And The Band Played On (1993)

The final montage always makes me cry.

Someday they'll make the companion piece film about Monkeypox and call it And The Organ Grinder Played On.

And the Doctor Danced On

Great film!

It really needed to be a mini-series. It did a great job with the medical part but the parts with the individual, it fell short. The most affecting parts are those of the men who rented the beach houses and the growing horror as each of them started getting sick.

I had the pleasure of doing a film with Modine about 3 or 4 years after And The Band. Only one scene, but we were sitting in a sports car (on the back of a truck) being driven back and forth across a bridge for the better part of a day. He could not have been any sweeter, and was iincredibly touched when I told him --as a gay man-- how much that film had meant to me. Genuinely humble, such a nice guy.

R5 I remember the Steve Martin, Swoosie Kurtz, and Richard Gere saga, but nohting else.

Martin's son contracted AIDS, Gere lived a promiscious lifestyle, and Kurtz was an innocent woman who had a bad blood transfusion.

Great film, and there is alot of interesting material online from the actual people who the actors in the film portrayed. I particularly like Gere's role and performance here, there isn't alot of it, but it's beautifully haunting (and just beautiful because, hello, Richard Gere). The ending is a classic in tearjerking though in hindsight, there were some people left that had died from the illness that were sadly left out.

I agree it would have been better suited as a miniseries.

R8 Yes. Wasn't Richard Gere based on Michael Bennett?

R9, I think so, a famous coreographer.

[quote]Kurtz was an [italic]innocent[/italic] woman who had a bad blood transfusion

As opposed to those guilty nasty homosexuals who had sex

This thread makes me want to watch that movie again. In fact I think I will.

R12 do it!

R8, sadly, not enough time to show everyone.

The gay self loathers with meth induced lack of impulse control are just as oblivious to the pox

Can't believe this film and Philadelphia came out the same year.

Swoozie Kurtz is really moving in her cameo. Her acting in just a brief scene got her a well deserved Emmy nomination

R17 Her story stuck with me. What else has she been in? I really only know her from this and Liar Liar, but I know her name. It's weird

The early 90s were good to Swoosie Kurtz.

Ugh Swoozie Kurtz scene didn't fit in well imo.

R18- The first thing I saw her in was The World According To Garp (1982).

[quote]The early 90s were good to Swoosie Kurtz.

Yeah, she was nominated for two Emmy's in '91 -- Supporting Actress in a Miniseries or Special for And the Band Played On, and Best Actress in a Drama for Sisters.

She's been nominated for nine Emmys, winning one as Guest Actress for Carol & Company in 1990. Her last nom was in 2006.

[quote]there isn't alot of it

Oh, DEAR!

Alan Alda was a total ass in this movie.

I liked that they devoted significant time and attention to the Gallo/Montagnier controversy, given that much of the audience wouldn't have understood or cared, and that they came out quite unequivocally pro-the French team. Gallo's portrayal was more than a little hamfisted though : 'Today we mark the first significant victory in the battle against, umm, hell, whatever they are calling it now".

Kudos to them for nailing Reagan too. I liked the McKellen/Modine scene at the end a lot. Great cast for a TV movie, obviously a lot of people were keen to help the project out.

And frankly, the movie was less unfair on Gaetan Dugas than Randy Shilts was.

The guy playing Dugas wasn’t hot looking enough.

Really?

Rewatched this during COVID lockdown - loved it. Really well done. The soundtrack always gets me too.

Skip the movie and read the book instead.

Decades ago someone wrote an article for Rolling Stone magazine that connected the creation of the polio vaccines to AIDS. It was said they were using (please, this was a milliners ago so the details are faded) serem made from chimp blood for the vaccines. Then tried out on the children in African countries. It’s easier to make one person a scapegoat for the pandemic than to admit one used a nation full of innocent kids to test out their vaccines

Gaëtan Dugas gets redeemed/re-evaluated in a short story in the new book, BETTER DAVIS AND OTHER STORIES. It’s both sad and funny (he’s portrayed as someone with a strong sense of humor).

[QUOTE] This thread makes me want to watch that movie again. In fact I think I will.

