Manuel is working his way through all the LGBT-themed films & miniseries produced and distributed by HBO.
Last week we looked at the quietly touching film Tidy Endings (1988), written and starring Harvey Fierstein and a must-see for Stockard Channing completists. We’re not going far this week, since much of HBO’s early LGBT output tried to grapple with the AIDS epidemic that had dominated the cultural conversation about gay men in the 1980s.
Did you know that films produced by HBO have won over 20 Oscars? This past year alone, HBO dominated both documentary categories with Citizenfour and Crisis Hotline: Veterans Press 1 emerging victorious. It has been a stealth awards run which Sheila Nevins (currently the president of HBO Documentary Films but her involvement stretches back to 1979) has all but nurtured herself.
There’s an entire history to be written about Rob Epstein’s cinematic contributions to American LGBT history on screen. From his involvement in Peter Adair’s Word is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives (1977) to his Oscar winning documentaries (The Times of Harvey Milk (1984) and Common Threads) and his seminal The Celluloid Closet (1995), Epstein (alongside Jeffrey Friedman from Common Threads onwards) has long been a vital force in increasing the visibility and representability of American sexuality, a commitment he’s intent on pursuing even as he and Friedman move into narrative features (as Howl and Lovelace attest). If you want to read a more in-depth talk about Oscar & LGBT docs, I cannot recommend this conversation between Glenn and Daniel enough.
Common Threads is based on the AIDS quilt project, and follows five individual stories of people who have panels memorializing them on it. Much like the quilt itself, the film is at once a personal and intimate memorial as well as a broader cultural symbol of the lives lost to the epidemic. The lives presented on screen showcase the various risk groups which shouldered the brunt of the early epidemic: in addition to gay men (Dr. Tom Waddell, David C. Campbell and his lover Tracy Torrey, and Jeffrey Sevcik - whose story is told by film historian Vito Russo who succumbed to the disease a year later), the film features the story of David Mandell Jr, a young hemophiliac and Robert Perryman, a straight African-American man who’d been an intravenous drug user. Like the NAMES project, Common Threads is touching in its cumulative effect.
Hearing family members and lovers reminisce about those taken by the virus is made harder (cruel even, in the way raw stories of grief need to be) by the repetition which structures the film: we hear of the sudden diagnosis, the lack of information, the futile battle with a disease no one knew (or cared) much about, and then of course, the death. Russo recalls being visited by Jeff’s ghostly presence while on a flight, Perryman’s wife holds back tears as she remembers refusing to visit her husband on the eve of his death fearing her fever would worsen his state. These stories of sadness and grief and anger recur and echo throughout the film, perhaps most explicitly in Tracy Torrey’s segments which are relayed by his lover David who finds himself afflicted with the virus and takes it onto himself to create his own quilt panel. Not even the film’s interlocutors are safe from the AIDS battle they helped to chronicle.
Governors Island in 2014. Can you spot the detail that my camera inadvertently caught, making this a touching image of that summer morning?
Last summer I got the chance to visit the quilt as it was unspooled over Governors Island. Seeing it in person was cathartic, enraging, inspiring and saddening all at the same time. What struck me then (and what struck me as I revisited Common Threads for this week) is the way art had become for the various people who chose to create these intricate panels, in the words of Sallie Perryman a “healing force.” Epstein and Friedman’s film, by choosing a rather unfussy style that focuses on the stories themselves (using Dustin Hoffman sparingly to offer some historical context and helpful statistics) takes inspiration from the quilt: Every panel tells a story. Every name is a life. And the film, with its emphasis on first-person storytelling paired with stock footage and family videos, stealthily builds on the personal narratives to offer a heartfelt indictment of the Reagan administration inaction even as it remains wholly focused on the lives lost.
It's always struck me that the most incisive and necessary cinematic portrayals of the LGBT community in the 70s and 80s were coming from the documentary field and Common Threads is no exception. Have any of you caught this landmark documentary? Does its urgency feel palpable still or has it become a historical time-capsule?
Next week: We make our first visit to one of HBO’s favorite genres - the biopic! - to see James Woods as Roy Cohn in Citizen Cohn (1992) (available here), an infamous political figure that was concurrently being immortalized in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America plays.
You'd think this would be on HBO Go.
BD -- i don't understand HBO GO's resasonings behind only making some of their archives available. It'd be such a bold frontier if any of their original programming (since they own it) were always available. I can undersatnd with features that they just license to show but their own original programming is a different matter.
Manuel -- great point about art being a healing force. That seems especially true of the AIDS crisis, so many sick artists were doing incredible work. A desperate defiance or a life-extending catharsis who knows.
This movie really isn't easy to find. It's not available from Netflix or iTunes. You can't even buy a DVD from Amazon. I'm glad my library has it!
What a powerful document this is. Each story is so simply told and yet so powerful and by the end it is truly a gut punch of a viewing experience but an essential one. I can't remember where I saw it. I think it might have been PBS since I've never had HBO but it is so worth any trouble it might be to find.
I haven't seen it. To be honest, I've been avoiding it for decades. I feel it's time now, but when I hear the soundtrack I literally shrink.