NEWS

At last week’s Oscars the documentary How To Survive A Plague lost on a gong, but it now seems it’s going to have a longer life than most of its fellow nominees, as plans are afoot to turn it into a mini-series for the ABC TV network.

The documentary tells the story of the brave young men and women, most of whom where gay, who in the 1980s successfully reversed the tide of an epidemic, demanded the attention of a fearful nation and stopped AIDS from becoming a death sentence. This improbable group of activists bucked oppression and, with no scientific training, infiltrated government agencies and the pharmaceutical industry, helping to identify promising new medication and treatments and move them through trials and into drugstores in record time.

In the process, they saved their own lives and ended the darkest days of a veritable plague, while virtually emptying AIDS wards in American hospitals in the process.

THR reports that the documentary’s director, David France, is teaming up with ABC to turn the true tale into a TV mini-series. The adaptation is in the early stages at the moment, but France says he’d like to go further than the film, “We know we’d like it to be an extended story that’s not just about AIDS and what AIDS wrought but about this tremendous civil rights movement that grew from the ashes of AIDS and the dawn of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender movement.”

It will be ABC’s first mini-series in more than half a decade. Indeed it’s suggested that while France has been interested in the idea for over a year, it was only after the success of Hatfield & McCoys that an adaptation began to get some traction with the TV networks.

It is unusual for a mainstream network to take on a subject that will be do unapologetically gay, but France compares it to what ABC did for race relations with Roots in the 1970s. “ABC is the network of Roots,” says France. “For ABC, this is a continuation of a dialogue that they’ve had with their viewers and with history, and that to me was the most decisive and convincing fact in our discussion — this idea that we can do that again and that we can be that for the gay community.”

Let’s hope the network executives don’t get scared off by the subject matter as it gets closer to the screen.