I would as well. Is the movie streaming anywhere or available on YouTube? I guess I can just check for myself.

It's on HBO r31.

The documentary about Gaetan is really good as well. Someone on DL actually recommended it. I cried at the end - quite touching. Someone had posted it on youtube - you had to watch in 6 increments IIRC, but if you want to rent on itunes - link below.

Thanks, R32.

I’m about to watch it on HBO Max. I have never seen it.

R27- The actor playing Gaetan Dugas Jeffrey Nordling is a good looking guy. The real Gaetan Dugan was not so good looking.

Jeffrey Nordling was great in Big Little Lies.

Fun fact: my father was a clinician at the time and AIDS became a big part of his career. He attended an early conference at which all the big names were there, including Gallo and Montagnier. Dad loved hearing Gallo speak and thought he was amazing, really charismatic, a great speaker and so on top of his brief (and Gallo praised a question of his which probably helped). Montagnier on the other hand was 'really boring'.

So next day he gets back into work and tells a colleague about what he thought of the conference and how amazing Gallo was, to which his colleague (a little older and wiser, but whom he didn't really get on with) said rather witheringly 'I wouldn't buy a used car from that man'.

So: some people did see through him.....

He also had AIDS.

R38, I hope he dies in prison, preferably violence

R30 that was debunked years ago.

[quote] What else has she been in?

“Love, Sidney.” I remember liking it at the time, not sure how well it would hold up today.

This and Lontime Companion were the best AIDS movies.

Longtime companion isn’t streaming anywhere. That’s too bad.

R43- Here you go.

R44 thank you!

What was the saddest story to you?

Mine was Swoosie Kurtz and Richard Gere's.

Steve Martin trying to understand his son being gay and contracted AIDS.

R47 It was his brother, who 'swore to his last breath he wasn't gay'

R48 Sorry. I thought it was his son. Regardless, Martin gives a good performance.

They should remake Longtime Companion. As an indictment of Reagan.

Longtime companion is devastating. It’s interesting how understated and natural the performances are - no hysteria. Just so terribly sad.

I love Longtime Companion. I think part of its strength is how close it was made to the decade it covers.

The final scene is iconic.

Also the scene where Bruce Davison tells his dying partner to let go. Oooof. So sad.

Bruce Davison won an Oscar for his performance didn't he?

No, R54. He lost to Joe Pesci for Goodfellas. But Davison was nominated.

[quote] It really needed to be a mini-series. It did a great job with the medical part but the parts with the individual, it fell short. The most affecting parts are those of the men who rented the beach houses and the growing horror as each of them started getting sick.

IIRC, NBC wanted to do a minseries version before HBO got the rights.

I loved the 80s style music and choreography in the Richard Gere scene.

There's a picture of a bald Gaetan Dugas somewhere and I could see how people of the 80s thought he was attractive.

That. Did. Not. Happen, r37.

R59 How can you be so sure?

Sad movie

Great but super sad movie..

I won't watch this film, or Longtime Companion or The Normal Heart. I've seen parts of all of them and recognize their quality but I *lived* through all that once and I won't turn off the TV again because I'm dissolving into tears.

R1 Meet too. I can never get through it without crying. Elton John's lyrics are so poignant and haunting.

The movie was shit compared to the brilliant brilliant book

Book was brilliant, but I think the movie was well done. It was important for more people to access the story.

Is the book worth it? I might give it a listen on Audible.

[R67] yes it is. May take you a long time to listen though it’s quite long.

Nureyev, Perry Ellis, and that soul at 3:45 break my heart.

^sorry, 3:25.^

I lived in the L.A. area when AIDS was starting to spread among gays in the early 80s, but never saw the TV movie as I was working out of country in the 90s, until today, thanks to reading these posts. My emotions started racing through my body and I was tearing up through a good part of the movie. It brought back so many memories of my 30s, worrying about if I might be next. I could feel Matthew Modine’s anxieties and his feeling of despair when trying to move ahead with a program to save lives. Ian McKellen made me feel his pain as AIDS ate away at his body. The whole cast was rooting for us. I’m still coming down from layering my memories on scene after scene. What was happening in my life 40 years ago revisited me.

