Brad Davis’ Film Farewell : ‘Dragons’ Arrives Year After Actor’s AIDS-Related Death

When Brad Davis joined the cast of “The Habitation of Dragons,” a drama about family and politics in a small Texas town, he had been HIV-positive for six years and had already developed some symptoms of AIDS. But nobody involved with the film knew that.

So nobody knew then that the film--which airs tonight at 5, 7 and 9 as part ofcable channel TNT’s “Screenworks” series--would be his last.

“He really didn’t show any signs of being sick while we were making the movie,” said executive producer Michael Brandman. “He was pretty energetic and very much present during anarduous schedule.”

In fact, Brandman said, cast and crew members didn’t find out that Davis was sick until his agent reported that the actor couldn’t show up for the post-production task known as “looping.”

“We thought (Davis) was kidding around with us, because he was one of the great impish, puckish people, and we had all come to love and cherish his humor,” Brandman said. “Within 24 hours, we got a call from his agent that he had died.”

That was a year ago today.

The people who worked on the film, Brandman said, were shocked. He said he later learned that the actor died after the deficiencies in his immune system caused by AIDS left him unable to recover from a simple cold.

Brandman said that because Davis had completed all of his scenes in the film, it was possible to edit and finish without him.

The film was completed last year, but because it is part of a series of TV movies based on the work of playwrights, the cable channel waited until several of the other “Screenworks” projects were completed before putting it on the air, Brandman said. The delay had nothing to do with Davis’ illness or death, he said.

Davis, who was 41 when he died, came to prominence in the 1978 film “Midnight Express” as Billy Hayes, an American youth jailed in Turkey for attempting to smuggle hashish out of that country. He also appeared in “Chariots of Fire,” “A Small Circle of Friends” and “Rosalie Goes Shopping.”

In “The Normal Heart,” he played the lover of a man who died of AIDS, and in German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s film “Querelle,” he played a gay sailor.

After Davis’ death, his widow, free-lance casting director Susan Bluestein, said in an interview with The Times that the actor kept his illness a secret because he feared that he would not be able to work if it were known that he had AIDS.

He was infected, his wife said, during a period of his life when he was addicted to drugs and sharing hypodermic needles.

Davis himself wrote in the draft of a book proposal on his ordeal, “I make my money in a profession that professes to care very much about the fight against AIDS. . . . But in actual fact, if an actor is even rumored to have HIV, he gets no support on an individual basis. He does not work.”

The revelation--after his death--about Davis’ illness rocked Hollywood, a community in which, as Davis noted, many like to think of themselves as compassionate enough to accept people who have AIDS.

But Brandman said that had he known, he would not have hired Davis for the role of George Tollivar in “The Habitation of Dragons”--not because he was afraid of the disease, but because Davis’ condition would have rendered the film uninsurable.

“Had this information been given to us up-front, I think Brad’s paranoia would have been actualized,” Brandman said. “Because there’s no way that even on the short shooting schedule we were on that any insurance company would insure anyone suffering with this disease.”

Without insurance, Brandman said, producers would have no financial protection if any of the actors on a film became incapacitated.

Davis’ situation was tragic, Brandman said, and is faced by other actors who are HIV-positive or have AIDS. Like Davis, he said, these actors “are unable to seek help, knowing that the help that they are seeking would limit, if not altogether remove, any opportunity for being able to work in this (film and television) community.”