Roger Spottiswoode | And the Band Played On / 1993

shouting without being heard

by Douglas Messerli

 

Arnold Schulman (screenplay, based on And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic by Randy Shilts), Roger Spottiswoode (director) And the Band Played On / 1993

The spectacular extravaganza that Roger Spottiswoode’s And the Band Played On appears to represent with its all-star cast of Matthew Modine, Ian McKellan, Alan Alda, Lily Tomlin, B. D. Wong, Phil Collins, Steve Martin, Richard Gere, Anjelica Huston, Richard Masur, Jeffrey Nordling, and numerous others belies the fact that they play a group of individuals who, with the exception of Alda’s rather despicable character Dr. Robert Gallo—who still today is recognized somewhat unfairly as one the major discoverers of HIV as the infectious agent responsible for AIDS—were unknown and unheard by US government agencies and the media, along with other spokespeople of the LGBTQ community in the early years of the AIDS infection when they should have been the ones most listened to and followed. It is almost an irony that director Spottiswoode found so many celebrities to perform the true unsung heroes who fought during the Ronald Reagan years to whom few listened.

       Not so very differently from our own current struggles with the COVID pandemic, these scientists, social organizers, and politicos were ignored, called names, and labeled as hysterics at a time when the nation was turning its back on thousands if not millions of individuals worldwide who might have lived longer but died ignominious deaths.

      Accordingly, we can immediately admit that And the Band Played On is a work with a strong message to convey, and is consequently not as objective as some might have wished—although given the absurdity of the US leaders’ ignorance, I might have wished the film was even more outspoken in its views.

       As it was, even in making this movie screenplay writer Arnold Schulman, the director, his film associates, and his cast encountered almost as much red tape and denial as the original figures described in Randy Shilts documentary book And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic upon which the film was based.

       The film begins with epidemiologist Dr. Don Francis (Modine) and an associate arriving in an African medical outpost only to discover that nearly all the villagers are already dead of Ebola hemorrhagic fever. Only one woman is still alive, who after grabbing Francis’ arm in desperation, falls dead. They have nothing to do in this place but to burn the bodies, unable to even explain to a surviving young boy what has happened to his friends and family. It is a horrific vision which haunts the character and the movie throughout, a foretelling of events that will suddenly occur in San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, in eventually in nearly all major American cities, particularly and inexplicably among young sexually active gay men.

        I lived through the time, afraid like every other gay man that any of my years of sexual activities might suddenly render me as simply another statistic; and since then, I have watched nearly every LGBTQ-oriented film and television broadcast devoted to AIDS. So I must admit I came to this film with a weak stomach and several gallons of tears ready to be released at every momentary frustration these AID researchers and committed social organizers might face. And there were most certainly enough that by film’s end I felt drained. You must excuse me, accordingly, if I don’t bother to recount them all in detail once again. The discomfort that one feels while watching this film is intentional, a reward for having the conscience and empathy to relive history and to feel enraged by past events.

     The small group of scientists at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) were already understaffed and working on a miniscule budget which as doctors Mary Guinan (Glenne Headly), James Curran (Saul Rubinek), and Francis along with CDC investigators Harold Jaffe (Charles Martin Smith) realized did not even allow them an updated electron microscope let alone the sophisticated medical devices they needed to begin to properly research, identify, and explain the new disease. And even worse, under the new Reagan presidency, the CDC was highly under-budgeted facing disease that had stricken a homosexual community that the Regan administration at best did not want to talk about let alone support and encourage. For many religious leaders of the day the disease was the curse of God, a deservéd punishment for their behavior. And the more the CDC administrators might push for funding, the less they were likely to be able to obtain.

     Even worse, once they have begun to suspect that the new disease is viral and spread through sexual fluids and blood, Francis cannot get the CDC admit to the gay community what they have learned. Despite the support of individuals in San Francisco such as the congressional aid, gay rights and AIDS activist Bill Kraus (McKellen) and the highly respected local physician and epidemiologist Dr. Selma Dritz (Tomlin), Francis cannot, with CDC backing, get the gay community to close down their extremely active bath scene. The corrupt owners of the baths, interested only in bringing in their gay clientele to egg the gay community on, as community spokesmen such as the AIDS poster boy Bobbi Campbell (Donal Logue) speaks out against the baths’ closure since to him and others it represents a sexual right for which the gays have fought. Many the initial discoveries of the CDC seem another rouse to take away hard-won rights and blame the disease on the gays.     