I’m sorry you had to live through that r71. It makes sense you had somewhat of a PTSD response to the movie. Xo

R72 a lot of us lived through it. And we watched people we loved waste away and die, and we saw celebrities we admired waste away and die. It was horrible. And the government ignored it.

Can’t even imagine R73. I don’t know how you get thru that without developing some sort of PTSD. Your resilience is incredible.

Did early days of covid trigger anything for you?

Nope. Covid was scary in a different way. Quarantining at home, everyone in the same boat was decidedly different. With the AIDS Crisis, we felt isolated. It was ugly.

Could people stop dragging Longtime Fucking Companion into every fucking thread.

You know why it won no Oscars? Because, in spite of how good Bruce Davison is, it’s not a very good movie.

Did you audition for the film and were rejected, R76? That’s an oddly specific rage towards a simple (wonderful, btw) movie.

Simple we agree on.

How good is the book?

Dr. Francis deserves the Presidential Medal of Freedom. I have such respect for that man.

Which Broadway director was Richard Gere's character based on? I'm guessing Michael Bennett.

Yes, R81 Michael Bennett.

R75 I keep seeing Covid epidemic/Aids epidemic comparisons everywhere, usually by people who know nothing of at least one of them. It's very annoying.

I agree, R83. So many people died during the AIDS Epidemic, and for so long it was a subject of shame and no one mentioned it. People died of "pneumonia." or "Cancer." or "Kidney failure" Rudolf Nureyev, Michael Bennett, Perry Ellis, etc.etc.etc. You'd look at some celebrity who was starting to lose weight and who looked "Tired." and you knew. I remember the day vivdly, when Arthur Ashe had his news conference. That whole period was soul-crushing.

People don’t die of AIDS-related illnesses any more, either. People are still getting infected but as long as they can afford meds, it’s a different story. A socioeconomic one.

R71, what an extremely powerful post. Punched me square in the gut.

I, too, was there at the beginning, before we even knew what transmitted it. All we knew was gay men were dying. Was I next (in spite of not being old enough to be sexually active)? Did I have some sort of gay gene that this disease knew about and would get me?

I’m so glad you and me are here.

For those interested, I cannot more highly recommend this documentary which debunks the idea of patient zero, Gaetan Dugas. I found it to be both fascinating and disturbing and very saddening.

From the Youtube description:

The story of the AIDS epidemic and the man accused of starting it.

When a new, deadly virus spreads across North America at an alarming rate, one man is singled out for bringing the disease to the continent.

Spanning the 1970s until today, the story of Gaetan Dugas –aka ‘Patient Zero’ –serves as the perfect microcosm of the evolution of AIDS in America and the country’s response to it.

In the early 1980s, little was known about this global epidemic, except that it seemed to be most prevalent amongst gay men. America was in the grip of fear and uncertainty and, in the scramble for answers, Dugas would become known and vilified as ‘Patient Zero’.

Exploring timely themes about fear, the demonizing of the unknown, and the danger of false narratives, this FadooProductions and Fine Point Films documentary weaves social history and scientific investigation into a poignant story of an individual who became intrinsically and tragically linked with AIDS.

Attached is a link to the Audible version

[quote]The story of the AIDS epidemic and the man accused of starting it.

This again, R87? Who accused him of starting it? He was the key that proved the virus was spread by having sex. He was central to cases in NY, LA and SF. These are facts. What he is accused of is continuing to have sex with others when he knew he was positive. That's the fact. His family and friends continue to frame him as a victim. Fuck them.

R89 - But he didn't [bold]start[/bold] it, which is the point that people here are making.

Whap people?

FOr a cluster of cases he was patient zero.

Patient Zero or Patient "O", it means the epidemiologists were able to tie cases in different cities to him, and those people were tied to other cases in their areas. A lot of people were having a lot of sex, so promiscuity isn't the issue. There were any number of Patient zeroes. Few documented their tricks like he did and he was valuable helping put together the web of cases. That he continued to have unprotected sex with others when he knew he was infected is the issue.

