he likes the town, he paints toy soldiers, and he's gay
Insert a pretentious subtitle here, something about the representation of gender roles in Groundhog Day . Bill is just a waiter at the Tip Top Café. Well, he was in fictional 1993. He’d been working there for three years since he left Penn State. And, as the title above says, he was (and I suppose still is, presumably, if these fictional realities continue on even when we don’t invest further attention into them) gay. In Danny Rubin’s original script, Bill was supposed to deny being gay—Rubin thought that was funnier, but Harold Ramis changed it (according to Rubin, but the second revision by Ramis still has Bill say “I am not!”). “Having Bill deny the assertion could have been confusing” Rubin says, in a scene in which Phil is “trying to prove to Rita that he knows everything and everyone.” Rubin adds: But I think the real reason the line changed was political correctness. A gay man being outed against his will might be funny or it might be considered cruel. A gay man casually and...