TELEVISION : Finally, the Band Will Play : Despite countless hurdles, journalist Randy Shilts’ book about the first five years of AIDS in America will make it to TV screens

The worlds of the real and the unreal, of the near sublime and the almost ridiculous, intersect at random on the set of “And the Band Played On,” HBO’s long-awaited television movie based on journalist Randy Shilts’ landmark 1987 book about the first five years of AIDS in America.

On the sixth floor at California Medical Center in downtown Los Angeles--two floors below the AIDS ward--Matthew Modine and Ian McKellen are rehearsing the movie’s penultimate deathbed scene under the eye of Roger Spottiswoode, the third director since “Band” landed at HBO in 1989.

Modine is playing the movie’s central character, Dr. Don Francis, a retrovirologist who directed laboratory efforts for AIDS research at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. McKellen, the first openly gay man to be knighted in England, is portraying Bill Kraus, a San Francisco gay activist and congressional aide. With the insidious disease affecting his brain, Kraus one minute talks gibberish, the next veers into rapier-sharp wit.

“Who’s President?” Francis asks.

“Kennedy,” Kraus replies.

“It’s Reagan,” Francis says softly.

“Please don’t remind me,” Kraus deadpans. “I’m sick enough already.”

Then, as Francis sums up who should be called to account--”the entire Administration, the people who run the blood banks, the media that wouldn’t print the news until it stopped being only about gay men, the bigots in Congress, the TV evangelists, the scientists who spent their time fighting over credit”--the real-life hospital’s public address system interrupts: “Attention. Code Blue is canceled.”

Which means that rehearsal has to start over--and that, somewhere else in the hospital, a patient in crisis has been revived or has died.

Also on the set this day are several dozen extras, there to play AIDS patients. Not all are acting: Some, like Harold Martin, are HIV-positive; others have full-blown AIDS.

“The last three weeks, I spent every day and every night crying because I lost five friends to the disease,” Martin, 43, confides in a soft Arkansas accent during a break. “I really don’t have any friends left. The two that are sick now are the last two I’ve known over a period of time.”

Martin, who got on “Band” through the service organization Being Alive and the West Hollywood Health Clinic, has purplish spots on his scalp, a sign of Kaposi’s sarcoma, a cancer that afflicts many AIDS patients. Makeup? a visitor asks tentatively. “I hope so,” he says, laughing.

This is the production that Bill Mannion, chairman of the Shanti Foundation, visited to give a course he calls “AIDS 101.” Some of the crew had “concerns, realistic concerns,” he relates. “ ‘What happens if someone bleeds on a costume?’ I explained normal detergents would kill the virus. Soap and water.”

Now in post-production and tentatively scheduled for a September debut, “And the Band Played On: Politics, People and the AIDS Epidemic” has taken longer to get to the TV screen than for Shilts--a gay writer on the San Francisco Chronicle, the first reporter in the nation to cover AIDS full time--to write the epic 630-page bestseller.

In February, Shilts, 41, disclosed he has AIDS. “I want to talk about it myself rather than have somebody else talk,” he told the Chronicle. He learned he was HIV-positive in March, 1987--”The day that I pulled the last sheet from the typewriter of ‘And the Band Played On,’ I got the test results.”

The book had taken Shilts four years.

Aaron Spelling, the veteran producer, read it almost immediately upon publication that fall, met with Shilts and got permission to pitch it to television. Under exclusive contract to ABC at the time, he took it there--and was turned down. “It wasn’t a sure blockbuster,” he explained.

Producer Edgar Scherick then picked up the rights and took “Band” to NBC, where it languished for two years before quietly being dropped. There were rumblings that network officials got cold feet because of the project’s “gay content”--many advertisers had shown themselves unwilling to support programming about homosexuals--but NBC said it was simply “the complex nature of the book” that influenced the decision.

Spelling obtained the rights again and approached Richard Cooper, senior vice president for HBO Pictures, deducing that he would have better luck at the pay-TV company because it is not subject to pressure from advertisers.

