In his seminal tell-all Hollywood Babylon, Kenneth Anger claimed to reveal the festering truth beneath the dream factory of the American film industry. His was a bemused but cynical perspective on the business of show, reveling in the sordid juiciness of early Tinseltown controversies that usually concluded with tragedy, if not death. Representatives of the film idols referred to in the book lined...
In his seminal tell-all Hollywood Babylon, Kenneth Anger claimed to reveal the festering truth beneath the dream factory of the American film industry. His was a bemused but cynical perspective on the business of show, reveling in the sordid juiciness of early Tinseltown controversies that usually concluded with tragedy, if not death. Representatives of the film idols referred to in the book lined...
Samuel took a stone and set it up between Mizpah and Jeshanah, and named it Ebenezer; for he said, Thus far the Lord has helped us.
1 Samuel 7:12
I dont deserve to be so happy.
A Christmas Carol (1951)
///
Few works of art can lay claim to the cultural real estate occupied by Charles Dickens A Christmas Carol. Published in December of 1843, the novella was partly inspired by Dickens visits to the more abject areas of England, along with his desire to create something that would motivate the public to ease the plight of the least among them. He planned earlier that year to write a political pamphlet about the horrors of child labor and the poverty state, but he changed his mind when he realized that a fictional story, with its heightened reality, might better persuade readers.
The book was an immediate critical and commercial success: the first run of what would wind up being dozens of printings sold out by Christmas Eve, and by February 1844, stage versions were already being put up across London. Dickens returned to the well with four more special holiday tales throughout the 1840s, but none were received like A Christmas Carol. He delivered excerpts from it at a series of public readings he gave in his final years, before dying in June of 1870 at the age of 58. That seems so long ago nowthe American Civil War had ended just five years earlierbut the great span of interwoven generations since then shows how close it still is. It was only eight years after Dickens death that Eadweard Muybridge captured a series of photos showing a horse at a gallop, the precursor to motion pictures; another 15 to 20 years, and you have Georges Mlis and the Lumire brothers revolutionizing an art form. As the turn of the century brought with it the explosion of creativity and development that would turn into the early film industry, Dickens work was still present in peoples minds. Hed been gone just over 30 years the first time A Christmas Carol was adapted to the screen, and why not? It was a massively popular story, and early filmmakers were eager to get their hands on any stories they could find. That first adaptation was a short, and it was British, too: Scrooge, or Marleys Ghost came out in 1901, meaning its entirely likely that some of the people who watched that film in its debut had lived alongside Dickens. Maybe theyd even known him. We are never far from the past.
///
That was, of course, just the beginning of what would quickly become a tradition in the film industry of adapting A Christmas Carol to the screen. Dickens other works found their way to theaters, too, but not nearly as often as A Christmas Carol did. This (admittedly unscientific but nevertheless helpful) roundup on Wikipedia shows 45 films based on A Christmas Carol, with the runner-up, Oliver Twist, clocking 19 adaptations. That averages out to a new Christmas Carol movie about every two and a half years since 1901. Every American born since the beginning of the film industry has been inundated with movies based on this one book.
Part of the reason can be traced to the story itself. At the risk of over-explaining something that is, according to the thesis of this very essay, well known to anyone who could be reading it, the plot of A Christmas Carol is perfectly suited to film. Ebenezer Scrooge, an elderly miser and business owner who regularly mistreats his chief employee, Bob Cratchit, is visited on Christmas Eve by the ghost of his late colleague, Jacob Marley. Wearing chains that he forged in life, Marley warns Scrooge to turn from the path of greed and cruelty and to embrace his fellow man in love and friendship. To make sure Marley gets the message, he tells Scrooge that the old man will be visited by three more spirits: the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Christmas Present, and Christmas Yet to Come. Each of these spirits show Scrooge what his life has really been like, and what people really think of him. Forced to reckon with a life devoid of love and defined by emptiness, Scrooge experiences a spiritual awakening. He repents of his deeds and promises to live a better life, awakening to find himself safely back in his bed on Christmas morning. Overjoyed, he mends fences with his nephew and extended family, gives Bob a raise so he can care for his sick child, and generally becomes beloved by all he meets. The End.
