The people making Desert Hearts shot it in thirty-one days in the mid-eighties, on a budget of $1.5M (perhaps roughly $4M in today's money). It tells a good story in about ninety minutes and it looks good for every one of those minutes. Few things can make one feel more retvrn about US filmmaking than that.

Best thing in the film? Every time Helen Shaver flawlessly delivers a quiet, stinging late-fifties Columbia English faculty put-down. Second best part: her oblique lines about the New Criticism in the lawyer's office.

(If it looks like I'm on a run of gay—and specifically lesbian—things, I am, and that's because while two women in love with each other isn't all that Kin-Bright's about, it is part of what the poem's about; I know that, unlike with martial verse, I don't know this field that well, and I don't want to mess it up, or at least not mess it up too badly.)