Dugas was pretty much a Typhoid Mary type.

r89 Please see my usage of the word "debunks", thanks.

The predicate for the claim is that Patient Zero is the "one who started it." Patient Zero or "O" in any epidemiology study is one who connects disparate cases. Dugas is still Patient Zero fpr the early clusters identified, just not in the way it was misrepresented.

R18 you know her from Sisters, she played Alex, the oldest, a wealthy, slightly snobish, WASP wife of a plastic surgeon.

I love Swoozie Kurtz, but I didn't care for her in the small blood transfusion patient subplot in this movie.

I'm glad they had that plot point. I didn't care that it was Swoozy. It was an important part of the story.

Oh great, someone mentioned the mediocre Longtime Companion again 🙄

An Early Frost is also a terrific TV film from the early days of the plague. Great writing and acting all around. Quite touching and poignant.

If you haven't read "Borrowed time an AIDS memoir, it's worth checking out.

People really believed a cure was right around the corner and that hope kept them alive so much longer than if they had known the truth. There's a lot of interesting stories in it.

It’s like r11 and all the upvoters complaining about the description of Swoozie Kurtz role as an “innocent woman” didn’t watch the movie. The CDC were searching for an AIDS victim like her, because she was a rich, demure, middle-aged, lily-white wife, someone marketable as an “innocent woman”, “as opposed to those guilty nasty homosexuals who had sex” because she and the babies and the haemophiliacs proved that a virus transmitted through body fluids doesn’t discriminate, while blood banks were more than willing to throw gay men under the bus.

[QUOTE] An Early Frost is also a terrific TV film from the early days of the plague. Great writing and acting all around. Quite touching and poignant.

And Sylvia Sydney plays the grandma!

Thespian Ian Charleson was the first major Brit to die of AIDS. He was in elegant films like Chariots of Fire, Hamlet Prince of Denmark, and Gandhi.

He requested his lawyers to expose the real reason he died.

It was a huge "scandal."

Frank Rich took a different view in the TIMES that year:

“The Band Preened On” (26 September 1993)

If you were lucky enough to escape the hype surrounding this month’s premiere of And the Band Played On, you may not be aware that Richard Gere has been anointed a saint. So have Gere’s costars in this television docudrama, among them Matthew Modine, Steve Martin, Ian McKellen and Lily Tomlin, and so has its maker, HBO. “The politically correct entertainment event of the season” was how Entertainment Weekly described HBO’s celebrity screening in East Hampton. The press (not all of it employed by organs of HBO’s corporate parent, TimeWarner), has canonized the selfless Band players for gutsily bucking Hollywood taboos and making an angry, controversial, political movie about AIDS in which not all of the characters are heterosexual.

It would be gratifying to join the applause of Joan Rivers, Regis Philbin and John Cochran of NBC News — to name a few who endorsed Band in HBO promos. It would be cheering to believe that some brave Hollywood souls have defied the town’s shameful record of silence and denial in shunning the AIDS epidemic onscreen. (Jonathan Demme’s Philadelphia, due in December, is expected to be the first A-list feature film to break the ban.) And it would be exciting if a television movie about AIDS had the same galvanizing effect that And the Band Played On had as a book in 1987. Written by Randy Shilts, the San Francisco Chronicle reporter who heroically pursued the AIDS story before most journalists would touch it, Band played a major role in waking up a nation to the depth of an epidemic and to the ignorance, bigotry and establishment fecklessness that allowed it to course through the world’s veins unchecked.

But that was 1987. HBO’s Band, which looks at the disease from a prophylactic historical distance and loots its source primarily for its epidemiological intrigue, does not plug into the pressing, ever-evolving medical and political AIDS dramas of today. But it is a particularly egregious landmark in the history of bloated media sanctimony. Only by the standards of Hollywood, where donning a bejeweled red ribbon at an awards ceremony counts as a courageous stand, could showing one’s face in a movie as bland, dated and toothless as this one be considered a badge of honor. Only by the standards of, say, NBC Dateline, could Band be considered a victory for social conscience on the tube.

