AIDS Writers Look at Strategies to Deal With a Wary System : Writers: Different approaches are necessary for TV, film and theater, Writers and Dramatists guild members report.

Mount a panel discussion titled “Writing About AIDS,” match a playwright with movie and TV writers, and the results aren’t necessarily what one would expect.

Held Monday at the Writers’ Guild West headquarters and sponsored by the Writers Guild and the Dramatists Guild (and moderated by the guild’s president, David LeVine), the seminar might have led some to expect a how-to discussion on writing the ideal AIDS drama. What they heard instead was how writers tackle a socially controversial subject, write their script, run them through very different media gauntlets--and find how some media are more accepting of sensitive material than others.

“Dealing with stories about AIDS is really about dealing with a system,” said Carl Sautter, who scripted an episode of “Trapper John M.D.” that addressed aspects of the disease. “The key for writers is to know how to work within the system that exists. There’s always someone meddling with the script. It’s not that the system won’t deal with AIDS. It’s wary of any tough subject.”

Sautter was actually referring to two systems: television and the networks, pincered by the dual censors of sponsors and the ubiquitous standards and practices overseers; and movies and the studios, where a relative lack of censorship is mitigated by financial concerns brought about by big budgets and bigger career risks.

There is a third system, the theater, represented on the panel by William Hoffman, author of one of the first AIDS-themed plays, “As Is.”

Sautter, “Midnight Caller” supervising producer Stephen Zito and Ron Cowen and Daniel Lipman, co-scenarists of the Emmy-winning AIDS drama, “An Early Frost,” related the obstacles to getting their stories on the air--ranging from network skittishness over suggestions that elderly female characters could like the gay characters, to pressures from AIDS advocacy groups that their concerns not be left on the cutting room floor.

Hoffman told a different story.

“I wrote ‘As Is’ out of a despair that no one was talking about how my friends were dying,” he said, “and the writing literally stopped any suicidal tendencies I felt. I wanted to hit people below the belt with this, so I expected trouble from (producers and theater management). But there was none--just the opposite. I hated writing it, and the only reason I finished it was hearing the supportive reactions from workshop and preview audiences. They would say, ‘You’re kicking us in the guts, but keep doing it.’ ”

That’s how theater works, when it’s working well. “The TV writer,” Cowen said, “is writing for Wichita, not off-Broadway New York. It was too important to get the message out about this disease, so if we inserted an early scene with two men in bed together, you would hear the channels clicking across America.

“Dan (Lipman) and I were terrified of AIDS when we started our research. We were so ignorant, and so were the patients we interviewed. One guy was positive that he got the disease from a dirty glass in a bar. So we couldn’t assume that an audience knew about AIDS.”

Contradicting the notion that theater audiences are aware of AIDS-related issues, Hoffman added that he, too, wrote his play “for people who didn’t know about the disease.”

LeVine and his guests, recognizing the mass media’s responsibility to expand public awareness of the epidemic, lamented the lack of TV and movie dramas addressing the issue. “Instead of dealing with gay men,” Cowen said bitterly, “they put out dozens of stories about hemophiliac kids, who make up a tragic but very small number of AIDS cases. I think these programs and the people who do them are disgusting, since they send out two wrong messages: that gays are responsible for AIDS, and that it’s not safe to get blood.”

As for the next big AIDS drama, Hoffman suggested the stories of AIDS activists. “They’re one of the most exciting movements in the U.S. A few, committed people have actually changed government policy (on drug research to curb AIDS). It’s a great story of our time, and it’s under-reported.”

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