Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt

Reviews

THE NEW YORK TIMES : WORD AND IMAGE
 TUESDAY, OCTOBER 24, 1989
 Review/Television

AIDS Quilt and the Stories Behind Its Symbols
 By John J. O’Connor

As of this past summer, the number of deaths among Americans with AIDS rose to more than 59,000, higher than the total fatalities in the Vietnam War. Yet the vast majority of people with AIDS remain virtually invisible on prime-time television. There is one obvious reason. The groups most affected so far, male homosexuals and drug users, are considered by many to be social outsiders. Compassion is clearly at a premium. A not-so-benign neglect has been the general rule.

Emerging from that sorry context, Home Box Office’s “Common Threads; Stories from the Quilt,” being presented tonight at 10, is all the more impressive as a singularly moving and sympathetic account of people whose lives have bee profoundly altered, or cut short, by AIDS. The 75-minute documentary slams through stereotypes to tell the stories of several individuals- a one-time Olympic decathlon star, a former drug user, a United States Navy commander and his lover, a boy with hemophilia, a New York writer. They and all the other people with AIDS are referred to simply, and pointedly as Americans. Dustin Hoffman is the narrator. Bobby McFerrin composed the original and unobtrusively effective score.

Directed by Rob Epstein (“The Times of Harvey Milk”) and Jeffrey Friedman- who are also the producers along with Bill Couturie (HBO’s “Dear America: Letters Home From Vietnam”)- “Common Threads” takes its five personal profiles from the AIDS Memorial Quilt, started in 1987 by the Names Project in San Francisco to provide a positive means of expression for those whose lives are touched by the epidemic. The quilt is made up of 3-by-6-foot panels, each commemorating an AIDS death. Today the 16-ton patch-work contains 10,500 panels capable of covering 14 acres.

On one level, “Common Threads” is a compact yet thorough history of the AIDS phenomenon, reaching back to 1981 news reports referring almost casually to a new cancer appearing in gay men. The toll for that year was 335 Americans dead. The story recounts several years of official inaction that, even more so in retrospect, could be seen as bordering on criminal negligence. The villains range from Ronald Reagan and his assistant Gary Bauer to Eddie Murphy with his insensitive comedy routines about gays and AIDS. A national debate about AIDS finally got under way in the seventh year. The heroes include Surgeon General C. Everett Koop and Adm. James D. Watkins, who, after an investigation by a Presidential commission that he headed, concluded that “the system, for whatever reason has failed.”

The emotional core of this film, however, is the biographies. The lives of the already dead are reconstructed through photographs and reminiscences by loved ones. The living, several of whom have tested positive for antibodies to the AIDS virus, speak candidly, even graphically about their experiences. Slowly, carefully, powerfully, “Common Threads” takes the cold statistics and gives them very recognizable faces. Very few viewers are likely to be unmoved.

There are estimated to be more than 10 million cases of AIDS world-wide. One new case is registered every minute. There is an AIDS related death every 30 minutes. “Common Threads” offers no false comfort but its underlying message is important: There is no longer any excuse for keeping tens of thousands of American invisible on the prime-time landscape. They, too, have stories worth telling.

People Magazine WEEKLY October 16, 1989
PICKS & PANS
By Alan Carter

As powerful and moving a documentary as you will ever see, Common Threads looks at the making of the AIDS Quilt- the amalgam of individual memorial quilts (now as big as 11 football fields) designed and sewn since 1987 by the loved ones of people who died of AIDS. Friends, lovers and family recall their lost lovers, sons, brothers, fathers, in touching stories, home movies, photos, anecdotes that help humanize the scourge. Sober narration (by Dustin Hoffman), haunting music (by Bobby McFerrin) and grim statistics (we’re told 335 Americans died from AIDS in 1981 and that the toll climbed to nearly 60,000 by 1989) help increase the considerable impact. The documentary suggests that the federal government and television news were inexcusably slow to respond to the crisis. This one stays with you. Grade: A+

FACES AND CRIES FROM THE AIDS BATTLEGROUND

By Samuel G. Freedman

During one of the interviews conducted for “Common Threads,” a documentary about the AIDS Memorial Quilt that will be shown at 10 o’clock tonight on Home Box Office, a gay man named Vito Russo compared himself to a soldier in the Vietnam War. With his lover dead from the disease and himself infected, Mr. Russo said, he understood how must have felt to stand amid gunfire and shells. And more than that, he went on, he realized that only others on the front could conceive of his terror and rage.