“Samuel took a stone and set it up between Mizpah and Jeshanah, and named it Ebenezer; for he said, ‘Thus far the Lord has helped us.’”
— 1 Samuel 7:12
“I don’t deserve to be so happy.”
— “A Christmas Carol” (1951)
///
Few works of art can lay claim to the cultural real estate occupied by Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Published in December of 1843, the novella was partly inspired by Dickens’ visits to the more abject areas of England, along with his desire to create something that would motivate the public to ease the plight of the least among them. He planned earlier that year to write a political pamphlet about the horrors of child labor and the poverty state, but he changed his mind when he realized that a fictional story, with its heightened reality, might better persuade readers.
The book was an immediate critical and commercial success: the first run of what would wind up being dozens of printings sold out by Christmas Eve, and by February 1844, stage versions were already being put up across London. Dickens returned to the well with four more special holiday tales throughout the 1840s, but none were received like A Christmas Carol. He delivered excerpts from it at a series of public readings he gave in his final years, before dying in June of 1870 at the age of 58. That seems so long ago now—the American Civil War had ended just five years earlier—but the great span of interwoven generations since then shows how close it still is. It was only eight years after Dickens’ death that Eadweard Muybridge captured a series of photos showing a horse at a gallop, the precursor to motion pictures; another 15 to 20 years, and you have Georges Méliès and the Lumière brothers revolutionizing an art form. As the turn of the century brought with it the explosion of creativity and development that would turn into the early film industry, Dickens’ work was still present in people’s minds. He’d been gone just over 30 years the first time A Christmas Carol was adapted to the screen, and why not? It was a massively popular story, and early filmmakers were eager to get their hands on any stories they could find. That first adaptation was a short, and it was British, too: Scrooge, or Marley’s Ghost came out in 1901, meaning it’s entirely likely that some of the people who watched that film in its debut had lived alongside Dickens. Maybe they’d even known him. We are never far from the past.
///
That was, of course, just the beginning of what would quickly become a tradition in the film industry of adapting A Christmas Carol to the screen. Dickens’ other works found their way to theaters, too, but not nearly as often as A Christmas Carol did. This (admittedly unscientific but nevertheless helpful) roundup on Wikipedia shows 45 films based on A Christmas Carol, with the runner-up, Oliver Twist, clocking 19 adaptations. That averages out to a new Christmas Carol movie about every two and a half years since 1901. Every American born since the beginning of the film industry has been inundated with movies based on this one book.
Part of the reason can be traced to the story itself. At the risk of over-explaining something that is, according to the thesis of this very essay, well known to anyone who could be reading it, the plot of A Christmas Carol is perfectly suited to film. Ebenezer Scrooge, an elderly miser and business owner who regularly mistreats his chief employee, Bob Cratchit, is visited on Christmas Eve by the ghost of his late colleague, Jacob Marley. Wearing chains that he “forged in life,” Marley warns Scrooge to turn from the path of greed and cruelty and to embrace his fellow man in love and friendship. To make sure Marley gets the message, he tells Scrooge that the old man will be visited by three more spirits: the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Christmas Present, and Christmas Yet to Come. Each of these spirits show Scrooge what his life has really been like, and what people really think of him. Forced to reckon with a life devoid of love and defined by emptiness, Scrooge experiences a spiritual awakening. He repents of his deeds and promises to live a better life, awakening to find himself safely back in his bed on Christmas morning. Overjoyed, he mends fences with his nephew and extended family, gives Bob a raise so he can care for his sick child, and generally becomes beloved by all he meets. The End.
During the last months of his life, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt ordered that the mantelpiece in the White Houses state dining room be inscribed with John Adams prayer: I pray Heaven to bestow the best of Blessings on this House and on all that shall hereafter inhabit it. May none but honest and wise Men ever rule under this roof.
