FROM the FA cup to Hollywood, David and Goliath stories are always heart-warming. Sadly, this week's Oscar nominations show that money will out and small independent movies, without big guns behind them, rarely get to take home the big trophies. Critical acclaim - the cinema equivalent of a third division win against a premiership side in round one - just ain't enough, although The Opposite Of Sex notched up two Golden Globe nominations (usually a reliable augury for the Oscars) for its female leads Christina Ricci (ex-Adams Family) and Lisa Kudrow (Phoebe in Friends). The reason the film got that far down the mainstream award track was due to that other intangible, word of mouth - because The Opposite Of Sex is a wonderful life-affirming film about love, sex and everything in between, the kind of film that lifts the spirits on the dankest of winter days.
Director, writer and only begetter Don Roos is disarmingly delighted at its word-of-mouth success. "It's very unusual that it's made its own market. It's how movies should be instead of pouring all this money into advertising. Though I can't really say that we're pure: we did have Opposite-Of-Sex condoms at one stage." And Roos laughs a naughty-boy laugh. Forty-four, he looks and behaves 10 years younger and when he speaks there's the hint of a stutter, betraying the vulnerability that informs every character in the film and which, dare I suggest, is the key to its success.
"I wanted to write a movie about the kind of families we have in Los Angeles, which are not the families any of us expected to have." Families - even unconventional ones, Roos contends - are formed by sex. "Sex is such a powerful connective force and it happens less often with the person you're having sex with than the people connected to them. Because you slept with one person one time, you inherit a whole raft of people. It's just how our species is set up, even if it doesn't result in children, even if it's homosexual, you end up building families with sex. You end up with all these people in your life and you think, why is that person in my life, why is he or she there? And the answer is sex."
The "family" in The Opposite Of Sex is a core-group of four people: high school teacher Bill (gay - but in every other way straight); his body-beautiful lover Matt; Lucia, spinsterly sister of Bill's former lover who died of AIDS; and Bill's 16-year-old half sister, the white-trash Deedee, whose arrival in the middle-class middle-West household kick-starts a series of events which turns everyone's world upside down. The extended family includes Jason, Matt's unsavoury bit-on-the-side, and the local Sheriff, Carl (played with dead-pan inscrutability by Lyle Lovett) who has the hots for Lucia. Yet the film's central relationship - that between Lucia and her dead brother's former lover - is totally asexual. All might have remained in stasis but for Deedee's arrival. When she seduces her half-brother's lover things get complicated.
Unwanted pregnancies and AIDS are not usually the stuff of comedy, but here they very definitely are. The title comes from Deedee's belief that because sex leads to babies, love and committed relationships - all things she abhors - what she wants is the opposite. Not until it was made, did Hollywood become interested. At the script stage, says Roos, potential backers all asked the same question: "Who is the audience for this movie?" His answer was people who like sex, people who don't, people who understand about love, people who don't. "That's pretty wide really. But nobody really wanted to do the movie."
Except, that is, the actors. Because Don Roos's ability to get under the skin of each of his disparate characters, giving them real existence's and one-liners that work well beyond the quick laugh, is - in Hollywood terms - little short of miraculous. His perception, particularly about women, is remarkable.
"It's very easy to be called a good woman's writer," explains Roos, "because there's so little competition. Roles for women are so poor. It's absurd what they want women to do in movies - basically to run around on high heels and scream. If they're trying to be politically correct - like in Independence Day - they'll have a single working mother who makes her money as a stripper. That's their attempt to be au courant." Roos's reputation began with his first screenplay Love Field, which won Michelle Pfeiffer an Oscar nomination. Then came Single White Female, which launched Bridget Fonda and Jennifer Jason Leigh.
How does he explain his success in writing for women? "In part, it's because I am gay and I have a highly developed female side. Secondly, growing up in the 1950s when I did, most of the stories about human beings - gossip, human interest - were told to me by my mother, so all that stuff came to me with a woman's face on it. My mother was a storyteller, a gossip in a nice way, really funny stuff. And basically that's really what I go to the movies for: I want to meet an interesting bunch of people who are behaving badly - the best they can - and follow them and get involved. It's not a very elevated view of art, but I basically like to overhear people."
Don Roos's love of small town life and gossip is in the blood, he says. "My mother's father was born in Ireland and so I'm half Irish and half German. But I only really identify with the Irish part: the holocaust really put a crimp into wanting to be German. If you have any Irish blood, especially if you're a writer, that's what you want to claim."
It brought him to Dublin in 1975 to the School For Irish Studies. His experience of Irish life is, however, a great deal more hands-on than that. A year later, he returned when one of his great aunts died. "She and the other great aunt ran the post office in Grangebellow eight miles north of Drogheda. My great uncle had been the blacksmith at the crossroads. So I ran the little post office for a year, gave out the pensions and the children's allowances."
AFTER his year behind the counter, Roos returned to the US and enrolled in a newly inaugurated screenwriting course at the University of Notre Dame in South Bends, Indiana - the town he grew up in and where The Opposite Of Sex is set. "I was never interested in writing short stories or novels. I had always wanted to be in showbusiness, as a writer, since I was a child, because of the Dick Van Dyke Show. I mean, there he was at work with a TV in his office."
And writing for TV was his first stop when his talent was spotted by the producer of The Sting who taught on the course. It was a useful apprenticeship, he says. "You'd write it and shoot it the next day. But I soon got fed up with the commercial breaks and the networks, so I wrote Love Field." Because the studio which made it went bankrupt, it was hardly seen. No matter. Pfeiffer's Academy Award nomination was Roos's ticket out of television.
Actors' performances depend in large measure on the quality of the script and in The Opposite Of Sex, both Ricci and Kudrow turn in the performance of their lives. Neither teenager-from-hell Deedee (the film's politically incorrect narrator) nor the waspish spinster Lucia fit easily into Hollywood pigeon-holes. What the characters share, and what made them easy to write, says Roos, is that they're both angry. "Writers are generally well-behaved tidy quiet people - except for Irish writers who are more extravagant - so when you get to write an angry character, the words just pour out of you because it's stuff you'd like to say. "Both of those women are completely unconcerned with what people think of them. And if I could be ever free of that burden, it would be an incredibly great release. So it's great to write characters who don't care. Lucia's character doesn't care if she sounds bitter, sour, judgmental, grasping, she has to say what she has to say."
Don Roos returns to the house that his great aunt left him in Grangebellow as often as he can and he keeps in touch with Ireland via The Irish Times Website. ("It's just brilliant.") He has an idea for a film which would allow him to recreate the Ireland of his post office days. "One of the things I discovered in 1975 was that country music is so huge in Ireland. And I had this idea of Bette Midler going to Ireland in the 1970s to be a country singer. Because she's Jewish she can't be a country singer in America, but she could in Ireland. And 20 years later, picking her up as a homegrown, Irish, Jewish country singer."
The Opposite Of Sex was premiered a year ago at Sundance, the festival for independent movie-makers run by Robert Redford. As a showcase it was invaluable, says Roos, but - in terms of trophies - Roos had no more luck than with the Academy. I'm surprised. The naughty boy grin returns. "Don't be. It's not nihilistic enough to win some independent award. In a way its heart is very conventional; its about the fact that people loving each other is good, and attachment is good, and people sacrificing for each other is good."
The Opposite of Sex goes on general release on Friday