THE NORMAL HEART
The groundbreaking play about the AIDS crisis, The Normal Heart, is now a star-studded film. It only took 30 years. Story by Marc Andrews.
IT TOOK ALMOST THREE decades for Larry Kramer’s landmark play, The Normal Heart, to get filmed by Hollywood. After plenty of nearstarts (many of which involved Barbra Streisand, who owned the rights for years) it finally fell to US cable network HBO to commit this important piece of work to film as a TV movie.
HBO, of course, is the network that we have long loved for delivering programs as gay-friendly as Sex And The City, Girls, Looking and last year’s Liberace biopic, Behind The Candelabra.
It took Glee’s Ryan Murphy to bring The Normal Heart to TV and although there were initial concerns that he might damage its heart (he did somehow manage to bungle the film adaptation of Augusten Burroughs’ Running With Scissors), that hasn’t proved the case with this sensitive subject matter.
The Normal Heart is set in New York City in the early years of “the gay plague”, as AIDS was known initially between 1981 and 1984, and it is autobiographical, based on writer Larry Kramer’s own experiences during that time.
It’s seen t hrough t he eyes of writer/activist Ned Weeks, who is gay and Jewish (just li ke Larry), who goes on to set up a support group for t hose affected by what becomes known as AIDS. While many people beside him are urging the gay leaders of t he day to be calm in their response to t he crisis, Ned/Larry only gets angrier as more and more young men are dying and no one seems to care. In many ways, t he movie documents t he AIDS activism which later turned into ACT-UP, t he “si lence equals death” organization t hat did change, if not halt, t he AIDS epidemic.
The Normal Heart first had life as an off-Broadway production in 1985 before moving to LA, London and, finally in 2011, becoming a Tony-winning Broadway production.
For the TV movie version, Ryan Murphy assembled a dazzling array of talent, which includes Mark Ruffalo in the lead role as Ned, openly gay actors Jim Parsons, Jonathan Groff and Matt Bomer, plus Taylor Kitsch and Julia Roberts in pivotal roles.
Matt Bomer lost a huge amount of weight for his role as an AIDS victim who also happens to be Ned’s boyfriend. He spoke about the love scenes, declaring that his straight mate Mark Ruffalo was “a dream… doing scenes with the type of intimacy we had to do with a different actor could have been really challenging.”
Matt first read Larry’s play when he was an impressionable teenager. “This play was actually the first exposure I really had, [it gave me] a real understanding of the illness. I read it in the closet of my drama room when I was 14 years old,” he revealed, adding knowingly, “the irony of that is not lost on me.”
Asked on the eve of the movie’s debut how The Normal Heart had changed him, Larry Kramer was as eloquent and heartfelt as ever. “It made me profoundly grateful in a whole new way for a lot of the things I’m fortunate to have in my life,” the former Gay Men’s Health Crisis founder and ACT-UP activist said, “but mostly it really gave me a new understanding of unconditional love.”
She might have been a gay icon for years, and her son Jason Gould is openly gay, but that doesn’t mean Barbra Streisand wants to know what gay men get up to in bed.
According to Larry Kramer, the reason Barbra didn’t get The Normal Heart into movie multiplexes when she owned the rights was because she was so turned off by the idea of gay men having sex.
Babs bought the rights to his play soon after they were available and had a draft of a screenplay ready to go in 1995, ironically the same time that combination therapy medication changed the AIDS crisis forevermore, turning it into something more like a historical artifact.
“The problem with her is that she didn’t know what to do with it, and she also was really uncomfortable with the subject of gay sex,” Larry explained. “I really think it’s important that after eons of watching men and women make love in the movies, it’s time to see two men do so. I bought her a book of very beautiful art pictures of two men making love and she found it very distasteful. That was sort of a sign for me that we weren’t made for each other.”
Barbra wasn’t about to take this accusation lying down. She responded, “Larry was at the forefront of this battle and, God love him, he’s still fighting. But there’s no need to fight me by misrepresenting my feelings. As a filmmaker, I have always looked for new and exciting ways to do love scenes, whether they’re about heterosexuals or homosexuals. It’s a matter of taste, not gender.”
A leaked 2012 email from Larry to Babs called her out, saying “[You] did not have quite the same burning passion to make it as you always claim.” Recently Babs went on the defensive again, telling The Hollywood Reporter she tried very hard to get the movie made, initially. “When it became clear that we couldn’t raise the money to do it as a film due to the controversial nature of the material, I thought, alright, we’ll do it on TV. At least it would reach a wide audience, but HBO would only pay Larry $250,000 for the rights, and he would not let it go forward for anything less than $1,000,000 and no company was willing to move on it.
“In the press, Larry kept speaking out against me, but I think it’s unfair to keep blaming me for the movie not getting made,” she complained. “I worked on it for 25 years without pay. Larry had the rights for the last 15 years and he couldn’t get it made, either. Those are the facts.”
Ryan Murphy won Larry’s trust and in 2009 snapped up the rights and they worked together on tightening the script. Now, 30 years on, The Normal Heart finally documents those dark days on film with its suitably somber tagline: “to win a war you have to start one”.
More: The Normal Heart is released through HBO.