Why TV Tackles AIDS and the Movies Don’t

Television has plunged in where feature film fears to tread. Almost every episodic series, sitcom and soap opera has tackled AIDS. And the subject has taken its place alongside child abuse, wife battering and abortion as fodder for movies of the week.

As far back as 1985, NBC’s “An Early Frost” brought AIDS’ grim reality into the living room. ABC’s “Rock Hudson” and “The Ryan White Story” (about the teen-aged hemophiliac who succumbed to the disease on April 8) have helped keep the issue alive. More recently, public television weighed in with American Playhouse’s poignant “Andre’s Mother”--the story of a woman whose son has died of AIDS complications, in deep denial about his homosexuality. Written by Terrence McNally, it starred Richard Thomas and Sada Thompson.

Why the difference between the two media? “TV can develop relatively quickly and, weirdly enough, controversial concepts are marketable,” says David Hoberman, a former TV executive and now president of Touchstone Pictures. “You can promote the hell out of them through commercials. You’re also sure of reaching a lot more people. We could make an AIDS movie and 12 people could come.”

Director/producer Robert Greenwald, currently producing “Our Sons” (an AIDS movie for ABC), concurs. “There are certain subjects that you’d turn on a knob to see, but for which you wouldn’t go out and pay $7.”

CAA agent Bill Haber, whose “best friend on Earth” died of AIDS five years ago, says that the need for material and basic economics also come into play. “Because there are about 130 TV movies a year, it’s pragmatically easier to get a subject like this on the air,” he notes. “And since you can do a TV movie for $2.5 million, as opposed to a feature film which costs at least $15 million to produce and release, it makes for less caution. The gamble is greatly reduced. I’m real proud of TV’s track record.”

Yet TV, too, has some distance to travel. Many of its AIDS programs have focused on “innocent victims” rather than confronting the homosexual element head-on. “Of the number of scripts commissioned, how many deal with AIDS among gays?” wonders Greenwald. “Kids, mothers, transfusions--every conceivable permutation but the predominant reality.”

Says playwright William Hoffman: “Little Ryan White is rightly considered a hero. But I know 10 gay Ryans . . . any one of whom could be the subject of a movie.”

In those gay-themed AIDS projects that do emerge, the networks still dilute the reality. Whereas “Longtime Companion” (opening in theaters and then airing next season on PBS) treats gay sexuality and affection as a fact of life, physical contact between men was virtually taboo in “An Early Frost” and “Rock Hudson.”

“There’s a certain fear of anyone stepping away from the straight and normal,” says John Erman, the director of “An Early Frost.” “More than ever, we’re swerving back toward Victorian ethics. . . . Everyone was petrified of portraying a gay couple in any way positively.”

On balance, however, the track record is good. “TV’s treatment of gays is highly political--right off the headlines,” says author and critic Vito Russo. “It has brought the issue of gay rights into the home, educating Middle America in a way that movies never did.”