Larry Kramer
Also Known As: not available
Biography: Laurence David Kramer (June 25, 1935 – May 27, 2020) was an American playwright, author, film producer, public health advocate, and gay rights activist. He began his career rewriting scripts while working for Columbia Pictures, which led him to London, where he worked with United Artists. There he wrote the screenplay for the film Women in Love (1969) and received an Academy Award nomination for his work.
Department: Acting
Place of Birth: Bridgeport, Connecticut, USA
Birthday: June 25, 1935
Deathday: May 27, 2020
Adult: No
Gender: Male
Popularity:
Known For:
Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt
Overview: On the eve of 1987's Second National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights, surviving families and friends of people who have died of AIDS prepare panels to be added to a large-scale memorial quilt project. Drawing from the sea of names memorialized, director Robert Epstein focuses on the lives of six people. Alongside the intimate profiles offered, through news footage and interviews, Epstein puts the AIDS crisis in the larger context of social and government response to the disease.
Genres: History Documentary
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1989-12-01
Popularity:
Corpus Christi: Playing with Redemption
Overview: Terrence McNally’s Corpus Christi is a play retelling the Jesus story, with Jesus as a gay man living in the 1950s in Corpus Christi, Texas. This documentary follows the troupe, playwright, and audience around the world on a five-year journey of Terrence McNally’s passion play, where voices of protest and support collide on one of the central issues facing the LGBT community: religion.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: en
Release Date: 2013-11-10
Popularity:
Joe Papp in Five Acts
Overview: Joe Papp, the founder of the New York Shakespeare Festival and, subsequently, The Public Theater—arguably the most important theatre in North America—is profiled in this documentary that neither sanctifies nor vilifies him. He brought us free Shakespeare in the Park, Hair and A Chorus Line, and nurtured many of America’s greatest playwrights, directors and actors. His complex personality and mercurial behavior are much in evidence and spoken of with frankness through interviews with some of America’s most celebrated artists, including Meryl Streep, Christopher Walken, Martin Sheen, Kevin Kline, and James Earl Jones.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: en
Release Date: 2012-04-30
Popularity:
The Out List
Overview: Through the voices of Americans from all walks of life, The Out List explores the identities of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender community in America. In this series of intimate interviews, a diverse group of LGBTQ personalities bring color and depth to their experiences of gender and sexuality. With wit and wisdom, this set of trailblazing individuals weaves universal themes of love, loss, trial, and triumph into the determined struggle for full equality.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: en
Release Date: 2013-06-26
Popularity:
Howard
Overview: Though legendary lyricist Howard Ashman died far too young, his impact on Broadway, movies, and the culture at large were incalculable. Told entirely through rare archival footage and interviews with Ashman’s family, friends, associates, and longtime partner Bill Lauch, Howard is an intimate tribute to a once-in-a-generation talent and a rousing celebration of musical storytelling itself.
Genres: Documentary Music
Original Language: en
Release Date: 2018-04-22
Popularity:
Positive
Overview: This film powerfully documents New York City's gay community's response to the AIDS crisis as they are forced to organize themselves after the government's failure to stem the epidemic. Activists who are interviewed include playwrite Larry Kramer, People With AIDS Coalition co-founder Michael Callen (who died of AIDS in 1994), New York filmmaker and journalist Phil Zwickler, as well as representatives from ACT-UP, Queer Nation and the Gay Men's Health Crisis.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: de
Release Date: 1990-05-04
Popularity:
Vito
Overview: In the aftermath of Stonewall, a newly politicized Vito Russo found his voice as a gay activist and critic of LGBTQ+ representation in the media. He went on to write "The Celluloid Closet", the first book to critique Hollywood's portrayals of gays on screen. During the AIDS crisis in the 1980s, Vito became a passionate advocate for justice via the newly formed ACT UP, before his death in 1990.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: en
Release Date: 2011-10-14
Popularity:
Larry Kramer In Love & Anger
Overview: From the onset of the AIDS epidemic, author Larry Kramer emerged as a fiery activist, an Old Testament-style prophet full of righteous fury who denounced both the willful inaction of the government and the refusal of the gay community to curb potentially risky behaviors. Co-founder of both organization Gay Men's Health Crisis and the direct action protest group ACT UP, Kramer was vilified by some who saw his criticism to be an expression of self-hatred, while lionized by others who credit him with waking up the gay community — and, eventually, the government and medical establishment — to the devastation of the disease.
Genres: History Documentary
Original Language: en
Release Date: 2015-06-29
Popularity:
Burden of Genius
Overview: In 1967, Dr. Thomas Starzl stunned the world with the first successful liver transplantation. His breakthrough provoked controversy. Critics accused him of recklessness, even murder. Others declared it the beginning of a medical revolution. "Burden of Genius" is the story of an innovator as complex and elusive as the biological secrets he unlocked. It is also a reflection on the price of scientific progress by the man many consider the greatest surgeon of the 20th century and the father of transplantation.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: en
Release Date: 2017-01-01
Popularity:
How to Survive a Plague
Overview: A story of two coalitions – ACT UP and TAG (Treatment Action Group) – whose activism and innovation turned AIDS from a death sentence into a manageable condition. Despite having no scientific training, these self-made activists infiltrated the pharmaceutical industry and helped identify promising new drugs, moving them from experimental trials to patients in record time.
