"Angels in America" Aids...Regan's real legacy?

Tonight is the night when Americans might have tuned into Part 1 of "The Reagans" on CBS. But the joke is on the whiners who forced the mini-series off the air. Just three weeks from tonight, HBO will present the first three-hour installment of Mike Nichols's film version of Tony Kushner's "Angels in America," starring Al Pacino and Meryl Streep. (Part 2 is a week later.) This epic is, among other things, a searing indictment of how the Reagan administration's long silence stoked the plague of AIDS in the 1980's. If "Angels" reaches an audience typical for HBO hits, it could detonate a debate bloody enough to make the fight over "The Reagans" look like an exhibition bout.

That's not such a big if. "Angels" is the most powerful screen adaptation of a major American play since Elia Kazan's "Streetcar Named Desire" more than a half-century ago. It's been produced not only with stars but at four times the budget of "The Reagans." People are going to talk about it, and, as they do, HBO will replay it relentlessly to rake in more and more of the country. Threats of a boycott against a channel soon to unveil a new season of "The Sopranos" will go nowhere.

"Angels" is only minutes old when Mr. Pacino appears as a real-life crony of the Reagans — Roy Cohn, in his post-McCarthy-era incarnation as a still-powerful Republican fixer, closely tied to the Ed Meese justice department. A photo on his office wall shows him arm in arm with both the president and his vice president. Cohn is also a closeted gay man dying of AIDS. When he takes a sexual partner to the White House, he gloats, "President Reagan smiles at us and shakes his hand." Eventually Cohn will threaten to reveal "adorable Ollie North and his secret contra slush fund" unless the White House secures him a private stash of AZT, then the most promising AIDS drug and still unavailable to all but a few. Cohn gets his pills while thousands of other dying Americans are placed on hold.

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Because "Angels" will reach a far larger audience through TV than any play does in the theater, it will instantly cast the curious argument over CBS's "Reagans" in another light. If there was one consistent theme to 90 percent of the outrage over a mini-series that no one outside CBS (including me) has seen, it was focused on a single line about AIDS attributed to Ronald Reagan: "They that live in sin shall die in sin." The screenwriter of "The Reagans" admitted to The New York Times that she had no source for the line and it was cut. Yet even after it was cut, those on the attack kept harping on it more than any other element in the unseen film. Why?

On Edit:http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/16/arts/16RICH.html?pagewanted=print&position=

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This could get interesting, Rayguns determination in stalling the discussion of AID's thus stalling research and help, would and should be an issue that has been all but ignored by the media. Will America see this for what it is? I hope so. Saint Ronnie was a self appointed explitive.


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