Adams, the second president but the first to inhabit the Executive Mansion, as the White House was more often called in those days, couldnt have known how much urgency we might attach to such a prayer in an age of terrorism, global warming, and nuclear weapons. Nor could he have anticipated the way that the passage of time might alter and sometimes outright distort our perception of presidential honesty and wisdom; our definitions of both might be radically different from his. Our films on presidential politics are a snapshot of our hopes and fears, a way to work out our anxieties through fiction. Two films that emerged in reaction to the election of 1960, Advise & Consent directed by Otto Preminger, and The Best Man, written by Gore Vidal, reflect those anxieties as acutely as any ever made.
Like Freuds cigar, sometimes a film is just a film, of course, and not every presidential portrayal on celluloid betrays a hidden wish or worrymaybe Bill Pullmans fighter-flying Thomas Whitmore in Independence Day (1996) or Harrison Fords combat-veteran James Marshall in Air Force One (1997)both chief executives who take matters into their own handshave a subtext in partisan gridlock during the Clinton years, but more likely theyre just action heroes going with the flow in outlandish films. Sometimes, though, the relationship is on the nose, such as in the 1933 fascist fantasy Gabriel Over the White House, which appeared at roughly the nadir of the Great Depression. Walter Huston plays a lackadaisical playboy president who suffers a near-fatal accident and is reborn as a Mussolini-like figure who solves the countrys problems through sheer force of will (and guns). At about the same time, there was also The Phantom President, a Rodgers and Hart musical, in which no less than the Yankee Doodle Dandy himself, George M. Cohan, reminds convention delegates about to nominate him for president:
My friends, this land is sad today, It faces want and dearth. But government of the people, By the people, for the people, Shall not perish from the earth. The chorus answers, Hey, hey, heythats a new thought.
On the calmer end of the spectrum, at a time when Roosevelt was saying he was less concerned with being a great president than with not being the last president, the years 1930-1940 brought no less than three major films about Abraham Lincoln (D.W. Griffiths Abraham Lincoln, starring Walter Huston; John Fords Young Mr. Lincoln, with Henry Fonda portraying Lincoln as lawyer; and John Cromwells Abe Lincoln in Illinois, with Raymond Massey as the titular character) each bearing the reassuring message that when the Republic was last under threat, a hero arose to restore order.
The United States was a far more stable and prosperous proposition during the 1960 presidential campaign season, but the choice between Democratic Senator John F. Kennedy and incumbent Vice-President Richard M. Nixon made it a change election nonetheless. The previous three presidents had been born between 1882 and 1890. Kennedy, 43 years old, or Nixon, 47, would be the first president in United States history born in the 20th century. Whether one agreed or disagreed with the policies of Roosevelt, Harry Truman, or Dwight Eisenhower, in a very real sense the reassuring grandpas who had steered America through the frightening progression of the Depression, World War II, and the Cold War were going away for good.
There were good reasons to doubt both men. If Kennedy won, he would be the youngest elected president in history. While his panache made an appealing contrast with the dowdy Eisenhower, it was also a reminder that he was inexperienced, with an indifferent record in the Senate. Old New Deal Democrats, including Eleanor Roosevelt, doubted Kennedys bona fides. As Arthur Schlesinger Jr. put it, Kennedy seemed too cool and ambitious, too bored by the conditional reflexes of stereotyped liberalism, too much a young man in a hurry. He did not respond in anticipated ways and phrases and wore no liberal heart on his leave. In particular, the Kennedys had failed to repudiate the Red-baiting demagoguery of Senator Joe McCarthy and had, in fact, supported him.
Kennedy was also burdened by inherited doubts. He was a Catholic, and anti-Catholic prejudice was still strong in the country; it had helped defeat Democrat Al Smith in the election of 1928. There was also the looming presence of his father, Joseph Kennedy, a wealthy, unscrupulous climber who had sunk his own presidential ambitions by advising appeasement of Hitler while serving as ambassador to Great Britain at the outset of World War II.
