Getting Behind Behind The Candelabra

With less than three weeks to go before HBO premieres Steven Soderbergh's Liberace biopic, Behind The Candelabra, the network has released an extended "Making Of" clip, which you can watch/luxuriate in above. And while nothing and no one could possibly dull this commentator's excitement for the project, this clip does raise a few completely innocent questions about it.

Why was so much of it devoted to the production design?

The costumes? Sure. "Liberace wore a number of different things," says one costumer, deadpan, like...yes, he did, in the sense that McDonald's has sold "a number" of burgers. But I didn't really need a multi-minute look at the locations when that time could have been spent getting further into the questions that Michael Douglas and Matt Damon, who play the titular Liberace and his unofficial husband Scott, asked screenwriter Richard LaGravenese about their characters, specifically about the two men's relationship with each other.

Where's Steven Soderbergh?

The end of this clip promises an even longer "Making Of" on the 22nd, featuring interviews with Douglas, Damon, co-star Rob Lowe, and producer Jerry Weintraub, but director Soderbergh is apparently absent from that one, too. I guess I can accept that he might just be reticent about discussing his process, but the fact that Soderbergh's not talking about it does make me wonder if he's disavowing it or something. Maybe he had already retired from filmmaking before they started on the "Making Of" special.

Was I the last to know that Cheyenne Jackson is in this?

Because I was already pretty sure Behind The Candelabra was going to be the gayest thing that's ever happened, and now I'm sure. Except....

The Liberace Foundation co-operated?

That doesn't mean they're going to soft-soap the gay stuff, does it? From what I hear, at least some employees at the museum in Las Vegas have some adorable ideas about Liberace's love life and the fact that he "never married." So I hope it's not a bad omen that the Foundation brass was cool enough with the script to lend producers so many of Liberace's real costumes and pianos for Behind The Candelabra; I worry that in order to get the access the production needed, LaGravenese had to make the great man's scenes with Scott ambiguous enough to pass review. But that better not be the case. Or I will riot.