First it was referred to as a “mysterious illness.” Later it was called “gay cancer,” “gay plague” and “GRID,” an acronym for gay-related immune deficiency. Most egregiously, some called it “4H disease” – shorthand for “homosexuals, heroin addicts, hemophiliacs and Haitians,” the populations most afflicted in the early days.
While these names were ultimately replaced by AIDS – and later, after the virus was identified, by HIV – they reflected two key realities about AIDS at the time: a lack of understanding about the disease and its strong association with gay men.
When the feature film “Buddies” and the television film “An Early Frost” premiered 40 years ago, in the fall of 1985, AIDS had belatedly been breaking into the public consciousness.
Earlier that year, the first off-Broadway plays about AIDS opened: “As Is” by William Hoffman and “The Normal Heart” by writer and activist Larry Kramer. That summer, actor Rock Hudson disclosed that he had AIDS, becoming the first major celebrity to do so. Hudson, who died in October 1985, was a friend of President Ronald Reagan and Nancy Reagan. Reagan, who had been noticeably silent on the subject of the disease, would go on to make his first – albeit brief – public remarks about AIDS in September 1985.
Five days before Reagan’s speech, “Buddies,” an independent film made for US$27,000 and shot in nine days, premiered at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco on Sept. 12, 1985.
A film on the front lines
If you haven’t heard of “Buddies,” that’s not surprising; the film mostly played art houses and festivals before disappearing.
Its filmmaker, Arthur J. Bressan Jr., was best known for his gay pornographic films, although he’d also made documentaries such as “Gay USA.” “Buddies” would go on to reach a wider audience thanks to a 2018 video release by Vinegar Syndrome, a distribution company that focuses on restoring cult cinema, exploitation films and other obscure titles.
It was inspired by the real-life buddies program at the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, an organization Kramer co-founded. At the time, many people dying of the disease had been rejected by family and friends, so a buddy might be the only person who visited a terminal AIDS patient.
The film feels like a play, in that most of the movie takes place in a single room and features just two characters: a naive young gay man named David and a young AIDS patient named Robert. Over the course of the film, the characters open up about their lives and their fears about the growing epidemic. It also includes a sex scene – something other early AIDS films completely avoided – in which David and Robert engage in safer sex.
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AIDS packaged for the masses
The remarkably frank and intimate approach to the epidemic in “Buddies” contrasts sharply to the television film “An Early Frost,” which premiered on NBC on Nov. 11, 1985.
The film’s protagonist is a successful Chicago lawyer named Michael who hasn’t come out to his family, much to the distress of his long-term partner, Peter. When Michael finds out he has AIDS, he’s forced to come out to his parents, both as gay and as having AIDS.
Much of the film deals with Michael’s self-acceptance and his attempts to mend his relationships. Yet the production of “An Early Frost” was fraught with concerns about depicting both homosexuality and AIDS. Unlike David and Robert, Michael and Peter show no physical affection – they barely touch each other. https://www.youtube.com/embed/a0vizM1_tiI?wmode=transparent&start=0 A promotional clip for ‘An Early Frost,’ which drew 34 million viewers when it premiered on NBC.
Knowledge of AIDS was still evolving – a test for HIV was approved in March 1985 – so screenwriters and life partners Daniel Lipman and Ron Cowen went through 13 revisions of the script. The real-life fears and misconceptions about how AIDS could and could not be transmitted were central to the storyline, adding extra pressure to be accurate in the face of evolving understanding of the virus.
Despite losing NBC $500,000 in advertisers, “An Early Frost” drew 34 million viewers and was showered with Emmy nominations the following year.
A quilt of stories emerges
“Buddies” and “An Early Frost” opened up AIDS and HIV as subject matters for film and television.
They begat two lanes of HIV storytelling that continue to this day.
The first is an approach geared to mainstream audiences that tends to avoid controversial issues such as sex or religion and instead focuses on characters who grapple with both the illness and the stigma of the virus.
The second is an indie approach that’s often more confrontational, irreverent and angry at the injustice and indifference AIDS patients faced.
The former approach is seen in 1993’s “Philadelphia,” which earned Tom Hanks his first Oscar. The critically and commercially successful film shares a number of story points with “An Early Frost”: Hanks’ character, a big-city lawyer, finds out he is HIV positive and must confront bias head-on. HIV also features prominently in later films such as “Precious” (2009) and “Dallas Buyers Club” (2013), both of which, like “Philadelphia,” became awards darlings.