As a Congressman, Senator, and Vice-President who had successfully debated Nikita Khrushchev and stepped in as pinch-president when Eisenhower was ill, Nixon had experience in spades, not that the old general acknowledged it. (Asked at a press conference to name an example of a major idea of [Nixons] that you had adopted, the president replied, If you give me a week, I might think of one. I dont remember.) That experience, though, contained a fair share of disqualifiers. He had pioneered McCarthys tactics, first in his campaigns for the House and Senate, then in the divisive Alger Hiss affair. Due to the revelation of a campaign slush fund, which he combated with the infamous Checkers speech, he seemed to many not just an unscrupulous careerist, but also an example of tawdry, down-market venality. No class, was Kennedys two-word dismissal, an assessment that was echoed in campaign signs that asked, Would you buy a used car from this man? Anticipating Donald Trump, Nixon had tried to rebrand himself so often that one commentator said the question was not if there was a new Nixon or an old Nixon, but whether there is anything that be called the real Nixon, new or old. (James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations, 435.)
Tensions around the election were unsurprisingly stoked by the candidates. Kennedys major theme was the anodyne, Its time for America to get moving again, but in his first televised debate with Nixon, he began by questioning, Lincoln-style, whether the world could continue to exist half slave and half free, asking, Can freedom be maintained under the most severe attack it has ever known? It was as if the Russians were about to march down Pennsylvania Avenue and paint the White House red.
Unsurprisingly, with the old guard fading away and the new guard doing what it could to shatter any sense of serenity, public uncertainty about the election expressed itself in polemical art that asked tough questions about the integrity of the American political system and the quality of men that system produces. Among the first was the novel Advise and Consent by Allen Drury, appearing in 1959. A huge bestseller and inexplicable winner of the Pulitzer Prize, it became a Broadway play the next year, with the film version, directed by Preminger, finished in time for Oscar season in 1961 but held back for contractual reasons until June 1962. Vidals play The Best Man premiered on Broadway on March 31, 1960. The film adaptation, directed by Franklin Schaffner (who had directed the Broadway version of Advise) appeared on April 5, 1964. Significantly, both struggle to find an ending that does not duck the questions the stories pose, and both fail. Over 50 years later, with a presidential election of our own in the offing, we are still asking the questions.
*
In Advise & Consent, an unnamed, ailing president (Franchot Tone) nominates controversial candidate Robert Leffingwell (Henry Fonda) to succeed the recently deceased Secretary of State. Leffingwell is an intellectual who disdains kneejerk anti-Soviet policies. The former head of two federal agencies, he has made powerful enemies among the senators who must confirm his appointment, chief among them senior senator from South Carolina Seab Cooley (Charles Laughton, visibly ailing in his final role). Leffingwell also has an obsessive advocate in the sneering, peace-at-any-price junior senator from Wyoming, Fred Van Ackerman (George Grizzard). Caught between them is Brigham Anderson (Don Murray), senior senator from Utah, who will chair the subcommittee assigned to conduct the confirmation hearings. A family man with a pretty wife and a young daughter, Anderson is hiding a secret that could influence his vote if one side or the other was to get ahold of it.
During the last months of his life, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt ordered that the mantelpiece in the White House’s state dining room be inscribed with John Adams’ prayer: “I pray Heaven to bestow the best of Blessings on this House and on all that shall hereafter inhabit it. May none but honest and wise Men ever rule under this roof.”
Adams, the second president but the first to inhabit the Executive Mansion, as the White House was more often called in those days, couldn’t have known how much urgency we might attach to such a prayer in an age of terrorism, global warming, and nuclear weapons. Nor could he have anticipated the way that the passage of time might alter and sometimes outright distort our perception of presidential honesty and wisdom; our definitions of both might be radically different from his. Our films on presidential politics are a snapshot of our hopes and fears, a way to work out our anxieties through fiction. Two films that emerged in reaction to the election of 1960, Advise & Consent¸ directed by Otto Preminger, and The Best Man, written by Gore Vidal, reflect those anxieties as acutely as any ever made.
Like Freud’s cigar, sometimes a film is just a film, of course, and not every presidential portrayal on celluloid betrays a hidden wish or worry—maybe Bill Pullman’s fighter-flying Thomas Whitmore in Independence Day (1996) or Harrison Ford’s combat-veteran James Marshall in Air Force One (1997)—both chief executives who take matters into their own hands—have a subtext in partisan gridlock during the Clinton years, but more likely they’re just action heroes going with the flow in outlandish films. Sometimes, though, the relationship is on the nose, such as in the 1933 fascist fantasy Gabriel Over the White House, which appeared at roughly the nadir of the Great Depression. Walter Huston plays a lackadaisical playboy president who suffers a near-fatal accident and is reborn as a Mussolini-like figure who solves the country’s problems through sheer force of will (and guns). At about the same time, there was also The Phantom President, a Rodgers and Hart musical, in which no less than the Yankee Doodle Dandy himself, George M. Cohan, reminds convention delegates about to nominate him for president:
My friends, this land is sad today, It faces want and dearth. But government of the people, By the people, for the people, Shall not perish from the earth. The chorus answers, “Hey, hey, hey—that’s a new thought.”
On the calmer end of the spectrum, at a time when Roosevelt was saying he was less concerned with being a great president than with not being the last president, the years 1930-1940 brought no less than three major films about Abraham Lincoln (D.W. Griffith’s Abraham Lincoln, starring Walter Huston; John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln, with Henry Fonda portraying Lincoln as lawyer; and John Cromwell’s Abe Lincoln in Illinois, with Raymond Massey as the titular character) each bearing the reassuring message that when the Republic was last under threat, a hero arose to restore order.
The United States was a far more stable and prosperous proposition during the 1960 presidential campaign season, but the choice between Democratic Senator John F. Kennedy and incumbent Vice-President Richard M. Nixon made it a change election nonetheless. The previous three presidents had been born between 1882 and 1890. Kennedy, 43 years old, or Nixon, 47, would be the first president in United States history born in the 20th century. Whether one agreed or disagreed with the policies of Roosevelt, Harry Truman, or Dwight Eisenhower, in a very real sense the reassuring grandpas who had steered America through the frightening progression of the Depression, World War II, and the Cold War were going away for good.
There were good reasons to doubt both men. If Kennedy won, he would be the youngest elected president in history. While his panache made an appealing contrast with the dowdy Eisenhower, it was also a reminder that he was inexperienced, with an indifferent record in the Senate. Old New Deal Democrats, including Eleanor Roosevelt, doubted Kennedy’s bona fides. As Arthur Schlesinger Jr. put it, “Kennedy seemed too cool and ambitious, too bored by the conditional reflexes of stereotyped liberalism, too much a young man in a hurry. He did not respond in anticipated ways and phrases and wore no liberal heart on his leave.” In particular, the Kennedys had failed to repudiate the Red-baiting demagoguery of Senator Joe McCarthy and had, in fact, supported him.
Kennedy was also burdened by inherited doubts. He was a Catholic, and anti-Catholic prejudice was still strong in the country; it had helped defeat Democrat Al Smith in the election of 1928. There was also the looming presence of his father, Joseph Kennedy, a wealthy, unscrupulous climber who had sunk his own presidential ambitions by advising appeasement of Hitler while serving as ambassador to Great Britain at the outset of World War II.
As a Congressman, Senator, and Vice-President who had successfully debated Nikita Khrushchev and stepped in as pinch-president when Eisenhower was ill, Nixon had experience in spades, not that the old general acknowledged it. (Asked at a press conference to name “an example of a major idea of [Nixon’s] that you had adopted,” the president replied, “If you give me a week, I might think of one. I don’t remember.”) That experience, though, contained a fair share of disqualifiers. He had pioneered McCarthy’s tactics, first in his campaigns for the House and Senate, then in the divisive Alger Hiss affair. Due to the revelation of a campaign slush fund, which he combated with the infamous “Checkers” speech, he seemed to many not just an unscrupulous careerist, but also an example of tawdry, down-market venality. “No class,” was Kennedy’s two-word dismissal, an assessment that was echoed in campaign signs that asked, “Would you buy a used car from this man?” Anticipating Donald Trump, Nixon had tried to rebrand himself so often that one commentator said the question was not if there was a new Nixon or an old Nixon, but “whether there is anything that be called the ‘real’ Nixon, new or old.” (James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations, 435.)