“The day the project was dropped is the day we picked it up--immediately,” says Cooper, who saw it then as dramatic “in that it has a ticking clock,” as a medical thriller and as having something to say. “How does society cope with a huge crisis? Or not cope?”

And, Cooper says today, it is also “a great David and Goliath drama: little Don Francis and little Bill Kraus fighting every group, constituency, agency and being rejected.”

Screenwriter Arnold Schulman (“Tucker: The Man and His Dream”) was hired and wound up writing an astonishing 17 drafts. “I never though it’d get made,” he says now, laughing. The sweep and complexity of Shilts’ book--the $7-million docudrama has more than 100 characters--were not his only hurdles. With the director changes, he kept getting new bosses, “each one with a completely different point of view.” There were also constant legal reviews, questions of political correctness and a steady stream of critiques from Shilts.

Joel Schumacher (“Dying Young,” “Flatliners”) was the first director on “Band.” He was hired in April, 1991, and lasted six months before deciding that AIDS was too important to present as docudrama, as “fiction,” envisioning instead a documentary like PBS’ “The Civil War.”

Next came Richard Pearce (“The Long Walk Home,” ABC’s “The Final Days”), who worked intensively with Schulman for three months before leaving to do “Leap of Faith” for Paramount. Finally, last August, Spottiswoode (“Under Fire,” “Shoot to Kill”) stepped into the breach.

“When Dick Pearce left, I moved in quickly,” Spottiswoode said over lunch at L.A. Farm at Skywalker Sound. “I knew it was out there; I knew the book. It’s an absolutely fascinating subject. A dramatic detective story, a story about politics, a morality tale about how we all behaved and whether we behaved properly, which I don’t think we did. . . . We all have to accept some responsibility for the fact that for the first five years people in this country believed that for some reason this was a gay plague, that it was brought about by gay people, that it was their problem and that somehow it would go away.”

Because of the delays, coming on top of the project’s two-year history at NBC, HBO found itself under the media’s microscope.

“Every draft, every time we made a move,” Cooper recalls, “people said, ‘ Ach , this will never get made.’ It was like it was too hot a potato. I felt I was the hot potato.”

March, 1991. Cooper, Spelling and two of their associates--Marcia Basichis, vice president at Spelling Productions, and Richard Waltzer, vice president at HBO--meet in a windowless room at Creative Artists Agency in Beverly Hills to discuss prospects for director and lead actor.

They are thinking big. From the outset, they have been determined to get star power, to offset any reluctance that some viewers might have about AIDS and the movie’s predominantly compassionate portrayal of the plight of the gay community.

Spelling is delivering one-liners, joking about a rival agency’s defections to CAA--”It has more defections than the Iraqi army.” But Cooper seizes the moment:

“We’re gathered here today to see how we’re going to make this an event. . . . Jessica Lange just signed with CBS to do a ‘Hallmark.’ That’s where our sights should be.”

Director names come up. Jonathan Kaplan. Mark Rydell. Sidney Lumet. “What about Brian De Palma?” Cooper asks. “He’s just had (“The Bonfire of the Vanities”). He might be looking for something big. He can make something work in terms of suspense.”

John Erman, who directed “An Early Frost,” the groundbreaking 1985 TV movie on AIDS, is mentioned; so are John Badham and Joel Schumacher. “Schumacher would attract the Julia Roberts-type person,” Spelling says. Suddenly a brainstorm. “It might be very interesting to have a woman on this project,” he adds. “Don’t laugh at me, but Penny Marshall would love it.”

They segue to actors: Richard Dreyfuss, Jeff Bridges, Michael Douglas, Harrison Ford. “Not a chance,” Basichis says of Ford. “He’s got three movies lined up.”

Cooper says he spoke about Richard Gere to his agent, Ed Limato, at International Creative Management. Spelling shrugs. “My opinion is he’s not going to want to do this project. Some will run to it; some won’t.”

William Hurt: “Marvelous,” says Spelling. “Great,” says Cooper.

“You get Nick Nolte,” Spelling says, “and people will be flocking to HBO movies.”

“Aren’t they already flocking?” Cooper asks.

