Acting in the Time of AIDS : The stark reality of ‘And the Band Played On’is more than enough drama to entice actors

The tragedy of AIDS came to a “terrible arrowhead” for Anjelica Huston the day the Oscar winner reported to work for “And the Band Played On.”

Participating on the HBO film became a “very emotional piece for me,” she relates quietly. “It was on the morning of the death of a dear friend of mine that I went to work. I also had my hairdresser with me, who had been my hairdresser in films for eight years, who told me that day he had AIDS. It was the most heart-wrenching day. I just had the talk with my friend in the trailer before I went on to do this part. I didn’t think I could get through the day. It was tremendously hard.”

For others in the all-star cast, it was an equally difficult and uplifting project. Besides Huston, the film features Matthew Modine, Alan Alda, Richard Gere, Ian McKellen, Phil Collins, Glenne Headly, Swoosie Kurtz, Steve Martin, Lily Tomlin, B.D. Wong and Tcheky Karyo.

The dramatization of Randy Shilts’ best-selling chronicle of the early years of the AIDS epidemic and the small group of people who fought indifference, prejudice, ignorance and politics to battle the deadly virus premieres Saturday.

Huston, who has a cameo as a pediatrician, became involved in the production after she read Arnold Schulman’s script. “It’s obviously a subject that can’t get enough attention,” Huston says.

Directed by Roger Spottiswoode (“Under Fire”), “Band” focuses on the researchers at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control. Modine plays the central figure, Dr. Don Francis, who was asked in the early years of the virus’ appearance to determine what was causing the strange new illness and how to stop it.

What Francis encountered was an enormous wall of indifference. The press wasn’t interested in the “gay disease.” The Reagan White House ignored it. Blood banks refused to admit there was a problem with the blood supply. A segment of the gay community was more concerned with civil rights than staying alive. And scientists squabbled over bragging rights to who isolated the virus first.

The HBO project, which encountered its own share of problems getting off the ground and onto the air, nevertheless found great enthusiasm among participating actors.

“Every actor I know just wanted to be in it,” says Swoosie Kurtz, who plays a wealthy San Francisco woman who contracted AIDS through a blood transfusion. “It’s different than being in the cast of a normal production. I truly would have done a walk-on in this. I would have been an extra.”

Americans, she maintains, “are so adolescent about sex. The entire homosexual community makes them nervous. When you think that it took Rock Hudson’s death in 1985 to kind of start mobilizing the government and the straight people, it says a lot about this country.”

“It’s been much less a political football (in Great Britain) than it’s been in the States,” says Briton Ian McKellen, who plays San Francisco gay rights activist Bill Kraus.

“We look at AIDS in a different way,” McKellen says. “We are slightly protected because of the National Health Service. Anybody needing treatment gets free medical treatment and medication, so much of the continuing distress in the U.S. of people not having adequate insurance has never applied here.”

Whoopi Goldberg was set to play Selma Dritz, the San Francisco public-health official who was determined to convince experts that AIDS was a sexually transmitted disease. When Goldeberg became ill just days before production began, Lily Tomlin offered her services.

“I knew about the project for a long, long time,” Tomlin says. “I like to be part of something important.”

She talked briefly with Dritz, who is now retired. “She was very reserved and dignified,” Tomlin says. “I wish I had the opportunity to have spent time with her. You feel a little bit strange when you have to do someone who is living.”

Tomlin believes that “Band” accurately captures “the competitiveness of the whole research field. I knew about that, but you never see it depicted. The smallness of people withholding information so they can be identified with the discovery. They’re willing to sacrifice anything for that ego. The bureaucracy of the blood banks and the small-mindedness--it’s staggering, actually.”

A number of persons who are HIV-positive and living with AIDS appear in the film and were hired as consultants. ‘The irony was that many people were made up, so you didn’t know who was sick and who wasn’t,” Tomlin says.

“It certainly was unusual to be involved, as a gay man, in a project which was very close to home and to find everybody working on it to be totally supportive,” says Tony Award-winner McKellen (“Amadeus”). “Often, one would be in a situation where the majority of actors in any one scene were gay. There were some people who were ill in the movie who were very concerned to contribute.”

Modine (“Married to the Mob,” “Full Metal Jacket”) acknowledges that he learned a good deal about the virus during the film’s progress, “much to the annoyance of all my friends, because I became this doomsday messenger. All of the research I did, visiting places like UCLA Medical School, all of these articles (I read). As it all starts to pile up and accumulate, it doesn’t look very good. It’s certainly not a virus that discriminates.”

Modine spent time with his real-life counterpart. “He’s great,” Modine says of Francis. “One of the things that he really impressed upon me and Roger Spottiswoode is that he didn’t want to be lionized. It was very important for me that the way he was portrayed was that he was part of a group and he wasn’t out there by himself.”

Tony Award-winner B.D. Wong (“M. Butterfly”), plays Kiko, Bill Kraus’ lover. The set, he acknowledges, was “extremely stressful. The movie was shot in a very short amount of time. But, on the other hand, everybody felt like they were doing something important. We felt like we were something more than working a job.

“I’m no fool in believing in what all of us did, in wanting to be in this movie, was the greatest thing in the world,” Wong says. “But it’s one of the things that an actor can do. You can use your visibility to impress upon people there is something bigger than you. It’s a gift.”

“Band,” Wong believes, also serves as a voice for thousands who are infected with HIV or who have AIDS. “The thing they all have in common is this tremendous frustration. There isn’t a person with HIV who doesn’t express that daily--why does this have to be such a prolonged kind of agony and why can’t we put these tremendous technological minds together to cure this thing?”

Just by participating, Wong feels he was helping speak out on behalf of those living with HIV. “When you are the person with AIDS,” he explains, “it’s much harder for you to be the one who speaks out. It’s more powerful if someone unaffected or not directly affected helps you.”

Pop star Phil Collins, who has a small part as an owner of a San Francisco bathhouse, is proud he’s one of the first performers who told Spottiswoode he wanted to be involved.

“The story was one of those things that it seemed like mini-’J.F.K.,’ inasmuch as in the cover-ups, medically and politically,” Collins says. “I wanted to act more and ... it was great to be in a movie with those people. But just the fact that this went on. As soon as someone says, ‘We are not going to tell people the whole story,’ that’s when my back goes up and I dig my heels in. So I’m only too pleased to be part of the project. The people who are in it--they’re going to make some people who wouldn’t watch a film about AIDS, watch it. I almost see it as a public-information service.”

“Band” even inspired Collins to write a song for his upcoming album. “It’s about how I felt after I read the script and what went on,” Collins says. “I actually met a lady who is a fan of mine, who lives in Vermont. She has AIDS and she wanted to meet me before she died. We spent a few hours down in the studio, just talking together.

“Having done the film, I wrote this song about an imaginary character. It’s a man in the song. One of the lyrics is, ‘If they told the truth. This guy might be here today.’ (AIDS) was just ignored. People thought it would go away, like the blood banks.”

Glenne Headly (“Dick Tracy”), who plays a U.S. government scientist, says the one thing she learned making the film was, “When you start to have a lot of interconnection on a worldwide basis, it has a lot more to do than just with watching CNN.

“It ends up meaning you’re going to have physical contact with countries as well. When people are intercommunicating physically, then they are moving from place to place and they’re going to bring viruses. I knew we didn’t have a cure for AIDS, but I guess I had this misconception we had cures for most of the major diseases. I know other viruses will come up. That’s really scary.

What’s interesting about the movie is that it will show viewers that AIDS is not just a “gay issue,” says French actor Tcheky Kayro (“La Femme Nikita”). Kayro plays Willy Rozenbaum, a Parisian doctor who ran into difficulties with his hospital’s administration when he treated AIDS patients. “It’s more complicated than that,” he says. “When you deviate from the real reason that things are not working, especially in politics, you always focus on minorities. I think it’s good if (audiences) are shocked.”

McKellen hopes “Band” marks a turn in the attitudes of “big business in the entertainment world. There needs to be a constant supply of factional and fictional stories about AIDS. Because a film is on a serious subject, it doesn’t mean it can’t be gripping for an audience. We are living in the time of AIDS. When the history of this part of the 20th Century is written, the judgment will be made: “What did they do about AIDS’ ”?

“I’m glad it got made,” Huston says. “I’m proud to be a part of it. It should be difficult watching. There’s nothing easy about watching people die. It’s a grim time. We have to be able to look at that and accept it for all the bitterness it brings and try to make some change. If we don’t take responsibility, who the hell is going to take responsibility?”