Reel History

The Outfest Legacy Project strives to preserve early aids films in danger of being lost
by Gretchen Dukowitz

Independent filmmaker Bill Sherwood completed just one film before he died of AIDS in 1990 at the age of thirty-seven. Parting Glances was released to critical acclaim in 1986 and launched the career of actor Steve Buscemi (who went on to star in hits like Pulp Fiction and Fargo). Sherwood didn’t live long enough to see his movie become known as one of the finest films to be made about the personal impact of the AIDS pandemic. He didn’t arrange for the preservation of his movie either, and now Parting Glances, along with dozens of other films documenting the early days of the AIDS crisis, are in danger of being lost or permanently destroyed. But a gay and lesbian film organization has stepped in to help, giving these films a fighting chance for survival.

Los Angeles-based nonprofit organization Outfest produces the largest lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender film festival in the country. Last year, the group launched the Legacy Project, a new $1.5 million film preservation initiative that aims to save Parting Glances and other important films dealing with AIDS. “For years, we’ve been exhibiting films whose prints were faded, scratched, and had frames missing,” says Kirsten Schaffer, senior director of Programming and Operations at Outfest. “We asked filmmakers and distributors for better prints and were told they didn’t exist and they didn’t have the resources to make new ones. We heard this over and over and realized there was a tremendous need to preserve and restore these movies because they’ve really shaped our culture.”

Extraordinarily expensive and marked by arcane technical jargon, film preservation can be a tough sell. It took three years, a million dollars, and an intervention by no less than Martin Scorsese to restore and preserve Lawrence of Arabia, a film that’s almost universally considered a movie masterpiece. Schaffer acknowledges the high costs and challenges that independent filmmakers often face when trying to protect their work. “Studios are profit-driven so they don’t budget for film preservation on every title,” she says. “Independent filmmakers don’t have the money to store their prints at labs and they don’t have access to archives.”

To defer some of the cost of the project, Outfest is partnering with UCLA. The UCLA Film and Television Archive has one of the largest collections of media materials in the United States—second only to the Library of Congress—and houses over 270,000 film and television titles. Films pursued by the Legacy Project will be stored (and, if necessary, restored) at the archive’s high-tech modern facilities. Outfest has already placed over 3,000 titles at UCLA. “The Legacy Project collection has films about HIV and AIDS, including short films, like the films of Tom Chomont, and features that never had distribution and can’t be rented in video stores,” Schaffer says.

If the cost of film preservation is so high—and DVD and VHS copies of many films, even independent releases, so plentiful—why bother trying to protect movies like Parting Glances? “DVD and VHS are not stable formats,” Schaffer notes. “A tape may last twenty years but once it deteriorates, if the original 35 millimeter film hasn’t been preserved then the film is lost forever. What we know right now is that film is the most stable format,” she says.

But there are other, more important reasons for preserving Parting Glances and other movies that deal with the earliest years of the AIDS crisis. “The media has really reflected the epidemic. It’s very much a lens into the evolution of the disease,” says Tina Hoff, vice president of the Kaiser Family Foundation, an organization that focuses on major healthcare issues facing the country, including HIV/AIDS. “Early on, it was very much about trying to address a deep fear that people felt about something unknown and also about a disease for which quite frankly there was very little hope.” Hoff says that films like Parting Glances “tackled the misconceptions and the fear that a lot of people had and broke it down in a way that made it really accessible to them.”

“The key in communicating about HIV and AIDS is to personalize the issue,” Hoff says. “The media has incredible power to take those individual stories and amplify them so that you have millions of people that are hearing and sharing stories about people affected by HIV and AIDS.”
Damon Romine, entertainment media director at GLAAD—a media watchdog group that was formed twenty years ago in response to sensationalistic news coverage of the emerging AIDS pandemic—agrees. “We know that the media has tremendous power to educate and to change people’s hearts and minds,” he says. “In the early eighties, people were literally afraid to shake hands with gay people out of fear that they would get AIDS.”

“Independent filmmakers have always been at the forefront of telling stories that may not be highly commercial, but can deliver a timely message,” Romine says. “Parting Glances was one of the first feature films to tell a story about gay men and AIDS. It humanized the disease and delivered an important message—to both gay and straight audiences—about protection and prevention, but probably more importantly, about compassion too,” he says. “We need to make sure that we don’t forget about early films and television shows that dealt with AIDS so that future generations can hear those messages and understand what it used to be like.”

Gretchen Dukowitz is a freelance writer living in Los Angeles. She has written for The Advocate, Salon.com, and community newspapers.

September 2006