It was Schulman who decided to spotlight Francis, age 38 in 1981 when he is introduced by Shilts as being “among the handful of epidemiologists (at the Centers for Disease Control) who literally wiped smallpox off the face of the Earth in the 1970s.” Yet Francis does not appear until Page 73.

” I made him the hero,” says the screenwriter, “because here’s a man who had no other agenda. He worked in the field. If you want to stop an epidemic, you do this, this and this. And people’s toes get stepped on--’Too bad; we’re here to save lives.’ And suddenly he gets into this situation.”

Shilts had already stipulated in his “deal memo” with HBO that the handsome young French Canadian airline steward Gaetan Dugas--better known as “Patient Zero” because at least 40 of the first 248 gay men found to have AIDS in the United States either had had sex with Dugas or with someone else who had had sex with him--not be “a major plot line.”

Schumacher’s arrival brought the first major change. Meeting at HBO in July, 1991, with Basichis and Waltzer, the lanky director with a Lincolnesque face explained: “Don Francis will still be the leading character, still have the most screen time, but (CDC epidemiologist) Mary Guinan, (public health official) Selma Dritz, Bill Kraus, the French doctors, (scientist Robert) Gallo will be developed a little more so there’s more of an overall view--not the Don Francis story--which I know you’re all in agreement (on).

“And I really want to build up the Bill Kraus side of it. His death is one of the great pieces of writing in the script. But he needs more of a setup. He’s perfect because he did the work for Harvey Milk (the gay San Francisco supervisor who was assassinated in 1978). He was political, active, but also balanced; he wasn’t extreme on any level.”

As Schumacher sketched, you could hear documentary begin to overtake docudrama. Whereas Shilts had wrapped his book around the death of Rock Hudson in 1985, Schumacher was talking about wrapping the movie around Ryan White, the 18-year-old hemophiliac who died in 1990. “When this innocent child died, I think everybody realized (AIDS) was something that could come into your own home,” the director said.

As Warren Beatty did with “Reds,” Schumacher wanted a few “talking heads or witnesses, perhaps asking people on the street, ‘When did you become aware of this?’ ”

By August, Schumacher was talking about making the “ ‘War and Peace’ of AIDS.” In September, however, he and HBO parted company. For Schumacher, who went off to film “Falling Down” for Warner Bros., the straw on the camel’s back was finding out that Don Francis and Bill Kraus--whose deathbed scene was so pivotal to the movie--had never met. “I didn’t feel the first 10 years of AIDS on the planet needed added drama,” he says today in reflection.

HBO already had planned to begin filming Oct. 22 in Atlanta, although no one had been cast yet. They had to cancel.

“I’ve never had an experience like that,” Cooper said recently. “In the middle of a process, (Schumacher) walked in and said, ‘One change, Bob. Let’s not make this a drama; let’s make it a documentary.’ It’s like saying to a guy who makes cars, ‘Now we’ll make airplanes.’ ”

Spottiswoode did not share Schumacher’s reservations about the docudrama form. “I don’t think you should lie,” he said. “I don’t think you should attack somebody who shouldn’t be attacked. And I don’t think you should intentionally portray a falsehood. However, to portray what you hope is the truth, you sometimes have to (alter) for clarity’s sake, for dramatic purposes. There are times you have to take certain liberties with details.”

As for Kraus and Francis never meeting, Spottiswoode argues: “If one character met somebody like another character and it doesn’t substantially change the history of the piece, I find that acceptable.”

As it turned out, Spelling was wrong. Gere was the first actor on board.

Spottiswoode and Shilts caught up with him at an AIDS benefit in San Francisco last September--18 months after that initial casting session.

“And they beseeched me,” Gere recalled, noting that they told him the project needed major names and was having trouble getting them. “There wasn’t really a part in there for me,” Gere said he told them after reading the script. He was already booked, but he would consider a cameo. So Spottiswoode expanded the role of a fictional choreographer, presumably meant to be Michael Bennett (“A Chorus Line”), who died of complications of AIDS in 1987.

“Everyone was waiting to see who would be the first person to come in,” Spelling noted. “You’re a big star and we go to you. Your agent would say, ‘Let’s see who else you get.’ So it became a gigantic jigsaw puzzle.”

