northwest
Fish Tale
Portland soup god scores seven-figure indie film deal
with debut screenplay
by Stephen Marc Beaudoin
ean Brown still can’t believe his luck.
It was May 2007, and the locally famous co-owner of
Portland soup-erstar restaurant No Fish! Go Fish! had just
written the final words of his tender first screenplay. Ex­
hausted from months of all-hours research, reading and
writing, he set the script aside to begin another, perhaps even more
Herculean feat: shopping the wild card debut script to potential pro­
duction companies.
Almost a year later, and Brown is jetting down to Los Angeles
this month for production on that very film, slated to receive a hefty
seven-figure treatment from New York City-based Hard Sell Pro­
ductions, all backed by one of the producers of the Oscar-winning
2006 indie smash Little Miss Sunshine.
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It’s a long way from slinging lentil soups to casting
Hollywood-grade actors in a racy, gay-themed, multi-
million-dollar indie film of his own authorship. “I find
it to be totally unbelievable,” Brown told Just Out. “It’s
like winning a lottery to have sold a screenplay.”
So goes the latest scene in the 45-year-old’s unique
story. An avid film buff from an early age, Brown de­
toured into the restaurant business some years back
with his partner of 17 years, art historian and trivia
brainiac John Doyle. The pair opened No Fish! Go
Fish! in 2002, and Brown put hjs artistic ambitions on
the shelf.
But things began
to percolate again for
Brown when his friend,
local filmmaker Mike
Justice, introduced him
to a little-known ’60s-
’70s queer director by
the name of Andy Mil­
ligan. As Justice eased
him from gore-bizarre
short clips to feature­
length
flicks— The
Ghastly Ones and Seeds
of Sin were especially
influential—Brown
found himself equally
repulsed and fascinated
by the films.
“His movies are so
I----------------------------------------------------
awful!” he says. “While they might be masquerading as titil­
lating or schlock horror, once you know what to look for in
them, they become some kind of evil guilty delight.”
Brown immersed himself in Milligan’s films, devoured
all extant books on the director and tracked down some of
Milligan’s close artistic collaborators both in film and in
the legendary live theater collaboratives he was part of, like
New York City’s Café Cino, where he directed avant-garde
productions of works by Jean Genet and Lord Dunsany.
Beneath the surface signs of artistic promise, what
Brown says really attracted him to Milligan as a film sub­
ject was that "most everybody had something to say about
him” during his life,
and what was said was
generally not pleasant.
“He was just a prick,”
Brown said, offering a
typically lewd scene
from his screenplay:
“Milligan marries
a young lady named
Candy, and just mo­
ments before
she
walks down the aisle,
Restaurateur/screenwriter Sean Brown says he became deeply
fascinated with the low-budget gore films—like Seeds of Sin and The
Ghastly Ones —of queer director Andy Milligan.
she’s upstairs having
a three-way,” he deadpans.
“Milligan was very, very hard­
core serious into S/M. I don’t
think he really identified as
bisexual; he wanted to pres­
ent as heterosexual for a while
because he thought his career
demanded it. On their wedding night, Andy went to a gay bar
and his new wife went on a boat ride.”
It’s this type of unabashedly randy approach in Brown’s
script that both detracted and deterred prospective producers.
Brown says he got calls all the time from interested agents and
producers saying, “The script is great, but it’s just too filthy; do
you have anything more family-oriented?” He paused. “And I’d
say, ‘No, I don’t/”
Milligan’s Island is the film’s working title, and although
Brown says the production budget is set in the “mid- to up­
per seven figures,” he declined to give an exact amount. Chris
Long, a reality television show and documentary film director
(Naked Fame, Bkick Is) makes his feature-length fiction film debut
with the project.
Casting for the juicy role of Milligan has been a priority since
Day One of preproduction, and Brown rattles off a range of almost-
star actors under consideration: Larry Gosling, Simon Baker, Paul
Reubens. “He was my very first choice,” Brown says of Reubens.
“Until I saw him. He hasn’t aged well.” Brown vaguely identified
a cunent frontrunner for the role as “a very attractive young man
who’s a very good actor on the daytime soaps.”
Once the film roars into production later this month, Brown
says he’ll close down the No Fish! Go Fish! restaurant at 3962 S.E.
Hawthorne Blvd, for the duration of his time in Los Angeles—one
month, likely—although Doyle’s downtown soup cart will stay
open.
For the innovative restaurateur, entering into his dream film
project represents “a whole new process and way of solving prob­
lems” and is bursting with possibility and promise. But Brown says
he's trying to keep his ego.in check with the Milligan's Island produc­
tion team: “Coffee is the least filthy item I’ve demanded.
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