We’re going to make the movie about AIDS that should be made.’” The script and Oscar-winning team had no problem attracting stars. Nyswaner recalls pitching the concept to then-Orion Studio head Marc Platt: “His reaction was: ‘Guys, there are ten movies in development right now about AIDS and all of them have a heterosexual main character-that’s immoral. Just a year later, as the movie opened, the death toll had surged to 234,225.ĭemme and his protégé, screenwriter Ron Nyswaner, conceived of the basic story of a gay lawyer with AIDS who sues his high-powered law firm for wrongful termination. Filming for Philadelphia began in October 1992 by the end of that year more than 194,000 people had died from AIDS in the United States. “Everybody knew somebody,” Saxon recalls.
Both were personally inspired to center their next big project on the subject-Demme by the Spanish illustrator Juan Suárez Botas, a close friend who had been diagnosed with AIDS, and Saxon in tribute to his friend Robert Breslo, a writer who was suffering from the disease. Demme and his producing partner Ed Saxon had both just won Oscars for The Silence of the Lambs and were in a position to take a creative risk. Though the industry had lost countless people to AIDS-most famously, Rock Hudson in 1985-there was tremendous reluctance to make a movie about the epidemic, especially one focused on those hardest hit: the gay community. Philadelphia was the first major studio film to face the AIDS crisis head-on. “I’m in the corner looking like I’m talking to someone.” Nearby, Tom Hanks’ character sits alone, anxious for the results of his latest blood work. “Our conference room was made to look like part of a clinic,” says Burns, who was among the mingling “patients” waiting to see a doctor in an early scene. In all, some 50 people with AIDS appeared in the influential courtroom drama, which opened across the country 25 years ago this month. Of them, Burns says, “only one of them is still alive.” Other ActionAIDS clients, the healthier ones, were also immortalized, as extras in Jonathan Demme’s revelatory film Philadelphia. Burns, the executive director of the pioneering health center, which until June 2016 was called ActionAIDS. “These were done by a local artist who would come in and ask our hospice clients if she could paint them,” says Kevin J. They’re all gone now, lives cut short by a plague. These were the early fighters, mostly men, a few women, their faces and thin frames captured in the watercolor portraits hanging in a hallway at Action Wellness in Philadelphia. Tom Hanks (center) won an Oscar for his portrayal of Andrew Beckett, a gay man suffering
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