Other stars fell into place: Alan Alda as Dr. Robert Gallo, the controversial American co-discoverer of the AIDS virus whose claims put him into conflict with French doctors at the Pasteur Institute; Anjelica Huston as Dr. R. Ammann, a pediatric immunologist, among the first to locate the AIDS virus in infants, proving the disease was not confined to gays (in Shilts’ book, he is Dr. Art Ammann); Steve Martin as the brother of a closet homosexual who died of complications of AIDS; Tony winner B. D. Wong (“M. Butterfly”) as Kico Govantes, a San Francisco artist who was Kraus’ lover, and Grammy winner Phil Collins as a bathhouse owner.

Also, Glenne Headly (“Lonesome Dove”) as the CDC’s Dr. Mary Guinan; David Dukes (“Sisters,” “The Josephine Baker Story”) as Dr. Mervyn Silverman, director of the San Francisco Department of Public Health, a liberal who yearned to please and got tangled in the political swamp of what to do about the gay bathhouses--to some, the symbol of their liberation; Swoosie Kurtz (“Sisters”) as Mary Richards Johnstone, a well-heeled, middle-aged woman who contracts AIDS through a tainted blood transfusion; performance artist Michael Kearns, who is openly gay and HIV-positive, as San Francisco gay activist Cleve Jones, and Stephen Spinella (“Angels in America”) as Brandy Alexander, a transvestite impersonator, one of the earliest victims of the disease.

Unlike Schumacher, who kept scrapbooks of the real personalities to match them to actors, physical resemblance didn’t matter to Spottiswoode. He hired Whoopi Goldberg to play Dr. Selma Dritz, assistant director of the Bureau of Communicable Disease Control for San Francisco’s Department of Public Health--a white woman. “She’s a strong, opinionated, powerful person (who would have played) exactly that kind of a character,” he said. “Color, I thought, was a kind of detail.” Goldberg later got pneumonia, however, and was replaced by Lily Tomlin.

Modine (“Memphis Belle”) came through ICM--as did Gere and Huston--the agency Spottiswoode particularly credits for moving the project forward. Modine was easy for him. “I called him up. He used to be a neighbor on North Beverly Drive. He lived two doors away.”

For Modine, the movie has a certain resonance: “When I moved to New York, I was a chef in a restaurant, and to the best of my knowledge all the waiters are dead. They were some of the first to go before they called it gay-related immune deficiency. They died of colds? That was in ‘79-’80-’81. If we think of ourselves as tribes, there’s a tribe of media people, a tribe of hospital people, a tribe of businessmen. Well, my tribe, the artistic tribe--actors, dancers and jugglers and storytellers--they’ve been decimated.”

As for Gere, he had no qualms playing gay. When an interviewer suggested he might have been particularly brave in taking on the choreographer role in the wake of tabloid speculation about his sexual orientation, Gere replied deliberately: “No, not at all. As you know and I know, there is nothing wrong with being gay. Now if you start with that premise, the rest is all kid stuff and silliness, isn’t it?”

In mid-movie, there is a line that encapsulates the core of Shilts’ book: “You know damn well if this epidemic were killing grandmothers, virgins and four-star generals instead of gay men, you’d have an army of investigators out there,” says Dr. Marc Conant, a dermatologist at UC San Francisco.

At first, Conant (Richard Jenkins)--as key a figure as Francis in Shilts’ book--wasn’t in the script.

Richard Rothenstein, 35, a former HBO publicist who has AIDS and is a consultant on “Band,” said that the final version is “a whole transformation, a whole different script.” He remembers, for example, that a prominent character early on was Don Francis’ wife--”and there was no real reason to make this a sitcom, a domestic story.”

An actor who saw an early script and does not wish to be named agrees: “I felt they had taken this heterosexual doctor at home, his marriage falling apart, and made that much more important than people dying with AIDS. We’re supposed to be crying over this straight doctor, and meanwhile people are dropping like flies around him?”

