The movie that sought to expose greed, ego and bureaucracy behind the AIDS crisis endured its own production saga that reads like a smaller-scale version of the book’s indictment. Screenwriter Arnold Schulman spent nearly two years rewriting the teleplay while the project cycled through multiple directors — "One director came and went... then another director... one director wouldn't even talk to me," he complained — and navigated competing creative agendas at Spelling Entertainment and HBO Pictures. Schulman bitterly noted the irony: a film made for “altruistic reasons” to shame institutional self-interest was produced through a process marred by the same forces. The development headaches delayed production, required constant script surgery to condense Randy Shilts’s 600‑page chronicle into a two‑and‑a‑quarter‑hour drama, and contributed to occasional uneven pacing critics observed after the film’s 1993 festival premiere. The behind‑the‑scenes struggle became part of the film’s mythology — proof that tackling entrenched power structures on screen often means fighting them offscreen as well.
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AI concept artworkArchive Record · 1990s
The Film’s Irony: A Production Nightmarish Enough to Mirror Its Subject — Multiple Directors, Endless Rewrites
And the Band Played On (1993) / Arnold Schulman / 1990s
The movie that sought to expose greed, ego and bureaucracy behind the AIDS crisis endured its own production saga that reads like a smaller-scale version of the book’s indictment. Screenwriter Arnold Schulman spent nearly two years rewriting the teleplay while the project cycled through multiple directors — "One director came and went... then another director... one director wouldn't even talk to me," he complained — and navigated competing creative agendas at Spelling Entertainment and HBO Pictures. Schulman bitterly noted the irony: a film made for “altruistic reasons” to shame institutional self-interest was produced through a process marred by the same forces. The development headaches delayed production, required constant script surgery to condense Randy Shilts’s 600‑page chronicle into a two‑and‑a‑quarter‑hour drama, and contributed to occasional uneven pacing critics observed after the film’s 1993 festival premiere. The behind‑the‑scenes struggle became part of the film’s mythology — proof that tackling entrenched power structures on screen often means fighting them offscreen as well.
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