‘Wynne’s Journal’--The Universal Face of AIDS

He’s funny, he’s angry, he’s buoyant, he’s sad and, increasingly, he’s very, very sick. From deep in their sockets, his eyes meet the camera, sometimes defiantly, sometimes darkly.

“This is the face of AIDS,” he says.

And the gaunt face of 47-year-old Paul Wynne.

The media have covered AIDS so expansively that you wonder if there’s anything left to be said. Well, yes, and here it is, some remarkable television called “Paul Wynne’s Journal,” consisting of 18 intimate video essays from an AIDS-ravaged TV reporter now lying gravely ill in a San Francisco hospital.

But no Tammy Bakker tears here. “This is about Paul living,” says his cameraman and old friend Lorne Morrison.

“Paul Wynne’s Journal” comes to KCET Channel 28 tonight, applying bold punctuation to the international AIDS conference under way in San Francisco. KCET is airing the first of these two- to three-minute segments at 11 p.m., preceding the program “Tongues Untied,” and the rest throughout the weekend, mostly in the evening in conjunction with the station’s “Gay Pride Week” programming.

This disjointed scheduling somewhat undermines Wynne’s journal by fracturing its continuity. These amazing little pieces, taped over the last six months, instead should be presented as a block, separated by brief pauses, in which viewers could better monitor the progression of Wynne’s AIDS and his response to it. Jackie Kain, KCET’s director of broadcasting, who was responsible for acquiring the Wynne series, said that she hopes to air it as a unit later.

Meanwhile, credit KCET and Kain with making a smashing decision in having KCET become only the second station to pick up these first 18 segments. The first station was KGO-TV in San Francisco.

Flashback:

An entertainment reporter for KGO in the early 1980s, Wynne was unemployed when diagnosed as having the AIDS virus in 1987. Encouraged by his former KGO colleague Morrison, Wynne went to the ABC-owned station late in 1989 with a proposal that he do a video diary of what it was like to have AIDS. Harry Fuller, then the station’s news director, liked the idea and was supported by general manager Jim Topping. In January, 1990, “Paul Wynne’s Journal” began airing each Thursday on KGO’s 6 p.m. newscast.

The reaction was enormous, and no wonder.

The man on the screen is a scrawny, gangly 6-foot-1, his weight at times down 55 pounds from his former 184 pounds. Only a few peaks of red hair remain atop his head. He is ill. He is weak. But he is showing and telling, often wittily, giving AIDS a universal face by personifying its common denominators with other serious illnesses and even old age. Before our eyes in a matter of weeks, Wynne is getting older and feebler.

The virus has robbed him of many things--his health, his strength, his future--but not his engaging hamminess and sense of humor.

He enters a room with a shopping bag and sets it on a table. It contains an eclectic array of medicine that he calls “Paul’s parade of potions.” Included are prescribed narcotics. “Yuck,” he says. “I’ll never use narcotics again. I’d rather have the pain.” He pauses. “Or so I say now.”

Later he’s in a hospital bed, grimacing at the bland food: “Double portions!”

Wynne’s moods fluctuate broadly. He celebrates compassion, attacks ignorance.

He cites a poll that says 87% of Californians would fear working beside someone with AIDS. He pauses, lowers his eyes, shakes his head, then glowers at the camera. “Dummies!”

He tells a story about two gay men invited to a swanky dinner party replete with fine china and cutlery, only to be segregated at the end of the table in front of paper plates and plastic utensils.

To call Wynne courageous misses the mark, for it’s obvious that he’s doing this as much for himself as for others, that the camera is his transfusion. What’s so striking about his journal is not only the protagonist himself but also his video diary’s great humanity.

Wynne recalls the day he phoned his dad in Oregon with news of his AIDS. “Dad said, ‘We love you.’ He said goodby, hung up, and that was it. No tears, nothing Shakespearean. Simply across a long-distance line, a family in the 1980s, telling what they had to tell.”

We join Wynne at the hospital for his monthly weight check, listen to him grouse about having to make out a will, hear him whimsically plan his own memorial service: A gathering of friends, a tinkly piano behind the voice of Billie Holiday and, he adds, “You understand, by necessity, it’s a no-host bar.”

In a later segment, a frailer, grimmer Wynne faces the camera, his gaze hollower. “I’m very sick, and I’m very weak. My life is very joyless, and I’m very scared.”

Much earlier in the series he had demonstrated the paraphernalia of the advanced AIDS patient--the cane, the steel walker, the wheelchair. Not for him these symbols of surrender, he said then. In the 18th segment, however, the camera pans an object that Wynne acknowledges has, by necessity, become his sole means of conveyance. “So,” he says, “I move into my wheelchair phase.”

That piece was completed only a couple of weeks ago.

The last six segments were unscripted. “They’ve been difficult because Paul just doesn’t have the energy to do set-ups,” said Morrison, who has been behind the camera for each shoot.

“We never know what to expect from week to week,” said Wynne’s producer, David Sampson. “To see him wasting before us has been difficult.”

Ironically, even though the waning star of “Paul Wynne’s Journal” has gained wide national attention for his unique series, little of the journal itself has been seen outside the Bay Area.

“It almost didn’t air here because the sales department was against it,” Sampson said about KGO. “And it’s difficult to syndicate because stations don’t know what do to with it. That speaks to the conventionality of television.”

Then, too, as Wynne’s attorney, Jim Molesky, discovered when he explored the syndication possibilities at the outset of the series, the standard syndication contract is for 13 weeks. “We didn’t know then how long Paul had, so we decided to wait,” he said.

Medical charts of AIDS patients often zigzag. The update on Wynne as of Thursday, according to his colleagues and Molesky, is that he has rallied despite weighing not much more than 100 pounds, but remains hospitalized and fighting for his life.

You wish Paul Wynne and his journal would last indefinitely. While in the hospital this time, he has added two more segments, the last taped Wednesday. But no one knows if there will be more.