The wife role was whittled down, screenwriter Schulman said, until Pearce “pointed out that since nobody else’s wife was in it, she was like Sissy Spacek (who played Jim Garrison’s wife) in ‘JFK.’ She had no real function other than to be the neglected wife. I recognized it was out of proportion.”

Rothenstein also protested a line of Swoosie Kurtz’s Mrs. Johnstone, who, after discovering she got AIDS from a blood transfusion during heart surgery, says: “And I didn’t even have any fun getting it.” But the line came from Shilts’ book, and it stayed.

Schulman, who lives just down the hill from the old Rock Hudson mansion, went well beyond Shilts’ book in his research. He spent a week in San Francisco with Francis, now a health and science consultant, and had frequent phone conversations with him thereafter.

He interviewed key Centers for Disease Control doctors. He read later books about AIDS, including Dominique Lapierre’s “Beyond Love.” Schulman also studied John Crewdson’s 50,000-word investigatory report in 1989 in the Chicago Tribune about Gallo, which triggered a federal investigation. The federal report, released Dec. 30, said the National Cancer Institute scientist had committed scientific misconduct, concluding that he had “falsely reported” a key fact in a 1984 scientific paper about isolating the AIDS virus. (Gallo calls the report “utterly unwarranted.”)

Shilts--whose new book, “Conduct Unbecoming: Gays and Lesbians in the U.S. Military,” will be out April 14--became Schulman’s contact point for the gay community.

On Sept. 1, 1992, commenting on the 12th draft, Shilts wrote Schulman that while it was “coming closer and closer . . . the script still suffers from the ‘Mississippi Burning’ problem in that it tells the story wholly from the perspective of the CDC, and the gay people are all extras. Except for Bill Kraus. . . . I love (impersonator) Brandy Alexander.”

On Sept. 28, commenting on the 14th draft, Shilts said it was “a vast improvement” but he was still not sure Kraus was “three-dimensional,” while his lover, Govantes, “seems too much like Sissy Spacek in ‘JFK’. . . . I think it is important before we go to the bathhouses and see Gaetan (that) we have someone say that most gays are not promiscuous and this represents an extreme sub-group.”

It was “crucial,” Shilts added, to have “a couple of scenes that offer a balanced, accurate and positive” portrayal of gays, “like buddy program volunteering and stuff.”

Most of Shilts’ points were accommodated; “Band” now has two references to a buddy program. Shilts, unavailable for interviews recently, said through his assistant, Linda Alband, that he is “almost completely satisfied” with the script, except for a few minor things.

At a glance, one might surmise that the long journey from book to movie might have drained some controversial punch. After all, the Reagan Administration is long gone; the blood banks have been cleaned up.

Yet here is Ian McKellen as Bill Kraus, testifying before the platform committee at the 1980 Democratic National Convention, the lines taken from the actual event. “The gay rights plank I am asking to be included does not ask you to give us special privileges”--precisely the argument used by gay-rights advocates in trying to defeat Colorado’s Amendment 2 last year, which banned gay rights statutes. The matter is now in the courts.

Meanwhile, the numbers keep piling up. The AIDS body count, or “butcher’s bill,” is the grim thread running through Shilts’ book. In July, 1985, the month the world learned that Rock Hudson had AIDS, the number of Americans with AIDS had surpassed 12,000 and the toll of dead was 6,079. Through the end of 1992, the Centers for Disease Control reported that 244,939 people in the United States had contracted AIDS, of whom 171,890 had died.

His deathbed scene done, McKellen is unwinding in his trailer in the lot across from California Medical Center. He recalled his friend Ian Charleson, the Scottish actor who co-starred in “Chariots of Fire” and died of complications of AIDS in 1990. “I saw (him) in his last performance as Hamlet at the National Theatre, about two or three months before he died.

“I was a bit nervous about doing this today but, you know, acting is acting. I remember Ian when he was very weak at the end, putting all his energies into his body, sometimes very bright, and (other) times going away from you. . . . You know, you (wear the makeup) of the disease Kaposi’s sarcoma, and it’s just a bit of plastic. And just across the ward there are people who are marked for life, and now facing the possibility of dying. That’s when acting and life come right up close against each other.”