The King is Dead...Long Live, Ahhh Fuck It

Schamus wearing his professor's bow tie, sits outside Dodge Hall

So as you may or may not have heard there was what we like to call a clusterfuck of a coup d'état over at Focus Features, and visionary producer and distributor; James Schamus was basically let go with Universal forcing Focus to relocate to Los Angeles under the guise of some other guy whom no one has ever heard of, and now Focus is going to suck more than the government shutdown. This hits no one harder than someone like me, and I'm not showing off here, but got to not know him personally but at least pick his brain for a semester during grad school when he taught my Narrative in Film class in a tiny dingy classroom at Dodge Hall at Columbia University in the Fall of 2008. 

It was the hardest single class I've ever had, and also the most rewarding. It showed me that there was hope for the film industry as long as visionaries like Schamus were still big players in the game, and really understood the medium better than the money-hounds. 

Schamus and one of his favorite collaborators; Ang Lee. They made three films together.

Here's what I THINK happened, because no one really knows. I'm sure it will be made public soon. Focus, though being owned by Universal has maintained its integrity throughout and also its loyalty to independent film. Universal was feeling antsy and decided out with the old and in with the new. Focus made it's home in New York City where film is still appreciated as an art form, so they decided well, to hell with that, we'll sell our souls and move the whole company to Los Angeles, leaving Schamus and everyone he ever made famous or important back in NYC to fend for themselves. 

A little history about Schamus. He started out with his own company called Good Machine, and personally pioneered the New Queer Cinema movement along with producers like Christine Vachon (another visionary) and her company Killer Films, which is also New York based. Together, they released the films of Gus Van Sant, Todd Haynes, Tom Kalin, Derek Jarman, and others, building a repore within the indie world as mavericks of cinema. 

Schamus and fellow renegades of cinema, director John Waters and producer Christin Vachon.

Once Schamus started getting more notice, he took things into a more mainstream direction and founded Focus Features, which gave him the opportunity to take small independent films that no one else would touch like Francois Ozon's masterpiece Swimming Pool (2003), and Todd Haynes' definitive work Far from Heaven (2004) and managed not only to make them financially successful, but to win them all kinds of acclaim from the Palm d'Or (for The Pianist (2002)), to multiple Oscars and nominations (For Milk (2008) and (Brokeback Mountain (2005)) all the while maintaining what Gene Kelly repeats somewhat ironically in Singin' in the Rain (1952) ...dignity, always dignity. 

Brokeback Mountain (2005), a film who's meteoric rise and lasting affect on cinema culture would not have been possible without the guidance of James Schamus.

If I could just open things up here for a minute and speak to James Schamus directly, I would say that you sir, were a paragon, and an iconoclast of cinematic distribution and production in a sea of people who just want to make a quick buck. You have always held up your high standards and never given in to pressure. You've made successes out of the most unpredictable situations, and helped some of the best films of the last two decades be seen and appreciated. Focus will not be the same without you, and neither will the realm of American cinema. Without you, many masterpieces that only you would see the potential in will falter into nothingness, and that is why your departure from Focus is so genuinely sad on all of us. But I at least know that this is not the last we'll hear of Schamus. I have a feeling he'll stick to his principals as he always has and go back to his indie roots, championing the underdog, and remaining an integral cog in the scope of cinema. We all wish you the best. 

Below some trailers for Focus films: 

How To Survive A Plague: A Vital New Documentary About Our Millenium's Greatest Crisis

Why do people not make films about the AIDS pandemic? Because they can make them about puppies, and horsies, and 3D dance-offs. Just like the government has always done, the film industry generally turns its back on the greatest cultural and medical crisis of the 20th century and likes to basically pretend it's not happening. You didn't even hear the term AIDS in film until the 90's. Reagan didn't even say it on television during his whole 8 year term as president. 

Even when And The Band Played On was released in 1993 most of the principal cast in the film took their roles despite the advice of their agents which all discouraged it in fear that it would hurt their respective careers.

Key AIDS activist at the forefront of the ACT UP movement, Peter Staley is prominently featured in the documentary.

There have been a lot of docs that have come out about gay culture in the 70's from Before Stonewall (1984)  to Making the Boys (2011) about the seminal Mart Crowley play and subsequent film The Boys in the Band (1970) and also features like Gus Van Sant's Academy Award winning Milk (2008), but no film has ever quite dealt with the AIDS epidemic the way that How to Survive a Plague (2012) does.
I don't think people that grew up in my generation for the most part tend to understand just the level of crisis people were in back in the 70's, and this is why it's important for docs like this to exist. AIDS awareness has always been readily available to us, and we've all had info-sessions on it in schools, not knowing that only decades before people were dropping like flies and no one knew why and when they begged their government for help, the government turned their heads and did absolutely jack squat about it. If AIDS had hit Reagan's friends in Greenwich Connecticut, he would have been on that faster than a fly on shit, but because it concerned primarily the gay community which he at that point had publicly stated that he believed to be a mental disorder, he couldn't care less.

Openly gay journalist, writer, and freelance reporter Randy Shilts wrote the first ever catalog of the AIDS pandemic titled appropriately And the Band Played On: Politics People and the AIDS Epidemic published in 1987. This followed his first non-fiction novel The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk (1978). He died of the disease in 1994.

What we now consider as AIDS awareness - lectures, free testing, the AZT cocktail, and even those silly GAP t-shirts were all a result of everyday people that walked the streets and saw less and less of their friends, losing someone to this pandemic every single day, and decided that if the people whose job it was to protect them were doing nothing to do so, then they would take matters into their own hands. It was a long and arduous process but the result of which was light-years beyond anything the Center for Disease Control or the Federal Administration could have accomplished in double that time. 
It's beyond important that documentaries like this continue to come out and teach people now, for whom AIDS is not necessarily a death sentence anymore, that once upon a time when it seemed at its most hopeless there were a some unimaginably brave people who refused to accept the Keep Calm and Carry On attitude, and became proactive so that generations later what was once a plague can one day be completely a thing of the past.

Below is the trailer for the film. It is absolutely a must-see.

And below are trailers for some of the other films mentioned in this post: