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Declaring that ten percent of the population is gay, the director believed that “at least half of them” would come to Philadelphia. Regardless of straight America’s reaction, Demme trusted that he could count on the gay audience. Less cynically, many mainstream critics regarded Philadelphia as long overdue and hoped that it would help the public to understand the AIDS crisis more realistically and humanely. Frank Rich remarked that “the gay characters are uniformly saintly,” while, with the important exception of Denzel Washington, “the straight characters are either deified (the hero’s uniformly supportive family) or demonized (the hero’s monstrously bigoted former legal colleagues).” Despite reservations about the film’s artistic merits and its portrait of reality, many reviewers praised Hanks’ courage in playing the lead and, on this basis alone, encouraged readers to see the film. The straight press gave Philadelphia mixed reviews, objecting to the easy answers and two-dimensional characters. Admitted Demme: “I didn’t want to risk knocking our audience back feet with images they’re not prepared to see.”
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Indeed, one might not realize that Tom Hanks’ character, Andy Beckett, is gay until his longtime lover appears in his hospital room fifteen minutes into the film. Philadelphia was meant to tap into this kind of response in other ill-informed people and offer a much more complex perspective on the medical, legal, and personal aspects of the disease.Īlthough hoping to educate the film’s audiences, Demme was concerned about alienating its straight viewers by frankly depicting the sex lives of gay men, and so he tread lightly here. Recalling a 1984 train ride when he overheard a fellow passenger reveal that he had AIDS, Demme admitted he was “terrified” and wanted to escape the confines of the compartment in flight from the infected individual. He never intended to make the film for a gay audience but saw himself as the ideal viewer. Demme’s Academy Award as best director for The Silence of the Lambs (1991) helped get Philadelphia in production. The film’s straight director, Jonathan Demme, began to develop the project in 1988 with gay screenwriter Ron Nyswaner, and they selected the story that would become Philadelphia in 1990.
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But how did this movie, so radical for its time, come to be made and how was it marketed to a mainstream mass audience? Furthermore, how did it manage to attract the latter without alienating the “gay gaze” of its GLBT viewers? Tom Hanks and Denzel Washington in Philadelphia Not surprisingly, many gays were disappointed, but Philadelphia remains a landmark in terms of proving that gay-related films could be profitable and popular in the American mainstream.
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But if the former waited anxiously for word on the film’s box office potential, the latter worried about how the movie would depict gay people for mass audience consumption. At the time, it was regarded as a “bellwether project” for future AIDS films and was eagerly anticipated both by Hollywood and by the gay community. The movie’s worldwide earnings still eclipse those of Brokeback Mountain or The Dallas Buyers Club or any other GLBT film made since that time, making a re-evaluation of Philadelphia worthwhile.īy 1993, theater and television had produced many offerings on gay themes and the AIDS crisis, but Philadelphia was the first big-budget, major studio movie to center on these themes.* As such, it was overburdened with demands. WHEN PHILADELPHIA passed the twentieth anniversary of its release in December 2013, it was surprising to realize that the film is still Hollywood’s most successful gay-themed movie to date in terms of box office receipts.