      It doesn’t help that Francis is apparently not gay, and has no links with that community other than his new-made friends Kraus and Dritz (not even knowing Kraus in reality). And that becomes a problem for the film as well. Can a gay viewer feel the full frustrations and sympathies for a cause so near to the core of one’s being shared by someone who is basically an outsider? Since the straight world of government and media do not seem to care, how are we to imagine a lone scientist as being the beacon of gay men who are dying from AIDS? Unfortunately, in a world of “them” and “us,” Francis is presented and at times represents himself as one of “them,” and the movie doesn’t have time to explore that important aspect of human folly in depth. When the gays vote down the resolution to close the gay baths, Francis turns to his friend, the presumably lesbian Dritz with utter confusion, she rather lamely explaining, “They’re only human, and they’re scared.” It doesn’t fully answer for his or our frustrations, particularly for those of us, as gay men, who weren’t dependent on the baths and open sex in bookstores or meetups in gay bars for our sexual and social lives. But, in all honesty, in those days I still snuck out occasionally for a gay backroom bookstore hookup, and in so doing endangered my life and that of my companion. I was lucky.

      Kraus has a young lover, Kico Govantes (B. D. Wong) who is devoted to Kraus, but also hurt and lonely that the man has turned his full life over to his activist causes, leaving little time for their own private lives. He leaves Kraus in the midst of the crisis, and sometime after the man who felt no fear of the bath house and bar sexual encounters notices a spot at the base of his leg which might be Kaposi’s sarcoma, and soon after is diagnosed with AIDS, is eventually hospitalized, and dies. Although Kico returns to him at the first sign of his illness, the film hints that it is perhaps the lover who has explored sex with others to salve his sexual loneliness and brought home the disease. But once more, the movie itself is so busy with other concerns that it has no time to truly explore this possibility and its ramifications. Which is also perhaps for the better. The worst thing such a film might do is begin to blame individuals for a national catastrophe.

     It does get close to that, however, when the CDC team finally get hold of the victim they describe as Patient Zero, Gaëtan Dugas (Nordling), a Canadian flight attendant sought out by Dr. William Darrow (Richard Masur) because of his thousands of sexual encounters and ability to recall a large number of their names. By linking his sexual encounters he’s named to other AIDS patients, and their further sexual meetings with people who became sick or died, Darrow was able to prove that AIDS was in fact passed on through sexual contact. 

       The problem is that having discovered this through Dugas and describing him as Patient Zero, the lie was spread for decades that it was Dugas himself who first brought AIDS into North America or that he himself was responsible for the spread of the disease. Fortunately, Spottiswoode and Schulman don’t actually argue that, but neither does the film dispel the idea. In fact, the vast majority of men who were contacted for research admitted to hundreds and thousands of sexual partners within a single year; but unlike Dugas who willingly worked with the CDC and was able to remember names, the others resisted or didn’t even know the names of their numerous sexual partners. Nor was Dugas the first of AIDS cases. And by the time the sexual link had been established researchers had also come to realize that a great many heterosexual women were also coming down with the disease as were, even more tellingly, hemophilic patients and people who had had blood transfusions in surgery. John Greyson’s film Zero Patience (also 1993) is centered upon that travesty.   

      But even with that evidence, the gay community was, once more understandably, afraid of being denied their right to give blood or of being identified automatically as carriers. Until very recently as a gay man I was unable to give blood, something I did quite often as a community service when I was younger. Moreover, the blood industry wasn’t about to put their money into testing all blood samples, even if had they found a reliable method of testing. In this case it took the discovery of AIDS occurring in a wealthy San Francisco couple whose wife had acquired the disease from a blood transfusion, information her doctors had kept from her, to begin to change things by threatening them to sue.

      A wealthy choreographer (played by Gere, obviously representing the hundreds of famed actors and dancers who contracted HIV and died of AIDS, in particular Michael Bennett), after discovering he has AIDS, offers a large check to be spent for the cause.   

       With all these positives, however, there was still one endlessly large problem. The disease cell itself had yet to be identified; and when a French virologists from the Pasteur Institute in Paris Luc Montagnier, Jean-Claude Chermann and Françoise Barré-Sinoussi were finally able to separate out and find the infectious agent, an American biomedical researcher, argued that he believed the agent to be related to the HTLV cell he had discovered in his research on Leukemia, and when the French announced their discovery threatened to sue for the patent which would have further slowed-down the process of identifying the disease for at least another six years.    