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The edgier, more critical approach can be seen in the New Queer Cinema movement of the 1990s, a film movement that developed as a response to the epidemic. Gregg Araki’s “The Living End” (1992) is a key film in the movment: It tells the story of two HIV-positive men who become pseudo-vigilantes in the wake of their diagnoses. https://www.youtube.com/embed/7mvDLTMUtQQ?wmode=transparent&start=0 In ‘The Living End,’ the HIV-positive protagonists go on a hedonistic rampage to take out their anger at the world.
Somewhere in between is “Longtime Companion” (1990), which was the first film about AIDS to receive a wide release and tracks the impact of the epidemic on a fictional group of gay men throughout the 1980s. The film was written by gay playwright and screenwriter Craig Lucas and directed by Norman Rene, who died of AIDS six years after the film’s release.
Studios still leery
In many ways, television is where the real breakthroughs have happened and continue to happen.
The first television episode to deal with AIDS appeared on the medical drama “St. Elsewhere” in 1983; AIDS was also the subject of episodes in the sitcoms “Mr. Belvedere,” “The Golden Girls” and “Designing Women.” “Killing All the Right People” was the title of the latter’s special episode – a phrase the show’s writer and co-creator Linda Bloodworth-Thomason heard while her mother was being treated for AIDS.
More recently, producer Ryan Murphy has made a cottage industry of representations of queer people, particularly those with HIV. His stage revivals of “The Normal Heart” and Mart Crowley’s 1968 play “The Boys in the Band” were later adapted into films for television and streaming. He also produced “Pose,” a three-season series about drag ball culture in the 1980s that stars queer characters of color, several of whom are HIV positive.
Yet for all of these strides, representations of HIV in film are still hard to come by. In fact, out of the 256 films released by major distributors in 2024, the number of HIV-postive characters amounted to … zero.
If you think it’s an exaggeration to suggest that people might not want to be seen going to the theater to watch a film about characters with HIV, the results of a 2021 GLAAD survey may surprise you.
It found that the stigma around HIV is still very high, particularly for HIV-positive people working in schools and hospitals. One-third of respondents were unaware that medication is available to prevent the transmission of HIV. More than half didn’t know that HIV-positive people can reach undetectable status and not transmit the virus to others.
Another important finding from the survey: Only about half of the nonqueer respondents had seen a TV show or film about someone with HIV.
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This reflects both the progress made since “Buddies” and “An Early Frost” and also why these films still matter today. They were released at a time when there was almost no cultural representation of HIV, and misinformation and disinformation were rampant. There have been so many advances, in both the treatment of HIV and its visibility in popular culture. That visibility still matters, because there’s still much more than can be done to end the stigma.
The dystopian Pottersville in ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ is starting to feel less like fiction
A fresh look at It’s a Wonderful Life through the film’s darkest detour—Pottersville—and why its greed, corruption, and desensitization to cruelty feels uncomfortably familiar in America today.
To many Americans, George Bailey’s dystopian nightmare is disquietingly familiar. Paramount
The dystopian Pottersville in ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ is starting to feel less like fiction
Nora Gilbert, University of North Texas Along with millions of others, I’ll soon be taking 2 hours and 10 minutes out of my busy holiday schedule to sit down and watch a movie I’ve seen countless times before: Frank Capra’s “It’s a Wonderful Life,” which tells the story of a man’s existential crisis one Christmas Eve in the fictional town of Bedford Falls. There are lots of reasons why this eight-decade-old film still resonates, from its nostalgic pleasures to its cultural critiques. But when I watch it this year, the sequence where Bedford Falls transforms into the dark and dystopian “Pottersville” will resonate the most. In the film, protagonist George Bailey, who’s played by Jimmy Stewart, is on the brink of suicide. He seems to have achieved the hallmarks of the American dream: He’s taken over his father’s loan business, married the love of his life and fathered four excessively adorable children. But George feels stifled and beaten down. His Uncle Billy has misplaced US$8,000 of the company’s money, and the town’s resident tyrant, Mr. Potter, is using the mishap to try to ruin George, who’s his last remaining business competitor. An angel named Clarence is tasked with pulling George back from the brink. To stop him from attempting suicide, Clarence decides to show George what life would have been like if he’d never been born. In this alternate reality, Bedford Falls is called Pottersville, a place Mr. Potter runs as a ruthless banker and slumlord.Pottersville, the dark, dystopian version of Bedford Falls, is a place characterized by vice and moral decay.Paramount Having previously written about “It’s a Wonderful Life” in my book on literary and film censorship, I can’t help but see parallels between Pottersville and the U.S. today. Think about it: In Pottersville, one man hoards all the financial profits and political power. In Pottersville, greed, corruption and cynicism reign supreme. In Pottersville, hard-working immigrants like Giuseppe Martini who were able to build a life and run a business in Bedford Falls have vanished. In Pottersville, homeless addicts like Mr. Gower and nonconformist “pixies” like Clarence are scorned and ostracized, then booted out of the local watering hole. In Pottersville, cops arrest people like Violet Bick while they’re at work and haul them away, kicking and screaming.Violet Bick gets dragged away by the Pottersville police as George looks on.Paramount But what horrifies George the most about Pottersville is how desensitized the people living in it seem to be to its harshness and cruelty – how they treat him like he’s the crazy, deranged one for wanting and expecting things to be different and better. This is what the current political moment feels like to me. There are days when the latest headlines feel so jarringly unprecedented that I find myself thinking, “Can this be happening? Can this be real?” If you think these comparisons are a bit of a stretch, consider when “It’s a Wonderful Life” was made, and the frame of mind Capra was in when he made it.
Frank Capra, anti-fascist
In 1946, Capra was just returning to Hollywood filmmaking after serving for four years in the U.S. Army, where the Office of War Information had tasked him with producing a series of documentary films about World War II and the lead-up to it. Even though Capra hadn’t been on the front lines, he’d been immersed in the sounds and images of war for years on end, and he had become acutely familiar with Germany, Italy and Japan’s respective rises to fascism.Frank Capra served in the U.S. Army during World War II.Keystone/Hulton Archive via Getty Images When deciding on his first postwar film, Capra recalled in his autobiography that he specifically “knew one thing – it would not be about war.” Instead, he chose to adapt a short story by Philip Van Doren Stern, “The Greatest Gift,” that Stern had originally sent to friends and family as a Christmas card in 1943. Stern’s story is certainly not about war. But it’s not exactly about Christmas, either. As Stern writes in his opening lines:
“The little town straggling up the hill was bright with colored Christmas lights. But George Pratt did not see them. He was leaning over the railing of the iron bridge, staring down moodily at the black water.”
The protagonist contemplates suicide because he’s “sick of everything” in the small-town “mudhole” he’s stuck in – until, that is, a “strange little man” gives him the chance to see what life would be like if he’d never been born. It was Capra and his team of screenwriters who added the sinister Henry F. Potter to Stern’s short, simple tale. The Potter subplot encapsulates the film’s most trenchant, still-resonant themes: the unfairness of socioeconomic injustices; the pervasiveness of corporate and political corruption; the threat of monopolized power; the need for affordable housing. These themes had, of course, run through many of Capra’s prewar films as well: “Mr. Deeds Goes to Town,” “You Can’t Take It with You,” “Meet John Doe” and “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” the last of which also starred Jimmy Stewart. But they take on a different kind of weight in “It’s a Wonderful Life” – a weight that’s especially visible on the weathered face of Stewart, who himself had just returned from a harrowing four-year tour of duty as a bomber pilot in Europe. The idealistic vigor with which Stewart had fought crooked politicians and oligarchs as Mr. Smith is replaced by the bitterness, exhaustion, frustration and desperation with which he battles against Mr. Potter as George Bailey.George Bailey feels helpless in the face of corruption and cruelty.Paramount
Life after Pottersville
By the time George has begged and pleaded his way out of Pottersville, the lost $8,000 is no longer top of mind. He’s mainly just relieved to find Bedford Falls as he had left it, warts and all. And yet, the Bedford Falls that George returns to isn’t quite the same as the one he left behind. In this Bedford Falls, the community rallies together to figure out a way to recoup George’s missing money. Their pre-digital version of a GoFundMe page saves George from what he’d feared most: bankruptcy, scandal and prison. And even though his wife, Mary, tries to attribute this sudden wave of collectivist, activist energy to some sort of divine intervention – “George, it’s a miracle; it’s a miracle!” – Uncle Billy points out that it really came about through more earthly organizing means: “Mary did it, George; Mary did it! She told some people you were in trouble, and they scattered all over town collecting money!”The residents of Bedford Falls come together to save George from financial ruin.Paramount But the question of whether George actually wins his battle against Potter is a murky one. While the typical Capra protagonist triumphs by defeating vice and exposing subterfuge, George never even realizes that Potter is the one who got hold of his money and tried to ruin his life. Potter is never held accountable for his crimes. On the other hand, George is able to learn, from his time in Pottersville, what a crucial role he plays in his community. George’s victory over Potter, then, lies not in some grand final act of retribution, but in the incremental ways he has stood up to Potter throughout his life: not capitulating to Potter’s bullying or intimidation tactics; speaking truth to power; and running a community-centered business rather than one guided by greed and exploitation. In recent months, there have been similar acts of protest, large and small, in the form of rallies, boycotts, immigrant aid efforts, subscription cancellations, food bank donations and more. That doesn’t mean the U.S. has made it out of Pottersville, however. Each day, more head-spinning headlines appear, whether they’re about masked agents terrorizing immigrant communities, the dismantling of anti-corruption oversights, the consolidation of executive power or the naked display of political grift. Zuzu’s petals are still missing. Clarence still hasn’t gotten his wings. But this holiday season, I’m hoping it will feel helpfully cathartic to go with George Bailey, for the umpteenth time, through the dark abyss of his dystopian nightmare – and come out with him, stronger and wiser, on the other side. Nora Gilbert, Professor of Literary and Film Studies, University of North Texas This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Hollywood vs. Reality: How LA’s Wilshire Subway Was Really Built
Wilshire Subway: Did LA blast subway tunnels under Wilshire Boulevard? Hollywood says yes — engineers say no. Here’s how Metro safely tunneled beneath Miracle Mile.
When the 1997 disaster film Volcano depicted lava erupting along Wilshire Boulevard and referenced blasting during Red Line subway construction, it delivered gripping cinema — but not accurate engineering.
In reality, Los Angeles Metro did not rely on large-scale blasting to construct subway tunnels beneath Wilshire Boulevard and the Miracle Mile. Instead, engineers used tunnel boring machines (TBMs) specifically to avoid the very risks Hollywood dramatized.
Why Blasting Was Avoided
The Wilshire Corridor sits atop historic oil fields, making methane gas pockets a known and serious concern. A deadly methane explosion near Fairfax Avenue in 1985 led to heightened scrutiny of underground construction in the area. Blasting in such conditions could have caused unpredictable gas releases, ground instability, or damage to surface structures.
As a result, Metro engineers chose pressurized, closed-face tunnel boring machines, which allow for:
Controlled excavation in dense urban environments
Continuous ground support to prevent settlement
Integrated gas detection and ventilation systems
These machines grind slowly through soil and rock while installing precast concrete tunnel linings, creating a sealed, gas-resistant structure as they advance.
The Real Engineering Feat
Although Volcano took creative liberties for dramatic effect, the true story of tunneling under Wilshire is no less impressive. Advances in TBM technology and methane mitigation ultimately allowed the Metro D Line (formerly the Red Line/Purple Line) to safely pass through one of Los Angeles’ most geologically complex corridors — without explosions, collapsing streets, or cinematic chaos.
Bottom Line
Volcano remains a memorable piece of 1990s disaster cinema, but its portrayal of subway construction is fiction. The real achievement lies in decades of careful planning, modern tunneling technology, and engineering solutions that quietly reshaped Los Angeles beneath its busiest boulevard.
A Palestinian-Israeli film just won an Oscar − so why is it so hard to see?
The Palestinian-Israeli film “No Other Land” won the 2025 Academy Award for best documentary but struggles to find a U.S. distributor due to its controversial subject matter around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Despite critical acclaim, it faces unique barriers compared to other independent films.
Last Updated on November 3, 2025 by Daily News StaffLeft to right: Basel Adra, Rachel Szor, Hamdan Ballal and Yuval Abraham pose with their Oscars for ‘No Other Land’ at the 2025 Academy Awards. Maya Dehlin Spach/Getty Images
For many low-budget, independent films, an Oscar win is a golden ticket.
The publicity can translate into theatrical releases or rereleases, along with more on-demand rentals and sales.
However, for “No Other Land,” a Palestinian-Israeli film that just won best documentary feature at the 2025 Academy Awards, this exposure may not translate into commercial success in the U.S. That’s because the film has been unable to find a company to distribute it in America.
“No Other Land” chronicles the efforts of Palestinian townspeople to combat an Israeli plan to demolish their villages in the West Bank and use the area as a military training ground. It was directed by four Palestinian and Israeli activists and journalists: Basel Adra, who is a resident of the area facing demolition, Yuval Abraham, Hamdan Ballal and Rachel Szor. While the filmmakers have organized screenings in a number of U.S. cities, the lack of a national distributor makes a broader release unlikely.
Film distributors are a crucial but often unseen link in the chain that allows a film to reach cinemas and people’s living rooms. In recent years it has become more common for controversial award-winning films to run into issues finding a distributor. Palestinian films have encountered additional barriers.
