General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Trick (1999 film)

Trick is a 1999 American romantic comedy directed by Jim Fall and written by Jason Schafer, in which a shy aspiring songwriter and a go-go dancer spend one night in New York City trying, and failing, to find a private place to be together. It premiered at the 1999 Sundance Film Festival and screened at the Berlin Film Festival in Dramatic Competition before its United States theatrical release on July 23, 1999.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Director / writer	Jim Fall (director); Jason Schafer (screenplay)¹
Lead cast	Christian Campbell as Gabriel, John Paul Pitoc as Mark, Tori Spelling as Katherine¹
Release	July 23, 1999 (limited, US), distributed by Fine Line³
Runtime / rating	91 minutes (AFI); rated R for strong language and sexual content¹^•³
Box office	$2,049,595 domestic gross, from 6 opening theaters and a peak of 94³
Critical scores	76% Tomatometer (21 reviews) and 83% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes; 7.2/10 on IMDb⁴^•⁵
Festivals and honors	Sundance and Berlin Dramatic Competition (1999); Outfest Jury Award for Outstanding Emerging Talent to Jim Fall²

Spoilers

Plot

Gabriel (Christian Campbell) is a young composer of old-fashioned musical-theater songs whose latest number, "Enter You", gets a mixed reception at a Broadway songwriters workshop; a theater colleague, Perry (Steve Hayes), tells him he needs to get a life before he can write about one.⁶ That night he visits a gay bar and sees Mark (John Paul Pitoc), the club's go-go dancer, and the two later meet again on the subway and go back to Gabriel's apartment for what both expect to be a one-night stand.⁴

The night keeps intervening. Gabriel's roommate Rich (Brad Beyer) claims the apartment for his own plans, Gabriel's friend Katherine (Tori Spelling), a struggling actress, refuses to leave, and the pair drift through drag clubs and diners looking for somewhere to be alone.⁴^•⁷ Along the way the drag queen Miss Coco Peru (Clinton Leupp) delivers a warning about Mark's reputation with men, and the two leads, physically unsatisfied all night, develop an unforeseen romantic bond that the film resolves in their favor by dawn.⁴^•⁸ The story is set entirely over the course of one evening in Greenwich Village.⁹

Production

The screenplay began as a 70-page script titled "Gay Boy" by Jason Schafer. Fall said he wanted to make a film that was not "about two gay guys coming out, or AIDS, or anything I felt a lot of gay movies were dealing with, or a gay guy falling for a straight guy."¹⁰ The film was produced by Good Machine and Roadside Attractions, with Fall, Eric d'Arbeloff, and Ross Katz as producers, Terry Stacey as cinematographer, Brian A. Kates as editor, and a score by David Friedman.¹

Release and box office

Fine Line released the film in limited US theaters on July 23, 1999, opening on 6 screens with a $118,594 opening weekend, 5.8 percent of its final total. It expanded to a maximum of 94 theaters and ran about 5.1 weeks per theater on average, finishing at $2,049,595 domestically, all of it in the United States market.³ The ImageOut festival program describes it as Fine Line's highest-grossing film of that year.² The Los Angeles Times called it "a surprise hit at Sundance" before its July release.¹¹

Reception

Critical response was divided. The Rotten Tomatoes critics consensus holds that "by portraying its love story as nothing less than conventional, Trick avoids genre tropes to create a simple, effective romance," with a 76 percent Tomatometer from 21 reviews and an 83 percent audience score.⁴ Kenneth Turan, writing in the Los Angeles Times, called it "a light and amusing item with a lively sense of humor" and argued that, though made with a gay audience in mind, it had enough sweetness and humanity to cross over to a mainstream independent audience.¹¹ The Guardian's Brian Logan, reviewing at the Edinburgh Film Festival, called it "a small film with a big heart" and praised John Paul Pitoc's taciturn but expressive Mark and Tori Spelling's performance as Katherine.⁸ Variety's Emanuel Levy named it a highlight of the 1999 Sundance festival and noted that it departed from most gay-themed films by not dealing with AIDS or other "serious" issues.⁴

Roger Ebert gave the film two of four stars, objecting that it "imposes a Doris Day story line on material that wants to be more sexual" and that director Jim Fall gave too many supporting actors extended showcase scenes.⁷ The Deseret News critic Jeff Vice found the film's use of stereotypical heterosexual characters distracting and judged the premise contrived after the first obstacles, though he called Pitoc's performance the film's bright spot.¹² Dennis Lim in The Village Voice dismissed the screenplay as "a ragged, witless patchwork of subsitcom scenarios," while noting that post-Sundance raves had framed the film as a new, agenda-free brand of gay cinema.¹³ On IMDb the film holds a 7.2/10 rating from about 10,000 users.⁵

Place in queer cinema

When Trick came out in 1999, the ImageOut program notes, it was "something of an anomaly": no characters die of HIV, there is no homophobia or hate crime, and it is not a coming-out story.² A retrospective reviewer in Reeling Reviews connected that tone to its moment, writing that the film appeared only a couple of years after new drug treatments meant HIV might not necessarily be a death sentence, and that it reflected a hope and optimism gay men had not allowed themselves to feel for a long time.⁴ The Queer Cinema Archive describes it as one of the early queer films in which the audience is encouraged to root for a burgeoning romance with no hint of consequences.¹⁰ Around its 25th anniversary the film joined the Criterion Collection, and a 2024 oral history described it as holding a special spot in LGBTQ cinema history.¹⁴ A sequel, Trick 2, with the original cast returning, was announced in 2018 with Fall set to direct.²^•¹⁰

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026