Mr. Russo's analogy emerged unprompted, and it does not appear in the final film, but those words came to inform both the substance and the style of the documentary. From its testimony by distraught survivors to its listing of the death toll as it mounts yearly to its lingering images of the commemorative panels, “Common Thread” treats the nine-year epidemic as kind of viral war.

“We felt it was important to give people an image,” Mr. Epstein said, “and for a generation that lived through the war, Vietnam provides a specific frame of reference. I don’t want it to be too easy an analogy, but I hope that by showing how individuals are affected by historical events, by tracing the nine years of this epidemic, by saying you can’t turn away and pretend this doesn’t exist, an audience will perceive that AIDS is our generation’s Vietnam.”

“To me,” Mr. Couturie added, “there are lots of similarities between the way the nation has dealt with people with AIDS and Vietnam veterans. Whether it’s the war or the disease, here’s something the country doesn’t understand, is scared to death of. So the victims of both became untouchables. And if anything, it’s more pronounced with AIDS, because the majority of victims are gay men, and many others are IV drug users. It falls easily into Us and Them. The point of this film is not to preach to the converted, but to the prejudiced, to say that people with AIDS aren’t ‘fags,’ aren’t ‘junkies,’ but are your friends, your neighbors, your families. To say nobody deserves to die the death of AIDS.”

It was shortly after the completion of “Dear America” in the fall of 1987 that Michael Fuchs, the chairman and chief executive officer of Home Box Office, suggested a similar project about AIDS. The cable service had just produced an informational special about AIDS featuring Surgeon General C. Everett Koop and optioned “Suzi’s Story,” an Australian documentary about a mother and son afflicted by AIDS. “The consensus here was that there was much more to be said,” recalled Cis Wilson, the director of documentary programming. “And one of the goals was to humanize it.”

The proposal reached Mr. Couturie at a sadly propitious moment: One of his cousins had just died of AIDS, instantly closing the emotional distance he had achieved from the epidemic. As a resident of San Francisco, Mr. Couturie already knew of the quilt, which had been begun in that city in July 1987 by the Names Project. The quilt, which in the spring of 1988 included 3,000 panels, each a memorial to an AIDS victim, struck him as “a way to make a film that would be both hard-hitting and affecting.”

“I thought from the start the film itself should be a patchwork quilt,” he continued. “America is a patchwork quilt. People with AIDS are a patchwork quilt. The virus is indiscriminate. So people who otherwise would never have been connected are bound together.”

In a case parallell evolution, Mr. Epstein and Mr. Friedman had felt similarly moved when they had seen the quilt displayed in Washington in October 1987. “Up to that point,” Mr. Epstein said, “nobody had seen the quilt in its entirety, and the effect was, needless to say, awesome. We were there at dawn and we were standing around this huge canvas grid, and the names of the dead were being read. And by the time the quilt was fully unfolded several hours later there was something before you that was so beautiful and yet so horrifying. Entering this quilt, entering this weave of lives, interacting with the other people there, made you feel the weight of this epidemic.”

The two film makers, both San Franciscans, soon contacted the Names Project about doing a film and began poring over both the panels and the letters from surviving relatives and friends that frequently accompanied them. By late 1987, Mr. Couturie contacted Mr. Epstein, whose work he had long admired. Early in 1988, Home Box Office contributed $35,000 for research and development.

That money allowed Mr. Epstein and Mr. Friedman to select from thousands of letter-writers about 250 survivors to be interviewed by telephone. Some 60 of those were interviewed on video, 10 were initially selected for inclusion in the film, and finally that number was cut to six to permit more depth for each person. Satisfied with the project’s promise, Home Box Office increased its financing to $600,000, twice its level for most documentaries.

In its final form, “Common Threads” reflects a balance between the film makers goal of showing that AIDS is arguing that medical and governmental responses to it have lagged precisely because it does disproportionately strike gay men.

Two of the film’s subjects, Mr. Russo and Tracy Torrey, lost gay lovers (Jeffrey Sevcik and David Campbell) to AIDS. A third, Sara Lewinstein, is a lesbian who had a child with a gay friend (Dr. Tom Waddell) who died. The fourth, Sallie Perryman, is the widow of a heterosexual (Robert Perryman) who contracted AIDS as a drug addict. The last two, Suzi and David Mandell Jr.) who was exposed to the virus through a blood transfusion. Mr. Torrey himself died of AIDS within months of being interviewed for “Common Threads,” Mr. Russo, according to the film, is suffering from the disease and Mrs. Perrryman carries the virus, although she does not yet manifest any symptoms. The quilt itself, meanwhile, has grown to some 13,000 panels and continues to be displayed, wholly or in segments, throughout the country.

“Common Threads” in large part functions simply by listening to the survivors. “As we made the film,” Mr. Epstein said, “we discovered the strength of the basic, on-camera storytelling process. There’s a direct relationship that can happen between the viewer and the storyteller, and we wanted that direct emotional connection.

In some particularly chilling instances, those who died speak through snippets of earlier home movies and cassette tapes. Dr. Waddell, who competed in the Olympic decathlon in 1968, is heard dictating a tape for his young daughter, Jessica: “tonight while I was brushing my teeth, I noticed some white patches on my tongue. Sweetheart, I hope it’s nothing, but there’s a possibility that this is an early sign of AIDS….The fear of leaving you before you ever really know me is my greatest concern.”

Twelve-year-old David Mandell Jr., in a clip from an interview on a San Diego television station, delivers the film’s most decisive statement against the bias: “We didn’t come from a different planet. We’re still the same human beings that they are. We just have… a little difference in ourselves. And I don’t see why anyone should put some person down for that.”

“The main thing I came to realize in making ‘Common Threads,’”Mr. Friedman concluded, “is that you can’t make sense out of AIDS, and that it’s dangerous to try to. How do you make sense out of a natural catastrophe? People have tried by saying it’s God’s judgment, or this is a way for the gay community to become active ands united. But one of the things we have to learn about AIDS is that trying to assign it some larger meaning is off the point. The enemy is the virus.”

Variety   FRIDAY, OCTOBER 13, 1989

Common Threads: Stories From The Quilt

In an enormously effective documentary, the AIDS memorial quilt becomes a common bond among six people touched so painfully by Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome and willing to recall that pain. The final scene, in which an enormous ring of white-suited people hold hands around the quilt as it lies on the ellipse behind the White House, is simply stunning. So is the program.

The filmmakers, using exemplary editing, have skillfully woven the stories of people intimately involved with AIDS sufferers and who, in some cases, have the disease themselves.

Sara Lewinstein, mother of the late Dr. Tom Waddell’s daughter, talks about him and their lives and plays part of an audiotape he left for the child; a mother and father recall their 11-year-old son, David Mandell Jr., a hemophiliac, who had to let go.

Sallie Perryman talks about how husband Robert, after fighting off his IV drug habit, failing from AIDS, continued to counsel addicts; Navy Commander Tracy Torrey, sick himself, talks about his late lover, and New York writer Vito Russo, also ill, discourses candidly about the late, shy Jeffrey Sevcik, who died while Russo was overseas.

The spec moves among the survivors, measures the march of AIDS with chronological news clips, and counters the sadness of those living with the cadences of anger among demonstrators and among at least two government officials who deplore the lack of Washingron action.

Closeups of panels from the huge quilt emphasize personal statements; the reading of names at the site of the quilt rings out in melancholy comment.

Bobby McFerrin and the 10-voiced Voicestra perform the music backing the docu, which is a study in devotion and anger and courage at a dark time. And through it all, it’s love that shines the brightest.

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