Chapter 15; The Song of Susan
Excerpt from Renegade Suit, the autobiography of David Lazer (with Jay O’Brian)
Jim was devastated to learn about Richard Hunt’s and Howard Ashman’s illness, though at the time I only knew about Richard, who told me himself. Howard’s illness was a secret even to his musical partner Alan Menken at the time. AIDS was very poorly understood back then. Scientists had only recently discovered the HIV virus and the anti-retroviral drugs hadn’t yet seen wide distribution. To have AIDS was a slow but inevitable death sentence. And to make matters worse, it wasn’t getting the attention that it needed. The government was blasé about it all and many of the self-proclaimed moral authorities were blaming the victims, suggesting that it was “God’s justice” in action because the disease was primarily affecting homosexual men in the US.
Jim wasn’t having it. He made sure that Richard and Howard both got every medical advantage they could, which wasn’t much back then. He was also bound and determined to raise awareness. The disease had been something abstract for him (and me) prior to that moment. We were all scared and horrified at the devastation of the disease, but much in the same way we were horrified and scared about the famine in Ethiopia. It was horrible, but it was
somewhere else.
Now AIDS wasn’t “somewhere else”. It was killing the men we loved.
Jim, Bernie, Diana, and I decided that we would do something about it. We would use the resources we had to make a difference. Not only was the Walt Disney Entertainment Company going to donate to AIDS research and treatment, but MGM was going to produce a new movie specifically about the AIDS crisis. And we were going to make sure that Middle America knew it was
their problem too.
The Song of Susan was thus born.
To our happy surprise Ron Miller, Frank Wells, and the board didn’t resist. Frank, in fact, let us know that money was no obstacle. Tom Wilhite, the president of MGM, was happy to support us. Because for all the homophobic victim blaming, the truth was that the disease did not discriminate. Disease, unlike man, never does. We heard more than one story about unambiguously innocent people like children getting AIDS due to blood transfusions, or in some cases simply being born to an infected mother. The disease was guaranteed to spread further. It would not stay in one population no matter how much some people assumed it would. We were going to make it clear to all of America that this wasn’t a “gay man’s problem”, it was everyone’s problem.
Our heroine would be Susan, a young, suburban middle-class girl of 17 whose bike is hit by a drunk driver and who contracts HIV through a blood transfusion. We cast Molly Ringwald to drive home the “girl next door” aspect. Though by all accounts a “good girl” who participates in her church and school, Susan suddenly becomes a pariah in her community as salacious and malicious rumors spread. Suddenly she’s forced to confront the very bigotry and judgement that less privileged people have to go through every day. She befriends Benny, played by Richard Hunt, an HIV-positive gay man, and through their experiences we learn the horrors of disease and prejudice.
We set the film in New York, with Susan a Long Island girl. To write and direct we found Ron Nyswaner, who turned Jim Henson’s film treatment into a deeply moving screenplay. We made it an MGM film to further add gravitas to the production. Diana and I would share the producer credit while Jim and Bernie would claim the executive producer billet. Howard, who was working near non-stop already on
Mort and developing songs and a treatment on his own for an animated
Aladdin[1], wrote a single, beautiful original song to go with the soundtrack, “The Song of Susan”, performed by Freddy Mercury, who wrote the rest of the beautiful and poignant sound track.
Freddy was an early add, having approached us to work on it, and working for scale at that. He’d lost many friends and loved ones to the disease already. He was honestly irate to hear about Howard. “It’s all bloody bullshit, you know?” Freddy told me years later. “For most of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s I’d slept around and did drugs and basically lived like a stupid rock star with a death wish. Meanwhile, old Howard was faithful and true to every man that he loved, which wasn’t many. And his strongest drug was dry sherry. Unfortunately, one of the men that he loved lived more like I used to. And yet Howard dies and I somehow dodge the bullet[2]. I guess the universe has a fucked sense of irony, you know?”
By this point Howard was losing his once-incredible stamina and we were flying animators and directors and producers out to Fishkill, NY, to work with him. In addition to Richard, Jim secretly had Howard, who was very sick at the time but doing an incredible job of hiding it, make a cameo. Most of us didn’t know about it until the film debuted. It was how most of us learned about Howard being sick.
Howard and Freddy won the Oscar for the song, along with a Grammy for both song and soundtrack. Richard won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for the film. We lost Howard just a year later and Richard a year or so after that.
The Song of Susan received near universal praise at the time of its release. It’s gotten some pushback in recent years, but we remain proud of it and of the awareness we brought to what was an issue that nobody wanted to talk about in 1989.
For me, it will always be my greatest and most important production, not for what it did for
my reputation, but what it did for Richard and Howard.
Requiescat in pace, Richard and Howard, and thank you both for the gifts that you gave to us all
[1]
Aladdin was Howard Ashman’s idea, not a project envisioned in-house. He’d once played the character in Children’s Theater and loved the story and character. In our timeline Katzenberg didn’t like what they’d done with it and pushed it off, recruiting a reluctant Ashman to instead work on
Beauty and the Beast, a film originally envisioned by Disney for Richard Williams’ team after
Roger Rabbit. With
Roger Rabbit animated in house in this world and Williams largely retired now that
The Thief and the Cobbler has seen the light of day (much of his former staff went to Bluth),
Beauty and the Beast as we know it has been butterflied.
[2] All of these were hard decisions to make, to say the least. Needless to say, determining when and how someone contracts a horrible disease, especially one that can show no symptoms for years, is a serious challenge. Freddy Mercury reportedly had a negative HIV test result in 1982 and hypothetically could have taken steps to protect himself. In this timeline it was a false positive that scared him into playing things more carefully, a small spot of hope and happiness in a sad part of the timeline. By contrast, Howard Ashman reportedly lived a monogamous life the whole time. Alas, his first long-term lover did not, and was dying of AIDS by 1982, so Howard was probably HIV positive already at this point. Hunt’s point of infection I can’t figure out, though according to
Jim Henson: A Biography he was living with someone HIV positive by 1986, but was likely positive himself already at that point. Likely he'd been positive since the early 1980s. And this timeline has taken him to some of the early outbreak sites even before HIV had a name. There’s so much indiscriminate randomness to it all, that the end, I had to follow where the narrative took me, which was to accept the randomness and indiscriminate nature of it all, and simply attempt to honor those we lost and celebrate those we didn't in both timelines.