GLR May-June 2024

ESSAY

The Making of Longtime Companion F RANK R IZZO

I N THE LATE 1980s, getting a motion picture made about LGBT people that didn’t cast them as villains, psychos, or freaks was a momentous challenge. A main stream feature film about a group of gay men dealing— and dying—in the midst of the AIDS epidemic was nearly impossible. While there had been a TV movie that dealt with the plague (Ron Cowen’s An Early Frost in 1985), as well as some stage plays—William F. Hoffman’s As Is in 1985, Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart in 1985, and Har vey Fierstein’s Safe Sex in 1987 among them—there were no major films dealing with the epidemic from a gay point of view. Beyond the commercial risks, the times were fraught with fear mongering, misinformation, and demonization of the LGBT community from conservative politicians and televangelists, and there was seemingly no end to the attacks in sight. However, a number of filmmakers and artists were deter mined to tell a compassionate story about a particular group of

which he received a Tony Award nomination. How this collaboration came about is a story that I investi gated in 1989 in my capacity as a theater critic and freelance journalist, which included interviews with producers Stan Wlodkowski and Lindsay Law when the movie came out. To write this article, I reconnected with screenwriter Craig Lucas and actor Mark Lamos (who played Sean), who reflected upon the sequence of events leading up to Longtime Companion ’s re lease. In what follows, quotations from these individuals refer to these interviews. § C RAIG L UCAS HAD ATTRACTED studio interest when his 1984 Off Broadway drama Blue Window played in Los Angeles. “They asked what I wanted to do next,” Lucas told Entertainment Weekly at the time, “and, naïve me, said I wanted to make a movie about people with AIDS.” Lucas said the Hollywood welcome mats were quickly rolled up, and he returned to New York empty-handed. “[Norman] and I were trying to put on screen what we were not seeing: the lives of a certain group of gay men who were not particularly ex otic or extreme who were not pathetic, self-pitying or self-loathing.” Lindsay Law was the executive producer of Ameri can Playhouse , public television’s drama anthology se ries, which produced the TV version of Blue Window in 1987. Law also asked Lucas what he would like to do next, and when Lucas brought up AIDS again, “the blood drained from his face,” Lucas recalled. But the producer called back and said: “Why not?” “It was a feat of as tounding courage,” said Lucas. The writer’s first draft was set in Vermont and titled “Carolina Moon.” But halfway through, he realized it wasn’t the right setting—and started over, relocating the narrative to New York, at the gay summer enclave of Fire Island, for a particular group of white upper-mid dle-class men living in the city. Their happy everyday lives change dramatically in 1981 when, at the beginning of the film, they read the first account of a “gay cancer” in The New York Times . The film then follows these men—and three particular couples—over eight years. (The film’s title was a eu phemism used by newspapers in obituaries for partners of gay men and lesbians.) To research the epidemic, Lucas became a counselor at New York City’s Gay Men’s Health Crisis. He joined a support group for other counselors and consulted with them on the screenplay. Once Lucas had completed a draft of the script, he and Law sought funding for the film. Lucas remembered “one very well known producer-distributor, and when we said we had a script about gay people with AIDS, he said: ‘Don’t say another word.

A scene set on Fire Island from Longtime Companion .

men that was dealing with the devastation of the epidemic with grace, grit, and love. Longtime Companion , which is now seen as a watershed in LGBT culture and one of the few films to deal directly with the AIDS epidemic from a gay perspective, began with an idea by Craig Lucas, a playwright known at the time for his award-winning Off-Broadway’s play Reckless , and his longtime director Norman René. Lucas would later go on to write the Broadway hit Prelude to a Kiss (which was made into a film starring Meg Ryan and Alec Baldwin), the musicals An American in Paris , Amélie , and The Light in the Piazza , for Frank Rizzo is a theater writer and critic for Variety and a freelance journalist based in New York City and New Haven.

TheG & LR

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