In 1986, five years after the AIDS crisis began in the United States, Brent Nicholson Earle went for a run.
Not for exercise, and not for a short jog around the block. For the next 20 months, Earle ran about a marathon a day around the perimeter of the United States to raise awareness about AIDS.
The first cases of what would become known as AIDS in the United States were reported in June of 1981. As of 2021, more than 700,000 people in the U.S. have died from HIV-related illness. During his 20-month run – the American Run for the End of AIDS (AREA) – Earle himself lost 25 friends.
After he completed his run in 1987, he continued to lose friends and eventually found out that he too was HIV positive. The most people he ever lost in a year was 42 in 1991, he says in a new documentary called “For the Love of Friends.”
“Whenever I mention any of these numbers to anyone who didn’t live through it, I can see the look of disbelief in their eyes,” Earle says in the film. “They can’t begin to comprehend it.”
“For the Love of Friends,” which comes from first-time film director Cara Consilvio, details Earle’s life and his first run. Consilvio, who before the film mostly worked as a director and producer for theater and opera, also directed a play of the same name about Earle’s life that features heavily in the documentary.
Most of us won’t run one marathon over the course of our lives. By my calculations, Earle ran over 300 of them in that 20-month span, all for a cause that affected him and his community severely, but nobody else seemed to care about at the time. I recently had the wonderful opportunity to speak with Consilvio about how she became aware of Earle’s story and what it was like to work so closely with him while working on the film and stage show. “For the Love of Friends” will begin airing on Public Broadcasting Stations on June 1.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
I had never heard of this story before. When did you first come into contact with Brent and his story?
Cara Consilvio: I had met Brent at a Thanksgiving once, but I didn’t know. I knew he was an AIDS activist who worked with my mother-in-law, Barbara Martínez. They had produced this yearly event for World AIDS Day for many, many years. But I didn’t really know his story.
Barbara is very good friends with Brent, and they had been talking, and Brent expressed that no one had ever told his story in a film, and really wanted his story told. She started thinking, and my husband Alex Charner – who’s also a producer on the film – and I have a small film production company, Hup! Productions. All of a sudden, my mother-in-law and my father-in-law came to me and said, maybe you and Alex could tell this story. I Googled [Brent], and there was a People Magazine article, from like 1990, which talks about his run around America. I was like, oh my god! This is a crazy story.
We set up a meeting with Brent to see if he might be interested in having us tell his story, and I ended up talking to him for five hours. So that was really my introduction to Brent, and getting to know him and trying to sort of pitch him on my take for the film. We really got along right away. We both were actors in New York at a certain point, which I feel like bonds people – the trauma of it [laughs]. So that’s when I was first introduced to Brent’s story.
He seems like the type of guy who would talk to you for five hours, in the best way.
Consilvio: Yes, yes. He can tell so many stories, and we have, I mean, amazing amounts of footage with him. That was one of the challenges of creating the doc. I actually did the first cut before I gave it to my editor, and it was four hours. [Laughs] So there was a lot that was cut out.
I know there’s the play as well as the film. Did you decide to do those simultaneously, or did one come before the other?
Consilvio: I was really worried that we had no visual materials. All of the footage that we found, of the run, all the news footage – it was not easy to find. When we started the film and started interviews with Brent, I didn’t have anything.
In talking to Brent, he sort of had this melancholy about his life in the theater. Before he went on the run, he’d been an actor and working in New York, and he really wanted to also tell his story in theaters, since that is his first love. Myself being a theatre and opera director as well, I thought it would be really interesting for Brent to return to the stage after 30 years away, and then really work with the next generation and explore how you pass a story to the next generation. We brought in a group of amazing artists to help him tell his story – at that time, he had an IV, he was technically in hospice. He was doing the show, and we had all these young performers literally step into his shoes and help him tell his story. It was an amazing process, and it ended up being a larger part of the documentary than I think I originally anticipated. But it was sort of conceived at the same time.
Yeah, the play looked so interesting. We don’t really get to see the finished product, but can you talk a little bit about how it’s constructed? I know there are musical numbers, and people are playing different characters – it seems like sort of a complex undertaking.
Consilvio: Brent gave me access to all his journals from the run. So a lot of material is from the journals. Like the film, it sort of travels around the country. The audience gets to go with him. And then, I had already done a lot of Brent’s film interviews, so a lot of the script I took from the transcript of the film interviews, including the lyrics for The Saint [a former gay club in New York City] song. I commissioned a composer to write the song based on things that Brent had said in this interview.
Some of the other songs, like the song that’s in the credits of the movie, “Remember,” is something that Brent had written 30 years ago, and had never been set to music. We had three composers … there’s an opera aria, there’s a rock song, there’s two musical theater songs. It was really just, throw everything at the story and try to tell it in a lot of different ways. It was super fun.
You mentioned you had difficulty finding archival footage, and the documentary mentions how there wasn’t a ton of national coverage of this story. I’d never heard of this story, and I have my own ideas about why that is. But I would love to hear about what you think, and I’m also interested in how you finally found all that footage.