Tensions around the election were unsurprisingly stoked by the candidates. Kennedy’s major theme was the anodyne, “It’s time for America to get moving again,” but in his first televised debate with Nixon, he began by questioning, Lincoln-style, whether the world could continue to exist half slave and half free, asking, “Can freedom be maintained under the most severe attack it has ever known?” It was as if the Russians were about to march down Pennsylvania Avenue and paint the White House red.
Unsurprisingly, with the old guard fading away and the new guard doing what it could to shatter any sense of serenity, public uncertainty about the election expressed itself in polemical art that asked tough questions about the integrity of the American political system and the quality of men that system produces. Among the first was the novel Advise and Consent by Allen Drury, appearing in 1959. A huge bestseller and inexplicable winner of the Pulitzer Prize, it became a Broadway play the next year, with the film version, directed by Preminger, finished in time for Oscar season in 1961 but held back for contractual reasons until June 1962. Vidal’s play The Best Man premiered on Broadway on March 31, 1960. The film adaptation, directed by Franklin Schaffner (who had directed the Broadway version of Advise) appeared on April 5, 1964. Significantly, both struggle to find an ending that does not duck the questions the stories pose, and both fail. Over 50 years later, with a presidential election of our own in the offing, we are still asking the questions.
*
In Advise & Consent, an unnamed, ailing president (Franchot Tone) nominates controversial candidate Robert Leffingwell (Henry Fonda) to succeed the recently deceased Secretary of State. Leffingwell is an intellectual who disdains kneejerk anti-Soviet policies. The former head of two federal agencies, he has made powerful enemies among the senators who must confirm his appointment, chief among them senior senator from South Carolina Seab Cooley (Charles Laughton, visibly ailing in his final role). Leffingwell also has an obsessive advocate in the sneering, peace-at-any-price junior senator from Wyoming, Fred Van Ackerman (George Grizzard). Caught between them is Brigham Anderson (Don Murray), senior senator from Utah, who will chair the subcommittee assigned to conduct the confirmation hearings. A family man with a pretty wife and a young daughter, Anderson is hiding a secret that could influence his vote if one side or the other was to get ahold of it.
People are dying so fast that its like what I imagine being in a war would be like. volunteer nurse Hedy Straus in the 1987 documentary short Living With AIDS
By the time Ronald Reagan deigned to mention AIDS publicly for the first time in a press conference on September 17, 1985, it was known in some circles that the virus that causes it had been ravaging the gay community for more than four years. In the interim, while the medical and scientific communities scrambled to get a grip on the epidemic and fought for the government funding needed to do so properly, gay writers and filmmakers responded to the health crisis in their own wayby creating plays and films that humanized its victims and had the potential to educate the American public about the need for compassion and swift action.
One of the most immediate of these responses was Larry Kramers play The Normal Heart, which the outspoken writer/activista founding member of Gay Mens Health Crisis in 1982, when the disease was still known as GRID, or Gay-Related Immunity Diseasestarted writing in 1983 and saw staged to great acclaim at New York Citys Public Theater in the spring of 1985. Another project with a similar gestation period was the pioneering TV movie An Early Frost, broadcast by NBC that fall after co-writers and partners Ron Cowen and Daniel Lipmanwho later went to develop Queer As Folk for Showtimewent through 15 drafts with the network over a year and a half. And first-time filmmaker Bill Sherwoods low-budget indie Parting Glances was shot in 1984as evidenced by the new releases lining the wall in one scene set at a trendy record storebut didnt get released until early 1986. Snapshots of a time when there was a great deal of misinformation about AIDS and the people it affected, all three remain urgent dispatches from the front lines of the struggle. But to keep them straight, its helpful to take them in the order they reached the screen, touching on a few other milestones along the way.