HBO deserves praise, we’re told, because it made the movie after NBC begged off. But HBO would not make Band without stars, which is where Gere’s sainthood comes in. He was the first to sign on. Does that excuse his scant artistic contribution? Gere walks through 2 brief sequences in which he plays a Broadway director-choreographer modeled on Michael Bennett, though a Bennett stripped of all personality and, judging from the idiotic dance rehearsal Gere supervises, all talent. The only time Bennett, who died of AIDS in 1987, has been treated worse by Hollywood was in the film travesty of his masterpiece, A Chorus Line, whose screenwriter happened to be Arnold Schulman, who also wrote the screenplay of And the Band Played On.

After Gere lent his prestige to Band — for lower than his usual fee, of course — everyone wanted to get into the act. As long as acting was not required. Except for Alan Alda, who plays the credit-hogging retrovirologist Robert Gallo, the only major character who is not pious, the movie’s stars behave as if it was enough to show up on the set, reap publicity for their lofty intentions and give performances commensurate with their reduced compensation and generosity of service to a good cause. A particularly outrageous example is the great British actor Ian McKellen, who, in the role of a gay San Francisco politico, Bill Kraus, can’t be bothered to attempt an American accent (Kraus was from Ohio) and contributes a death scene of such narcissistic bathos that Greer Garson might have found it a bit much.

As for the political anger and controversy generated by And the Band Played On, let it be said that the film is fearless in its attacks on the appalling governmental AIDS policies under Ronald Reagan, who has only been out of office for 4½ years. (More recent government AIDS policies, or lack of same, go unmentioned in the printed legends that purport to bring history up to date during the final credits.) Nor does And the Band Played On achieve the goal of introducing a mass television audience to credible gay characters drawn from real life. The only male couple dramatized, Bill Kraus and his domestically-minded young Asian lover, have the relationship of an English don and a houseboy, if not a house plant. Gay men are robbed of their political courage as well as of their sexuality, since the film’s most fiery calls to arms are made by a heterosexual hero, Donald Francis of the Centers for Disease Control (Modine), rather than by the book’s outspoken gay voices (like Kraus, Larry Kramer and Shilts himself).

Shilts is not blameless in the taming of Band. As has been widely reported, he asked that the film’s early cut be shed of some passages featuring supposedly negative stereotypes of homosexuals (whether in drag or at a porno shop). Yet the journalistic power of his book came in part from its objectivity: as much as Shilts indicted the heterosexual establishment for ignoring or bungling the AIDS peril, he also attacked those gay leaders who put “political dogma ahead of the preservation of human life” by fighting against the closure of bathhouses. By muting this history and barely conceding that homosexuals can be as heterogeneous and fallible as any other group, the movie ends up with a gallery of forgettable gay boy scouts.

For those who did not switch channels, And the Band Played On concluded powerfully — with a touching video quilt depicting real AIDS casualties unfiltered through sterile dialogue and self-aggrandizing star turns. But the movie that preceded this tacked-on coda actually had less political guts than the summer’s unpretentious popcorn movies. After all, In the Line of Fire took on the 1993 political establishment by equating fat-cat PAC contributors with Presidential assassins; The Fugitive branded pharmaceutical companies as greedy and murderously criminal on the eve of national debate over the Clinton health-care plan.

“We like to do movies that are about something,” 1 of the high-minded producers of And the Band Played On said in a typical interview. This particular movie is about self-promotion, and about 5 years too late.

Wow

bump

It’s a shame about the Patient Zero confusion distracting from what the book and the film did so well.

Longtime Companion- the previous link at R44 is no good.

Frank Rich has always been a cunt.

R111

Every infectious disease cluster like syphilis or HIV you have a Pt Zero no matter what you call them. You plot this out and it always starts with one person.

The problem with this particular pt zero is that he was painted as The One instead of One Of. Being a Pt Zero has nothing to do with morals good or bad,

What the movie did not show was how many people at cdc Atlanta and cdc located in the states were involved long before the public had any idea something was going on. And they did it with no funding. Just took from other programs and got to work.

Those who imply the US govt especially cdc did nothing can go fuck themselves.