The Importance of Roger Spottiswoode’s Screen Adaptation...

The Importance of Roger Spottiswoode’s Screen Adaptation of And The Band Played On [1] Hollywood is no longer just a name, it is a business, a living entity holding America’s people in its grasp, and it is not about to let them go. Gradually taking on more responsibility and trying to build up its reputation over the years, Hollywood has progressively assumed the position of history-teller for the American public. This role, whether or not an appropriate one for an industry such as Hollywood to tackle, has catapulted actors and actresses into high paying, high visibility positions. History has and will continue to be one of the main subjects that the movie industry has been fascinated with. It is an alive and very fragile†¦show more content†¦The debate over cinematic history still remains, and it will continue to challenge Hollywood, constantly forcing the industry to make the best possible movies, producing historical epics on the big screen, making history a universal and personable subject. [3] In 1993, a small-time director at HBO Productions thought it was about time that a movie was made discussing the broad, taboo topic of the AIDS epidemic. Roger Spottiswoode was the director, and he took author Randy Shilts’ controversial journal And The Band Played On: Politics, People and the AIDS Epidemic (1987) and turned it into a movie. Spottiswoode took the challenge facing Hollywood straight on and was bold enough to attempt a project that had been passed over and rejected for six years straight. From the beginning to end And The Band Played On was a fight. Spottiswoode fought for HBO to take the project on, and he fought with Hollywood to try to entice actors to participate in it. The fight continued after the release of the cable TV movie, with critics and the public simply not wanting to know or be informed of the truth. [4] With controversy surrounding the production of the movie, the fight seeped into the movie and its evidence in the story. The portrayal of the actors and the fight that each character undergoes is an illustration of the fight that AIDS forced our country to face in the early 1980’s. With Richard Gere’s