An Early Frost



An Early Frost was the first major film to deal with the topic of HIV/AIDS. It was first broadcast on the NBC television network on November 11, 1985. It was directed by John Erman and starred Aidan Quinn as Michael Pierson, a Chicago attorney who goes home to break the news that he is homosexual and has AIDS to his parents, played by Ben Gazzara and Gena Rowlands.

Reviews, awards, and aftermath
Tom Shales of the Washington Post called An Early Frost "the most important TV movie of the year," although he had misgivings about the character played by Quinn, writing that "the central character has been made so far removed from the stereotypical homosexual that it could be argued he is stereotypically unstereotypical."

The film was number one in the Nielsen ratings during the night it aired, garnering a 23.3 share (the film outperformed a San Francisco 49ers-Denver Broncos game broadcast on ABC and a Cagney & Lacey episode dealing with abortion on CBS). The film won Sylvia Sidney the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress in a Series, Miniseries or a TV Movie. It also won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing For a Miniseries, Movie or a Dramatic Special (Quinn was also nominated for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Miniseries or TV Movie, though he lost to Dustin Hoffman). However, the network lost $500,000 in revenue because advertisers were leery about sponsoring the film. The three main networks shied away from airing programming with similar themes until 1988, although in the weeks following the broadcast of An Early Frost, episodes of St. Elsewhere, Mr. Belvedere, and Hotel dealt with AIDS issues, and in July 1986, Showtime broadcast the AIDS film As Is. The movie paved the way for later TV and general release films dealing with the topic of AIDS, including The Ryan White Story (1989), Longtime Companion (1990), and Philadelphia (1993), which won Tom Hanks, whose Andrew Beckett was similar in many ways to Michael Pierson, an Academy Award for Best Actor.

Storyline
Michael Pierson, a successful lawyer, discovers he has AIDS after his lover Peter, played by D.W. Moffett, confesses that he had sex outside the relationship because Michael is a workaholic and is living in the closet. Michael goes home to disclose the news to his parents.

Michael's father, Nick (Gazzara), is a lumber company owner, and his wife, Kate (Rowlands), is a former concert pianist, housewife, and grandmother (the couple's daughter, Susan, played by Sydney Walsh, has a husband and child). Nick's reaction is fury and betrayal, while Kate's reaction is an attempt to adjust. Probably the most famous scene in the movie occurs when Nick, having refused to speak to Michael for a day after getting the news, finally breaks the silence by saying, "I never thought the day would come when you'd be in front of me and I wouldn't know who you are." Susan, who is pregnant, refuses to see Michael, saying that she "can't take that chance," and Nick explodes when Michael tries to kiss Kate. Kate remembers reading in a magazine article that AIDS is not transmitted through casual contact and tries to get the rest of the family to accept Michael. (Gena Rowlands also taped a public service announcement about AIDS transmission.) Michael eventually winds up in the hospital (after paramedics who are called to his parents' house refuse to transport him to the hospital) and meets a fellow patient named Victor (played by John Glover), a stereotyped flamboyant homosexual with AIDS who spouts lines like "It's getting almost impossible to put together a dinner party these days." The film deals with the inevitable death of Victor with a scene showing Victor's few possessions being dumped into a garbage bag by a nurse because of fear that they could be contaminated.

The script for the film (written by Ron Cowen and Daniel Lipman, and directed by Jon Erman) spent two years in development and underwent at least 13 rewrites before the standards division at the network would clear it for airing. The film became the prototype for AIDS movies that followed it by providing a storyline and emotional hook that the everyday viewer with no experience of the disease could understand, follow, and identify with. It also grounded the disease in middle-class experience, which was a departure from earlier cultural depictions of AIDS as a disease that only affected American subcultures. The film was broadcast a month after Rock Hudson died of the disease, which added to the film's resonance.