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Features
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Queen Latifah Warms Up for Sundance
In advance of a closing night gala slot at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, the star of HBO’s Life Support holds impressive court in Pasadena.
Monday, January 15, 2007 at 4:15 PM
By Shelley Gabert
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Johnny Nunez/WireImage.com
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A forceful star and co-executive producer
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Tragically, AIDS has increasingly in the United States become a disease of color. According to a May 15th, 2006 article in Newsweek, even though African Americans make up just 13 percent of the U.S. population, they account for 51 percent of new HIV diagnoses. Black men are diagnosed at more than seven times the rate of white men, and black females at an astounding 20 times the rate of white women.
HBO’s upcoming movie Life Support, which is set to be the closing night gala at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, tells the tale of one such real-life woman: journalist, novelist, screenwriter and social-cultural commentator Andrea Williams. The sister of Nelson George, executive producer of HBO’s 2004 drama Everyday People, Williams was diagnosed with the disease in 1993. A mother of three daughters, she lives in Brooklyn – where Life Support is set – and continues to work as a peer counselor for a local non-profit organization, Life Force.
During a panel discussion this past weekend at the Television Critics Association Winter Press Tour, the no-nonsense Williams reluctantly shared the story of how she had contracted AIDS through unprotected sex with her husband of 18 years, Leslie "Sha" Williams, an intravenous drug user. But it was Oscar nominee Queen Latifah, who plays the lead character of Ana Willis in Life Support, who took up the cause most compellingly.
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Vera Anderson/WireImage.com
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Co-star and musical contributor Foxx
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"The problem right off the bat with AIDS was we looked at it as a gay man's disease and we let everybody else catch it,” Latifah began. “We were prejudiced as a country against gay people, and we are to this day. So because of that, now everybody is susceptible to it."
"It's the same way you put drugs in a black community,” she added. “You can't put drugs in one community. Drugs feel too damn good. So whoever gets a hold of it is going to do it. Now everyone's community is affected by it. When we understand that we are a human race, what affects you affects me, then we'll look at this thing for what it really is.”
For Latifah, the disease of AIDS often comes down to a woman's self-esteem. "You know for a guy to say, ‘Hey, I don't want to wear this condom. It don't feel the same,' well, now the ball is in your court,” she maintains. “The confident woman will say, 'Either you wear it or you're not getting none.' But the not-so-confident woman will break and say, ' All right,' and reluctantly allow you to take it off.”
In her executive producer role, Latifah felt that she could also contribute some of what she saw growing up in Brooklyn. Co-star Jamie Foxx, whose participation presumably helped get Life Support made, provided the song that plays over the closing credits. Looking very dapper, Foxx nodded many times as Latifah literally wowed and shut up the crowd.
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Jessie McCarthy/WireImage.com
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Co-star Anna Deavere Smith
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Such as when she later took on the United States’ approach to AIDS education and immediately jumped on the hot button of sex education in schools. "If you're Christian, you won't catch this because we're only going to fund faith-based initiatives by the way,” she stated. “If you preach abstinence, you can have our money as the United States of America, but if you don't, sorry. We can't help you out.”
“So now, her [Andrea Williams] organization, which is on the streets of Brooklyn every day testing people, giving out condoms to people, people who might not ordinarily buy them, has no more money,” Latifah lamented. “We can't even give you a pamphlet. We're broke. We can only test women."
To get a sense of how persuasive Latifah was this past weekend in Pasadena, one critic was prompted to ask whether she would ever consider running for political office. Her reply: “I cannot run for office because I did inhale."
But HIV/AIDS remains a deeply personal issue for Latifah, who has lost friends and two of her closest cousins to the disease. One was a heterosexual male with a transfusion and the other an intravenous drug-using female. "We're talking about the not-so-smart things people sometimes do for love,” Latifah observed.
Added writer-director George: "The invisible group is straight women. It's been straight women, black women, minority women getting the virus, and they're getting it in big numbers. I wanted to give them a chance to be voiced, that's why those support group scenes are in there so these real women can speak about their experience. So the whole film comes out of that desire - to let black women speak."
[ After premiering at Sundance, Life Support will sneak preview on HBO On Demand during Black History Month in February and then begin airing on the network March 10th. The film also stars Anna Deavere Smith (The West Wing, American President), Wendell Pierce (HBO's The Wire), Evan Ross (Diana Ross' son), Tracee Ellis Ross (Girlfriends), Gloria Reuben, Rachel Nicks, Darrin Dewitt Henson (Soul Food) and Tony Rock (All of Us).]
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