In order to fully appreciate Moment by Moment, one has to understand three fundamental concepts of “queer” cinema that seem to be increasingly difficult for critics and audiences alike to grasp: camp, classical Hollywood female melodrama, and feminism. I saw the film in the theater as a precocious teenager when it came out and quite liked it, scoffing at the critics who hadn’t bothered to dig into the film’s meta-references and genre- and gender-bending. Although Tomlin bounced back two years later with the box-office hit 9 to 5, some would argue that Travolta’s career never fully recovered from this “fiasco,” tainting his meteoric rise as a macho sex symbol with a feminized role barely concealing a strong homosexual subtext.
#Moment by moment movie
“Critics are fond of attributing a film’s badness to some hypothetical computer: this truly terrible movie might have been made by HAL in his most maudlin ‘Bicycle-built-for-two’ mood, as the plugs were being pulled out.” One of the kinder critiques, from the Monthly Film Bulletin, framed it this way: Critics savaged the film for its rank sentimentality and its apparent inability to recognize its own campy excesses. When Moment by Moment was finally released, it was a monumental bomb. But if there was ever any foreshadowing about the issue, Moment by Moment is the film, in retrospect, that provides the most grist for the mill. (Tomlin didn’t officially come out of the closet until 2013, the same year she married Wagner.) Gay rumors about Travolta didn’t start to emerge until the late eighties, and although the speculation persists, he has never publicly acknowledged what appears to be a reasonable assumption in the industry. (Both films were produced by Moment by Moment producer Robert Stigwood, who had hit the jackpot earlier in the seventies with blockbusters like Jesus Christ Superstar and Tommy.) The film was written and to be directed by Jane Wagner, Tomlin’s longtime creative collaborator, whom apparently everyone in the business knew was also her lesbian lover. Travolta was coming off the one-two punch of starring in Saturday Night Fever, in 1977, and Grease, earlier in 1978. Tomlin had made a big splash with her sensitive, emotional performance in Nashville in 1975, for which she was nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar, and with her co-starring role alongside Art Carney (who had recently won a Best Actor Oscar for Harry and Tonto) in Robert Benton’s The Late Show in 1977. In December 1978, there was a lot of anticipation for a new movie about to come out (if you’ll pardon the expression) starring Lily Tomlin and John Travolta.
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