Fighting The Good Fight

By Richard Zoglin

SHOW: AND THE BAND PLAYED ON

TIME: SEPT. 11, 8 P.M. EDT (DEBUT), HBO

THE BOTTOM LINE: Randy Shilts' AIDS chronicle becomes a dramatically coherent but oversimplified TV movie.

And the Band Played On arrives on television trailing storm clouds of controversy. Randy Shilts' 1987 book about the early years of the AIDS crisis was first acquired by NBC, which later dropped the project. HBO picked it up but had trouble finding stars willing to appear in it until Richard Gere led a parade of big names who signed on -- among them Steve Martin, Anjelica Huston, Lily Tomlin, Phil Collins, Ian McKellen and Matthew Modine. Later, director Roger Spottiswoode clashed with HBO over changes made without his approval to tone down the film's portrayal of gays in the promiscuous pre-AIDS era. Added to this was the provocative subject matter: Shilts' harsh critique of the U.S. government and the medical establishment for their slow response to the AIDS crisis.

Yet as the movie nears its debut this weekend, the uproar has settled into a generally respectful buzz. Shilts' prodigiously researched 600-page book has been boiled down to a fact-filled, dramatically coherent, occasionally moving 2 hours and 20 minutes. At a time when most made-for-TV movies have gone tabloid crazy, here is a rare one that tackles a big subject, raises the right issues, fights the good fight. That is both its strength and its weakness.

Screenwriter Arnold Schulman has skillfully pared down Shilts' sprawling narrative, which covers just about everything from the medical detective story to the fight for government attention and funding, from the gay community's reaction to the health crisis to the media's inadequate early coverage of it. The film has a hero: Modine plays Don Francis, a researcher at the Centers for Disease Control who was at the forefront of early work on the disease. He voices most of Shilts' anti-Establishment outrage and gets most of the best lines. "How many people have to die to make it cost-efficient for you people to do something about it?" he shouts at a meeting where the nation's blood banks resist testing blood for AIDS, despite early evidence that the disease is being spread by transfusions.

And there's a juicy villain: Dr. Robert Gallo, the National Cancer Institute researcher who raced furiously against the French to be the first to identify the AIDS virus. As portrayed by Alan Alda, Gallo is a self-glorifying skunk who dreams up publicity releases for himself before he has anything to publicize. "From this day," he muses to an aide after a good day in the lab, "Dr. Robert Gallo makes the first gigantic strides in winning the -- what, the war or the battle? . . ." The characterization is overdone, but the picture of the competitive underside of medical research operations rings true.

Unfortunately, the film cuts too many dramatic corners and shies away from troublesome complexity. Shilts' multifaceted portrait of the gay community, for example, is oversimplified. Though the film depicts the heated fight over closing gay bathhouses in San Francisco, the major homosexual characters are nearly all responsible public servants or saintly victims. Even Gaetan Dugas -- the Canadian flight attendant known as "Patient Zero," whom Shilts identified as a key early spreader of the disease -- is here simply a suave narcissist, not (as Shilts implies) an almost criminally reckless libertine who knowingly spread the disease.

Less controversial details are fuzzed as well. The film opens with a World Health Organization team investigating the Ebola fever outbreak in Zaire in 1976. "It was not AIDS," says the text on the screen, "but it was a warning of things to come." How? One has to go back to the book to learn that the Ebola fever virus is unrelated to AIDS; it was simply an epidemic that, unlike AIDS, was contained.

And so we are faced once again with the Worthiness Problem. And the Band Played On is a film that absolutely needed to be made, ought to be seen, deserves most of the praise sure to come its way. For viewers who know little about what occurred in the early years of the AIDS epidemic, it is an invaluable primer. For those who still harbor hopes that TV movies about important public issues can rise at least to the level of a high school textbook, it will prove a bit disappointing.