Long Forgotten, a Landmark Film in AIDS History Is Rescued

“Philadelphia,” “Parting Glances,” “Longtime Companion” and “Tongues Untied” are often cited as benchmark movies about AIDS. But long forgotten is “Buddies,” the first feature film about AIDS. An intimate two-hander from 1985, it was a snapshot of a terrible time for gay men in New York, made during some of the worst hours of the epidemic.

Now, 33 years after its debut, “Buddies” is being remembered, thanks to an impassioned push by people determined not to leave behind an artifact of a painful history.

Running 81 minutes, “Buddies” felt like a play and starred just two actors. Robert (Geoff Edholm), a 32-year-old gay man dying of AIDS, is visited at the hospital by David (David Schachter), a 25-year-old volunteer “buddy.” The two men develop a friendship that eventually becomes more intimate. The film ends — no need for a spoiler alert here — with Robert’s death; David, emboldened by Robert’s activist spirit, pickets the White House.

The movie made its debut at the Castro Theater in San Francisco on Sept. 12, 1985, before going on to art-house runs in New York, Boston, Chicago and other cities. This week, Vinegar Syndrome, in collaboration with the Bressan Project, released on Blu-ray/DVD Combo a new digital restoration of “Buddies.” Plans are underway to make it available for streaming next year.

“It’s a remarkable film,” said C. Mason Wells, the director of repertory programming for the Quad Cinema in New York, where “Buddies” recently had a weeklong run. “Not just for the story it tells, but how it tells it, with great subtlety and restraint.”

“Buddies” was directed by Arthur J. Bressan Jr., known among friends as a sociable, sexually voracious flirt who at 6 feet, 4 inches tall was a big bear of a guy. Born in 1943, he began living an openly gay life in the early 1970s and made a name for himself in the gay porn scene with fare like “Pleasure Beach” and “Daddy Dearest.” But he also crossed over from porn in “Gay USA,” a documentary about Pride marches in 1977, and gay-themed dramas. “Buddies” was Bressan’s final film; he died of AIDS complications on July 28, 1987, about eight months after he received an HIV diagnosis.

In Vito Russo’s landmark book, “The Celluloid Closet,” Bressan had a sense of his own ending. “If I never make another movie,” he said, “'Buddies’ will be a fine way to leave.”

But Roe Bressan, the director’s sister, said her brother didn’t know he had HIV when he directed “Buddies.”

“What fueled him was the fact that he watched so many people get sick and suffer without anyone doing anything,” she said. She and film historian Jenni Olson are collaborating on the Bressan Project to preserve and promote the director’s work. Olson, a consultant on the “Buddies” restoration, the project’s first offering, called Bressan “totally pioneering.”

“His films were simultaneously porn and some of the earliest examples of what we now think of as gay independent cinema,” she said.

Roe Bressan said “Buddies” showed “how he really wanted to be the person that got the group together, just like in Capra movies, and say, ‘This is happening, and we can fix it if we do it together.” (Bressan was a Frank Capra fan; he spoke to the director for Interview magazine in 1972 and held dear a signed copy of the script for Capra’s 1941 film “Meet John Doe.”)

As a filmmaker, Bressan was scrappy and resourceful, often casting friends and lovers (including Schachter). He wrote “Buddies” in five days and shot it in various apartments and other sites in New York (with a day in Washington) over nine days for about $27,000.

Reviews of the film were mixed. In The New York Times, Janet Maslin called it “heartfelt and serious,” but also “talky enough to dispel many of the emotions it means to arouse.” Critics in the gay press were more positive, hopeful that the film would spur empathy and action. Lawrence Bommer wrote in the Chicago paper Windy City Times that the film will “encourage many gay men to become ‘buddies,’ to lobby for the kind of funding any other epidemic would have already received, to treasure each moment with one another as we never could have five years ago.”

“Buddies” arrived during the tragic early years of AIDS. The Food and Drug Administration had recently licensed the first commercial blood test to detect HIV antibodies, but effective treatment was years away. The government and research organizations weren’t exactly pouring money into a “gay” disease. In 1985 “you could see AIDS on every street corner,” said David France, director of “How to Survive a Plague,” an Oscar-nominated documentary about AIDS activism. “You’d see a friend on the street and see Kaposi’s sarcoma” — a lesion that became a telltale sign of the disease — “on his temple, and that’s how you’d learn they were sick.”

By 1985, the gay political response to AIDS was outraged and raw; Gay Men’s Health Crisis and its army of volunteers were at the forefront. Artistically, AIDS was having an impact. David Wojnarowicz, the subject of a retrospective now at the Whitney, emerged as part of a new generation of artist-activists spurred by AIDS to create richly confrontational work. Stories of heartbreak and advocacy made their way to the stage (in plays like Larry Kramer’s “The Normal Heart”) and television (“An Early Frost”). The better-known early movies about the disease were released later in the ‘80s (“Parting Glances,” “Longtime Companion,” “Tongues Untied”) or the ‘90s (“Philadelphia”).

It’s hard to say why “Buddies” faded from memory. (It never had a home video release.) Perhaps it was the limited exposure of an independent film with a low budget and no stars, or the theme. France said that as affirming as it may have been, people may not have wanted to go “from visiting their friends in AIDS wards to this movie.” He added, “There was just too much to do.” Schachter, who never made another film, said revisiting “Buddies” in an age of extraordinary advances in AIDS treatment and prevention, was “weird, sad and lovely.”

“It’s sad because there was so much loss in all of our lives,” he said. “But it’s lovely that I feel so proud to be part of a resurgence for such a time capsule.” (Edholm, his co-star, died of AIDS complications in 1989.)

Roe Bressan was philosophical. “You know that fear and terror and bias and bigotry of those years?” she said. “Love won.”