As a scholar of Arabic who has written about Palestinian cinema, I’m disheartened by the difficulties “No Other Land” has faced. But I’m not surprised.
The role of film distributors
Distributors are often invisible to moviegoers. But without one, it can be difficult for a film to find an audience.
Distributors typically acquire rights to a film for a specific country or set of countries. They then market films to movie theaters, cinema chains and streaming platforms. As compensation, distributors receive a percentage of the revenue generated by theatrical and home releases.
The film “Soundtrack to a Coup D’Etat,” another finalist for best documentary, shows how this process typically works. It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2024 and was acquired for distribution just a few months later by Kino Lorber, a major U.S.-based distributor of independent films.
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The inability to find a distributor is not itself noteworthy. No film is entitled to distribution, and most films by newer or unknown directors face long odds.
So why can’t “No Other Land” find a distributor in the U.S.?
There are a couple of factors at play.
Shying away from controversy
In recent years, film critics have noticed a trend: Documentaries on controversial topics have faced distribution difficulties. These include a film about a campaign by Amazon workers to unionize and a documentary about Adam Kinzinger, one of the few Republican congresspeople to vote to impeach Donald Trump in 2021.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, of course, has long stirred controversy. But the release of “No Other Land” comes at a time when the issue is particularly salient. The Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, and the ensuing Israeli bombardment and invasion of the Gaza Strip have become a polarizing issue in U.S. domestic politics, reflected in the campus protests and crackdowns in 2024. The filmmakers’ critical comments about the Israeli occupation of Palestine have also garnered backlash in Germany.Locals attend a screening of ‘No Other Land’ in the village of A-Tuwani in the West Bank on March 14, 2024. Yahel Gazit/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images
Yet the fact that this conflict has been in the news since October 2023 should also heighten audience interest in a film such as “No Other Land” – and, therefore, lead to increased sales, the metric that distributors care about the most.
Indeed, an earlier film that also documents Palestinian protests against Israeli land expropriation, “5 Broken Cameras,” was a finalist for best documentary at the 2013 Academy Awards. It was able to find a U.S. distributor. However, it had the support of a major European Union documentary development program called Greenhouse. The support of an organization like Greenhouse, which had ties to numerous production and distribution companies in Europe and the U.S., can facilitate the process of finding a distributor.
By contrast, “No Other Land,” although it has a Norwegian co-producer and received some funding from organizations in Europe and the U.S., was made primarily by a grassroots filmmaking collective.
Stages for protest
While distribution challenges may be recent, controversies surrounding Palestinian films are nothing new.
Many of them stem from the fact that the system of film festivals, awards and distribution is primarily based on a movie’s nation of origin. Since there is no sovereign Palestinian state – and many countries and organizations have not recognized the state of Palestine – the question of how to categorize Palestinian films has been hard to resolve.
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In 2002, The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences rejected the first ever Palestinian film submitted to the best foreign language film category – Elia Suleiman’s “Divine Intervention” – because Palestine was not recognized as a country by the United Nations. The rules were changed for the following year’s awards ceremony.
In 2021, the cast of the film “Let It Be Morning,” which had an Israeli director but primarily Palestinian actors, boycotted the Cannes Film Festival in protest of the film’s categorization as an Israeli film rather than a Palestinian one.
Film festivals and other cultural venues have also become places to make statements about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and engage in protest. For example, at the Cannes Film Festival in 2017, the right-wing Israeli culture minister wore a controversial – and meme-worthy – dress that featured the Jerusalem skyline in support of Israeli claims of sovereignty over the holy city, despite the unresolved status of Jerusalem under international law.Israeli Culture Minister Miri Regev wears a dress featuring the old city of Jerusalem during the Cannes Film Festival in 2017. Antonin Thuillier/AFP via Getty Images
At the 2024 Academy Awards, a number of attendees, including Billie Eilish, Mark Ruffalo and Mahershala Ali, wore red pins in support of a ceasefire in Gaza, and pro-Palestine protesters delayed the start of the ceremonies.
As he accepted his award, “No Other Land” director Yuval Abraham called out “the foreign policy” of the U.S. for “helping to block” a path to peace.
Even though a film like “No Other Land” addresses a topic of clear interest to many Americans, I wonder if the quest to find a U.S. distributor just got even harder.
This article has been updated to clarify that the film was a collaborative effort between Palestinian and Israeli filmmakers. It has also been updated to reflect the film’s win at the 2025 Academy Awards.