Consilvio: Yeah, you know, Brent talks about it in the film, and he talks about it like, you know – he was gay, he was running around America, and it was about AIDS. And so, there was a lot of press that just didn’t want to cover it at all, that frankly weren’t interested. It was just a completely different time. He talks about, when you look at WorldPride now, the number of corporate sponsors – but he couldn’t even get a sneaker sponsor. They funded the run by selling t-shirts and buttons all over New York at tables. It was tough.
In terms of finding the archival footage, we wrapped filming right before COVID started. Then it was a good six months before it was safe for us to go with Brent to his storage facility – you know, everybody masked up – and just go through his boxes. We found a VCR, and I started watching all of his VHS tapes … then after I found the footage, it was an amazing journey to find out who could license us the footage. A lot of the local news footage, they were able to license it to us, but we actually had to use the digitized version that we found, because the footage had disappeared in a fire, or didn’t exist anymore. So all of that was really, really challenging to find. The one footage that was easy to get was that NBC footage, which was through Getty, so they’re wonderful, and got that for us, but it was a real challenge.
And then photos – all his photos were on slides, so going through an entire photo collection, and trying to find photos from the run, and photos of his mom, and photos of his family was a real journey. Alex Charner really was working closely with me on scanning all of those slides and getting all of those materials together.
That sounds painstaking. It’s funny you bring up the sneakers – that was one of my favorite bits. It’s so obvious, but you never think about it. I’m a runner, and I was like, how long would it take me to run through a brand new pair of sneakers?
Consilvio: You go through them pretty quickly when you’re running like, 20-25 miles a day.
For sure. I’ve never run a marathon – I’ve run a couple of halves – but that sounds daunting.
Consilvio: I always think about Brent when people tell me, oh I ran a marathon. First of all, I’m blown away that anyone can run a marathon or a half marathon. But then I think about Brent, who did it like, six days a week for 20 months, and it’s insane! I’m sure some people have done things like it, but at the time, he was kind of the first person to do such a long distance – almost 10,000 miles around the country.
For sure. You talk a little bit about this in the documentary, but I just think about how much he must have had to eat to maintain.
Consilvio: Yeah! I think they ate a lot of peanut butter and spaghetti [laughs].
You mentioned you were able to read his journals, and that a lot of that is in the film. Beyond the scope of this story in general, was there anything you learned that you were really struck by or surprised by? What was it like getting to work so closely with him for that long?
Consilvio: The thing that I started to really wonder about was really why? Why did he do it, and what sort of pushed him through it? The depth of his grief for his friends that he lost, and this calling that he felt to sort of be a voice for the people who died. You know, he lost so many people – and I think he still feels that. I was surprised by that. I mean, it haunts him, but it empowers him. He’s not doing very well right now, but even – he was in the hospital last week, and I spoke to him, and he was still coordinating for the AIDS Walk in New York, so we could have a booth there. He’s planning this event in December, and he doesn’t even know if he’ll still be with us. But he thinks it’s so important. It doesn’t matter to him. I’ve never met anyone who puts their own personal comfort aside for other people in the way that Brent does.
Wow. Sorry, I’m tearing up a little bit.
Consilvio: You know, when I first met him I was like, is this for real? But he really is just an amazing, good person who cares about other people deeply.
Yeah, and I think the amount of people he lost, which is mentioned in the documentary, is also really striking. We lived and are still living through COVID, and everyone knows someone who was affected, or who lost somebody. But hearing the amount of people that one person knew who passed away during the AIDS crisis is really striking.
Consilvio: Yeah, it’s astounding. That one story that Anita [Ross-Fein, friend of Brent] – she’s passed away since we filmed the movie, unfortunately – but she talks about being the stage manager on a Broadway show, and a few months after the show, half the cast is gone. That’s just crazy to me, as someone who works in the theater, that you can do a show and then you turn around and people are just gone. It’s hard to really understand it.
You’ve directed operas and you’ve directed for the stage, but this is your feature film directorial debut, right?
Consilvio: Yes, this is my first feature film directing job. It’s awesome. I’ve learned so much. It’s been so exciting and challenging and exhilarating – you know, all the things.
What are some of the challenges you faced moving from the stage to screen?
Consilvio: Well, with documentaries particularly, so much of the writing happens after you film it. You go into it with an idea, a thesis of what the structure of the film could be. But until you capture all the interviews and see what you have, then it’s a real writing process. I worked with the transcriptions and really did a paper cut first to try and structure the film. Brent’s life is so huge. To try to find the focus, and how to really weave the different story threads together so that the audience can follow and hopefully be moved, I would say that that’s the most challenging – the edit and the writing. And the archival licensing is very challenging [laughs].
What are you hoping that people take away from this story?
Consilvio: One of the theater actors, Sarah [Misch], in the film she talks about when things are really scary, how it’s easy to instead of taking action, just do nothing – just sort of huddle up and live in your own bubble. I hope that people can see that even when it’s the worst time, there is always something that you could do. Be inspired by Brent. He just decided to go out and do something. There wasn’t a lot of choice of what he could do, but his impact was great. I hope it inspires people to find what has meaning for them and take some action in their communities to try and make the world a little bit better.
