CONNOR DALTON: How did you become involved in this project?

STEPHEN KIJAK: The producers that I work with quite often had kind of brought it to me on a platter. And I was very interested to keep trying to tell stories with a little bit more of a social point to them, having come off of a big series for HBO Max about LGBTQ history. So this just fit perfectly, and I felt like Rock's story is so ripe and slightly undiscovered and right for reevaluation. It just had it all. It was a very exciting opportunity.

DALTON: Were you a fan of Rock Hudson beforehand?

KIJAK: Not really. I was more into the directors he worked with. I was a film history buff, so I was more interested in Douglas Sirk, George Stevens, and John Frankenheimer. I really hadn't paid much attention to him as an actor and really considered the full body of his work. So it was a learning experience for me, too.

DALTON: With so much information and material to draw from, where do you start making a film like this?

KIJAK: You begin at the beginning with a lot of really bad movies (laughs), and you just watch everything. We had the great benefit of working with the author Mark Griffin, who wrote the last great biography of Rock — All That Heaven Allows: A Biography of Rock Hudson. Not that it was an adaptation, but he worked closely with us as an advisor and gave us a great roadmap to follow. But then we created our own structure and our way through it was guided by a lot of the men in Rock's life who knew him. We wanted to make something personal and intimate while also hoping people come away with a sense of the sweep and the arc of his career and all the great films.

DALTON: What was the scope of your archive? What was at your disposal aside from his films?

KIJAK: Well, we worked with the Rock Hudson Estate Collection, which includes all of Rock's home movie footage. The downside to that was a lot of the time, he was shooting the films, so he was not in them. But it was a real look into his worlds. The collection also included all the photos and memorabilia. I think the greatest discovery was just a little box of slides from 1963 that no one has ever seen that show him and his lover, Lee Garlington, on a road trip through New Orleans down to Mexico. Half the time, they're just frolicking in little bathing suits (laughs). They're just beautiful little pictures of this moment that has kind of been totally lost. Also, you have tons and tons of movie magazines from the period; he was photographed so often. 

DALTON: One of my favourite pieces was the phone call of Hudson trying to set up an undisclosed friend with a guy he knows. It's astonishing material. What was your reaction when you first discovered it?

KIJAK: We couldn't believe it. We thought we had found a lost Rock Hudson interview. In a library collection, there were tapes that no one had ever bothered to listen to. [One] turned out to be a phone call someone was recording. It's basically Rock chatting up kind of like his pimp (laughs). It's this guy who's procuring young men for Rock to sleep with. I mean, I don't know how young; they were all grown adults. But he was a middleman, and they're just talking very frankly about endowments and physical attributes. 

It was a shocker, but we knew we had to use it. Maybe some people will think it crosses a line, but that line's been crossed a long time ago. Everyone knows everything about Rock's private life at this point. We're just scratching the surface, but I think it was very revealing. It's definitely an entertaining anecdote and just goes to show a level of openness within this sort of hidden world. 

DALTON: Were there any other items like that which you tried to keep in the film but just couldn't find a place for?

KIJAK: Not really, but your heart breaks sometimes for the stupidest things. We had an interview with Barbara Rush — a co-star of Rock's in films like Captain Lightfoot — who spoke about a little European vacation they took. There's a little extra bit that will hopefully circulate one day that shows him, Barbara, and Betty Abbott, the script supervisor, looking fabulous, roaming around Europe, taking pictures of each other. She talks about what a great kind of big brother and gentleman he was and how much fun they all had. It was this little window into a delicious moment in the past. Little things like that seem really insignificant, but they tell a whole story.

DALTON: You mentioned earlier you worked with Rock Hudson's estate. Did they provide any input or stipulations while you were making the film, or could you tell the story you wanted to tell?

KIJAK:  It was pretty much that. I mean, it's not really an estate. We call it the Estate Collection because it's just the stuff that was left over. There's no heir or real organised estate. It's literally someone who just owns Rock's stuff who, by the way, is trying to sell it all online. That's how much of an estate it is — he is just trying to flog it on the internet. But at least he collected it, protected it, and keeps it available for people. But no, we were given free rein, which was great. We had a lot of freedom to make the film we wanted to make. 

DALTON: I loved how you used moments from the films to illuminate statements made by interviewees or serve as coding for Hudson's hidden persona. How did you decide to integrate so many different clips?

KIJAK: There's a great film called Rock Hudson's Home Movies by director Mark Rappaport. It was made in the early nineties, which pretty much did all of that. It was an essay about Rock's hidden and coded sexuality that you can read and experience through his films. You can't really get around that film when you're making a film about Rock. You have to just lean into all that because he created a framework for you and done a lot of the homework. A lot of people haven't seen that film; I'd encourage anyone interested at all to seek it out. It's wonderful. 

But what we did was start from scratch and revise and review everything again, just to see if he had missed something or if we could look at it in a slightly different way. Then, to push it a step further, the idea was to start trying to cut films against each other. We could have done a lot more. There are whole films that I want to re-edit because you can find secret storylines within them that could give you almost a parallel universe where Rock gets to be a gay man in a movie, flirting with someone in a different film altogether. It's rich for rediscovery, and a lot of the codes and hidden messages are there for you already. It's quite extraordinary. 

DALTON: Throughout the film, we hear from former partners and flings of Hudson. How did you track them down and get them to take part?

KIJAK: Again, it was the benefit of working with the author Mark Griffin, who had done the heavy lifting for us and found a lot of these people and made a lot of the introductions. And everyone was very happy to contribute just to keep the story alive in a way. It was very important to find these guys and to interview them in the way we did because what you get is this generational portrait that takes you from free liberation to the AIDS crisis in about five or six interviews. It's a bit of a lost generation, I think, that people don't often focus on or pay attention to. So it was really crucial to include them and not just as talking heads. I feel like the point is to have them actually emerge as characters in their own right. In a way, you get to know them a little bit as you get to know Rock through them. 

DALTON: For the first 45 minutes or so, your interviewees are faceless. However, when the film starts to focus on Hudson's old flames, you shift to on-camera interviews. Why did you choose to show the faces of these men?

KIJAK: There's a whole coming out aspect to this. Rock was outed. His story was made public. So the tactic to show these men and experience them in their lives, even through these brush strokes of interviews, was very important. They were the closest, most personal ways to get inside of Rock's story. It's about visibility; it's about representation. A lot of those ideas were how we made our choices. 

DALTON: On a final note, Rock Hudson died keeping his sexual orientation a secret. You probably know him better than most; how do you think he would feel that his legacy is cemented in his queerness as much as it is as a film star, if not more?

KIJAK: It's a complicated question. I don't even really know if I know him all that well. There's still a bit of an enigma to him in his inner life that I don't think we can ever really get to. This is someone who I think would've stayed closeted until the end. So, in a way, it's less about him and his decision and more about the fact that we know it and everything that happened on the other side of that disclosure. I feel like we have to reclaim these lives and to tell them through a queer lens. I think it's a historical imperative, whether he would've wanted it or not. It's almost beside the point now. It's not going to hurt anybody. It's not going to change anyone's perceptions. We all know what we know about him. So I think it has to be examined in that way for the record. 

This article was originally published by The Curb