Im sure youve heard of Acquired Immunity Deficiency Syndrome.
For all its good intentions, An Early Frost wasnt the first feature film about AIDS. In his seminal text, The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality In The Movies, Vito Russo gives that distinction to Arthur J. Bressan, Jr.s Buddies, and hes supported by Raymond Murrays Images in the Dark: An Encyclopedia Of Gay And Lesbian Film And Video. According to Murrays book, however, Buddies was never released on video and it continues to be unavailable to stream or purchase, which has rendered it as invisible today as AIDS sufferers were to the general public three decades ago. By contrast, An Early Frost was put out on DVD in 2006, complete with a commentary by Cowen, Lipman, and lead actor Aidan Quinn, plus the documentary short Living With AIDS, which was filmed by producer/director/editor Tina DeFeliciantonio in 1985 and broadcast on PBS a couple years later. A huge ratings-getter, An Early Frost beat out Monday Night Football to be the top-rated show of the night, capturing one-third of the total viewing audience when it premiered. Today, it takes viewers back to a time when AIDS was a death sentence for nearly everyone who contracted it and effectively outed those who were still in the closet.
“People are dying so fast that it’s like what I imagine being in a war would be like.” –volunteer nurse Hedy Straus in the 1987 documentary short Living With AIDS
By the time Ronald Reagan deigned to mention AIDS publicly for the first time in a press conference on September 17, 1985, it was known in some circles that the virus that causes it had been ravaging the gay community for more than four years. In the interim, while the medical and scientific communities scrambled to get a grip on the epidemic and fought for the government funding needed to do so properly, gay writers and filmmakers responded to the health crisis in their own way—by creating plays and films that humanized its victims and had the potential to educate the American public about the need for compassion and swift action.
One of the most immediate of these responses was Larry Kramer’s play The Normal Heart, which the outspoken writer/activist—a founding member of Gay Men’s Health Crisis in 1982, when the disease was still known as GRID, or Gay-Related Immunity Disease—started writing in 1983 and saw staged to great acclaim at New York City’s Public Theater in the spring of 1985. Another project with a similar gestation period was the pioneering TV movie An Early Frost, broadcast by NBC that fall after co-writers and partners Ron Cowen and Daniel Lipman—who later went to develop Queer As Folk for Showtime—went through 15 drafts with the network over a year and a half. And first-time filmmaker Bill Sherwood’s low-budget indie Parting Glances was shot in 1984—as evidenced by the new releases lining the wall in one scene set at a trendy record store—but didn’t get released until early 1986. Snapshots of a time when there was a great deal of misinformation about AIDS and the people it affected, all three remain urgent dispatches from the front lines of the struggle. But to keep them straight, it’s helpful to take them in the order they reached the screen, touching on a few other milestones along the way.
“I’m sure you’ve heard of Acquired Immunity Deficiency Syndrome.”
For all its good intentions, An Early Frost wasn’t the first feature film about AIDS. In his seminal text, The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality In The Movies, Vito Russo gives that distinction to Arthur J. Bressan, Jr.’s Buddies, and he’s supported by Raymond Murray’s Images in the Dark: An Encyclopedia Of Gay And Lesbian Film And Video. According to Murray’s book, however, Buddies was never released on video and it continues to be unavailable to stream or purchase, which has rendered it as invisible today as AIDS sufferers were to the general public three decades ago. By contrast, An Early Frost was put out on DVD in 2006, complete with a commentary by Cowen, Lipman, and lead actor Aidan Quinn, plus the documentary short Living With AIDS, which was filmed by producer/director/editor Tina DeFeliciantonio in 1985 and broadcast on PBS a couple years later. A huge ratings-getter, An Early Frost beat out Monday Night Football to be the top-rated show of the night, capturing one-third of the total viewing audience when it premiered. Today, it takes viewers back to a time when AIDS was a death sentence for nearly everyone who contracted it and effectively outed those who were still in the closet.