        Although the film shows him personally making a pact with the Pasteur scientists, the agreement that he would share equal credit was arranged through Reagan and French Prime Minister Jacques Chirac; but even then Gallo lied, claiming he had discovered the cell which closely matched those the French had sent him as samples. The Nobel Prize eventually went to the Pasteur team. And the ignominy of seeking personal gain went once more to the American establishment.*     

       And the Band Played On ends, accordingly, in the middle of things, with Francis himself becoming so dispirited that he demands reassignment from Washington, D.C. to San Francisco. And there in 1993, the real Francis joined Genentech, Inc. in searching for a HIV vaccine. When their vaccine failed its clinical trials, he left VaxGen and co-founded Global Solutions for Infectious Diseases for which he still serves as Executive Director.  

    The movie closes with a great number of unattached strings hanging from its narrative seams, attempting to wrap them up in the final strains Elton Johns’ “The Last Song” in a montage to those who died of AIDS or those whose lives were lost through the failures of HIV or AIDS education and research, including Rock Hudson, Anthony Perkins, Rudolf Nureyev, Arthur Ashe, Michael Bennett, Liberace, Freddie Mercury, Elizabeth Glaser, Larry Kramer, Magic Johnson, Halston, Willi Smith, Perry Ellis, Peter Allen, Brad Davis, Keith Haring, Stewart McKinney, Denholm Elliott, Amanda Blake, Robert Reed, Michel Foucault, Tom Waddell, all of which seems to make this film even more diffuse than it previously was. What do these many dozens of victims have to do with the film’s actual narrative, about the thousands of those who died of AIDS? Well, everything of course, but these represent only a sampling of celebrities.

      You need only read Betsy Sharkey’s 1993 essay in The New York Times to realize that, after three directors, we were lucky to actually have been able to see this movie in any form without strings attached. As she summarizes early on, later her essay going into the painful details:

 

“The project has had three directors and provoked a furious debate not so much about AIDS but about the nature of docudrama, how truth is determined and whose right it is to decide just what truth is. The issue often comes up in connection with docudrama, but it has been argued most fervently when recent historical events have been dramatized, as with the films Mississippi Burning and Oliver Stone's J.F.K. The literal truth (whether two people ever actually met or had a particular conversation, for instance) is one consideration; a broader truth (what a particular group of people were like at a particular place and time, perhaps) is another.

      Like Randy Shilts's book of the same title and on which it is based, the movie And the Band Played On attempts to expose the deadly role that inaction and infighting among Government officials, blood banks, the scientific community and segments of the gay community played in the early spread of acquired immune deficiency syndrome. The director, Roger Spottiswoode, believed that the film would be as much a social statement as a dramatic work. It was he who wanted the controversial images to remain.** Mr. Shilts thought they should go, and at least one gay-rights advocate threatened to mobilize protests if the scenes weren't pulled.

       The screenwriter Arnold Schulman, who wrote 20 drafts of the script, is brutal in his assessment of the production's troubles. ‘I lived through every issue we dealt with in the movie, egos, greed, politics,’ he says. ‘It was a nightmare.’"

 

        But of even greater significance is the fact that in their search for a larger truth, Schulman  and Spottiswoode often falsified what really happened. For example, in reality, Dr. Francis never met Bill Kraus, let alone talked with him while Kraus spoke gibberish at his death bed. The real Francis observes: "There were many things that happen in the script that indeed did not happen, so I am talking to people I never really talked to. What Arnold [Schulman] did was to accordion this stuff so the truth is there, but it is not in fact what happened."

       No one, of course, could possibly put the millions of pieces of the truth of such horrible failures and laudable attempts together in a two and a half-hour work for general audiences of television. The disaster of AIDS came like a plague upon us, and so many turned away from what was happening or refused to accept the truth if its existence that millions worldwide were made to suffer before those who cared could began to have effect and change the picture. This film, if it does nothing else profoundly reminds us, however, that such a national failure to act in meaningful ways was not inevitable, but a willed decision of those in power.     

 

 *Gallo was only typical of many larger than human egos at the time. I remember an evening when we were invited to dinner at the home of actor Harry Hamlin and his wife at the time Laura Johnson in 1988 or 1989. They had also invited Jonas Salk, the man who created, of course, the Polio Vaccine of which my generation were the first to benefit (I received the shot at age 8). He told us that he was also working on the discovery of a cure for HIV, and believed that only he could accomplish this impossible task. Obviously he made no such discovery before his death in 1995.

 

**These included cuts from the real gay Halloween parade of drag queens, a deletion of much of a scene that took place in a gay bath house, and a bookstore owner’s explanation of what amyl nitrite or poppers are.

 

Los Angeles, April 28, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2022).