Genres: Documentary History
Original Language: en
Release Date: 2012-09-20
Popularity:
Making the Boys
Overview: Before Prop 8, Milk or Will & Grace, before the AIDS epidemic, gay pride parades or the Stonewall uprising, "The Boys in the Band" changed everything. "Making the Boys" explores the drama, struggle and enduring legacy of the first-ever gay play and subsequent Hollywood movie to successfully reach a mainstream audience. Featuring anecdotes from the surviving cast and filmmakers, as well as perspectives by legendary figures from stage and screen, it traces the behind-the-scenes drama and lasting legacy of this cultural milestone.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: en
Release Date: 2011-03-11
Popularity:
Gay Sex in the 70s
Overview: A chronicle of gay culture in New York during the post-Stonewall, pre-AIDs era. Thirteen men and one woman look back at gay life and sex in Manhattan and Fire Island - from Stonewall (June, 1969) to the first reporting on AIDS (June, 1981). They describe the rapid move from repression to celebration, from the removal of shame to joy, the on-going search for "someone," the freedom before AIDS, the friendships, and brotherhood.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: en
Release Date: 2005-04-26
Popularity:
After Stonewall
Overview: This sequel to "Before Stonewall" documents the history of gay and lesbian life from the riots at Stonewall in 1969 to the present. Narrated by Melissa Etheridge, the film explains the work, struggles, victories, and defeats the gay community has weathered to become a vibrant and integral part of North American society.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1999-06-06
Popularity:
30 Years from Here
Overview: The Emmy Award-nominated 30 Years from Here examines the AIDS pandemic over the past 30 years. Activists and medical experts that share stories include Terrence McNally, Larry Kramer, Marjorie Hill, Frank Spinelli, Jerry Mitchell, and Larry Flick.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: en
Release Date: 2011-11-25
Popularity:
Sex Positive
Overview: Sex Positive explores the life of Richard Berkowitz, a revolutionary gay S&M hustler turned AIDS activist in the 1980s, whose incomparable contribution to the invention of safe sex has never been aptly credited. Mr. Berkowitz emerged from the epicenter of the epidemic demanding a solution to the problem before the outside world would take heed. Now destitute and alone, Mr. Berkowitz tells his story to a world who never wanted to listen.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: en
Release Date: 2009-06-12
Popularity:
Every Act of Life
Overview: The life of Tony-winning playwright Terrence McNally (Master Class, Ragtime): 60 years of groundbreaking plays and musicals, the struggle for gay rights, addiction and recovery, finding true love, and the relentless pursuit of inspiration.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: en
Release Date: 2018-04-23
Popularity:
Stories from the Plague
Overview: The story of the AIDS epidemic from its early, ominous beginnings and the wave of death that followed, through the formation of ACT UP and the arrival of life-prolonging medicines. This program is comprised of interview outtakes from the documentary motion picture VITO, about gay activist and film historian Vito Russo.
Genres: No genres available
Original Language: en
Release Date: 2012-08-18
Popularity:
Voices from the Front
Overview: In New York City, a distraught activist confronts the mayor with a story of a friend who languished on a cot in an emergency room hallway for nine days, only to die 48 hours after leaving the hospital. In 1988, thousands of activists hold the Food and Drug Administration under siege, demanding speedier drug approval. In 1990 AIDS activists converge on the National Institute of Health, calling for a more equitable clinical trial system and expanded research into new drugs and treatment. Voices From the Front, the first feature-length documentary on AIDS activism in America, makes clear the emotional and political effects of community activism using the voices of those directly engaged. It is a powerful distillation of pictures and words from events organized to change public consciousness, expose the failure of the health care systems, and challenge government inaction and neglect concerning AIDS.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1992-03-18
Popularity:
The Books of James: Director's Cut
Overview: Inspired by a collection of personal notebooks, this feature-length director’s cut of the short film by the same name is an experimental documentary on art, AIDS and activism. Following James Wentzy from South Dakota to New York City, the film traces his days from struggling and surviving as an artist to later becoming an AIDS video activist. In showcasing a unique individual through his involvement with the fight against AIDS and his tireless frontline reportage of the crisis, The Books of James is an intimate portrait of a neglected everyman/hero and unearths a time now forgotten.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: en
Release Date: 2006-01-01
Popularity:
Outrage
Overview: An indictment of closeted politicians who lobby for anti-gay legislation in the US.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: en
Release Date: 2009-04-24
Popularity:
The Man on the Fifth Floor
Overview: An intoxicating look inside New York's legendary Chelsea Hotel through the witty, irreverent lens of composer Gerald Busby. Swirling around Busby's humorous and heart-breaking life, from his Baptist childhood in Texas to his salvation as a gifted piano prodigy; from gay witch hunts at Yale University in the 50s to gay liberation in New York City in the 70s; from a creative, energetic life inside the legendary Chelsea Hotel to the dawn of the AIDS epidemic, the death of his partner of seventeen years, his descent into crack addiction, the loss of his friends, his money, his career, the film is also a journey through New York's most exhilarating and devastating decades, the 1970s - 1990s. Using interviews and archival footage, it vividly captures the zeitgeist of New York's most creative and tumultuous years, the years that witnessed the dawn of the gay sex revolution, the birth of the disco scene, the world of all-night bars, drugs, street cruising and the anonymous sex in the trucks.
Genres: No genres available
Original Language: en
Release Date:
Popularity: