<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="1" > primer</h1>
"It's a series without a final episode, and if you love movies, history, and probing, it's your best partner!" —Author The Fifth Power
I like to watch movies, especially films adapted from real events, because this kind of film is a history, has a strong sense of substitution and can cause the audience to think, and the real events that can be adapted into movies show its significance and value.
I'm used to looking for some information about the film before and after watching the movie every time, so I just list the real events and history behind the film to give the reader, and this series will be updated from time to time based on the films I have seen.
You can think of this series of articles as a guide to the movie or as an exploration of the real events that have happened, but I wrote it out of a hobby, and you can understand the history behind the movie after watching it.
Today we're introducing the history behind an American film, Dallas Buyers Club.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="7" > the film</h1>
In Dallas, 1986, Ron Woodruff (Matthew McConaughey), a Texas electrician who was extremely anti-gay, found himself suffering from a "gay disease", AIDS, and doctors asserted that he had only 30 days left to live. The AZT he used was the only anti-AIDS drug approved for marketing by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration at the time, but it was extremely toxic. To stay alive, Ron began researching various anti-AIDS prescriptions and alternative therapies, even smuggling unapproved drugs from around the world.
With the help of his attending physician, Dr. Sachs (Jennifer Garner), and his business partner, the transvestite gay Raymond (Jared Leto), Ron set up an underground organization called the Dallas Buyers Club to provide more "unconventional treatments" for AIDS patients, and many sick gay men turned to him. His actions were naturally obstructed and pressured by the FDA (US Food and Drug Administration, hereinafter referred to as the FDA) and drug manufacturers.
Ron eventually died in September 1992, 2557 days after he was told he had only 30 days to live. In the past 7 years, he has unremittingly fought hard against the disease, with the Drug Administration and pharmaceutical manufacturers, and enjoyed a truly living life... Based on a true story, the film tells the story of how a terminally ill patient struggles to survive and save thousands of people facing the same situation, and has been nominated for the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor/Supporting Actor in a Drama Category and won 29 awards.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="17" > the history behind the film</h1>
Part I: The protagonist of the film, Ron Woodruff, is a man
The protagonist of the film is originally named Ron Woodruff, a cowboy born and raised in Texas, USA, and his son inherited his father, Ron, who also worked as an electrician, and before 1986, this cowboy tried to live as before, indulging in alcohol and sex. But as his health deteriorated, after seeking medical treatment, the doctor diagnosed him with HIV, and from the initial refusal to the fact that he later saw more and more AIDS-related knowledge, he began to accept the fact that he had been infected with AIDS.
Ron had to start seeking treatment. At that time, a drug called AZT was being tested among AIDS patients (that is, clinical trials, not yet at the stage of official marketing), which was said to curb the disease and was the only AIDS treatment drug legally approved by the FDA for clinical treatment. But this drug is difficult to get, because it is a clinical trial, so it is randomly distributed to patients.
But as a standard Texas cowboy, Ron refused to wait to die, and he consulted the library with all sorts of REPORTS and the latest research reports on AIDS that he could find at the time, and in the absence of suitable treatment drugs in the United States. Through the introduction of others to Mexico to find a doctor whose license was revoked in the United States to develop a "primitive cocktail treatment", the treatment results worked for him.
But this "original cocktail treatment" contains drugs that have not been approved by the FDA. In order to treat the disease, and he also saw a lot of business opportunities in it, he bought a large number of DDC and T peptides that were banned from sale in the United States in Mexico, and pretended to be cancer patients to bring these drugs back to the United States in the name of self-use and sold them to more AIDS patients.
At first, his trafficking did not attract the attention of the FDA, and then because he sold more and more quantities and amounts of money, the FDA confiscated all of his stockpiles of drugs. So he realized that selling illegal drugs wasn't a long-term solution, and to circumvent legal scrutiny, Ron came up with a solution — he set up the Dallas Buyers Club.
Yes, it is to gather members, use the membership system to cover up his drug sales activities, he uses the method of not selling drugs but selling club membership rights to avoid the law, and the members of the club only need to pay $400 per month in membership fees, and they can get all the medicines necessary for the treatment of AIDS for free. For the $400 a month a member pays, the member gains the right to receive the therapeutic medicines he smuggles.
At the same time, AZT was officially launched on the market as the first approved AIDS drug, with a price of about $10,000 per capita per year, making it the most expensive marketed drug ever. Faced with the high price of AZT and the consequences of treatment with strong side effects, more and more AIDS patients are fleeing the hospital and joining the Dallas Buyers Club.
It is a fact that the Dallas Buyers Club treats five times as many AIDS patients as hospitals, but the mortality rate is only 10 percent. Ron's actions were undoubtedly provocative to the hospital and the government. His confrontation with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and with drugmakers has also intensified.
But in fact, Ron Woodruff was not sued by the FDA, he instead took the FDA to court, because when the FDA confiscated Ron's drugs according to law, the club was forced to shut down, and Ron's best friend died (in fact, he thought) AZT side effects, Ron took the FDA to court, demanding that the fda be approved by the fda repeal the law.
The California federal court ruled that Ron's approach was illegal, and after Ron lost the case, but the FDA was not as evil as in the movie, the FDA still allowed him to continue to import and use anti-HIV drugs personally, provided that the FDA provide drug trial data. In fact, since the 1990s, the FDA has cooperated with the Dallas Buyers Club founded by Ron.
Ron Woodruff died on September 12, 1992, seven years after he was diagnosed with HIV. Later, smaller doses of AZT were widely used in subsequent mixed drug therapies that saved millions of lives.
Part II: The Historical Background of the Rise of HIV in the Film
In fact, in the film and the protagonist Ron's fate development parallel to the treatment of his own HIV disease, another key main line is Ron's concept of "gay" change. This has to say that in the 1970s and 1980s, the attitude of the "gay movement" in mainstream American society.
Although the attitude towards homosexuality in American society has generally been tolerant and gradually accepted since the 1969 gay bar "Stonewall Inn", the outbreak of the disease has hit homosexuals hard as AIDS was first discovered and popularized in the "gay" community.
In September 1980, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) began to pay attention to the disease and classified it as an infectious disease, which was later named "X-love immunodeficiency syndrome", which became AIDS (HIV). Subsequently, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention conducted a social behavior survey of the first patient who was found to have this disease, and found that he was handsome in appearance, and before he was found to be ill, he continued to linger in places such as X love bars in major cities in the United States. An average of more than 100 special relationships with more than 100 partners per year.
Between 1981 and 1982, most doctors in the United States wanted to figure out what the deadly disease that was spreading among homosexual populations was, and doctors tentatively named the disease Homosexual Immunodeficiency (GRID). At the end of 1981, there were 270 cases of homosexual immunodeficiency in the United States, most of whom were young gay men. In Europe, there are 36 cases of homosexual immunodeficiency, half of which occur in France.
In 1981, the first case of AIDS was detected in the United States, and the number of infections in the United States alone reached hundreds of thousands throughout the 1980s. Because AIDS first spread among gay men, american newspapers were filled with words such as "gay killers", "homosexual plague", and "homosexual threat". Due to the media's impetus and influence, the attitude of the U.S. government to the American people towards AIDS at that time was that "only those who are punished by God will get sick."
Before 1990, during the administration of Republican President Reagan, conservative thinking was dominant, and at the height of the Cold War, the Reagan administration was busy engaged in an arms race with the Soviet Union, the entire medical expenditure was being cut, and the U.S. government's investment in AIDS research was very limited, let alone prevention.
In fact, in addition to the rapid spread of the gay community, HIV also existed in blood products, because most of the blood products in the United States at that time came from the blood donations of prison inmates, and many of them were infected with the virus, which also infected many people who were not gay.
Later, due to the huge profits involved, blood banks and blood product companies turned a deaf ear to the rapid spread of AIDS, resulting in a large number of hemophilia patients infected with HIV virus, and then in order to avoid patient complaints, most hospitals in Europe and the United States destroyed the use records of blood supplies.
But AIDS patients realize that remaining silent is tantamount to sitting still, so they organize demonstrations, sit-ins, and other activities to speak out so that the whole society can understand what happened to them.
The gay community, which is not widely recognized and accepted by mainstream society in the United States, exploded in the United States in the mid-to-late 1980s and 1990s as a large-scale folk rights defense movement in which many AIDS patients collectively sought medical treatment and medicine, and they are closely related to each other. In 1989, for example, the gay activist group ACT UP staged a protest in which demonstrators lay in front of the New York Stock Exchange to protest the high price of the AIDS treatment AZT.
Part III: The social and humanistic background of the film
The protagonist, Ron, was born in Texas, which is located in the south of the United States and is also in the "bible zone" of the United States. The Bible Belt is a socioculturally dominant area of the United States commonly known as conservative Christian evangelicals. The social and folk customs of the Biblical Belt have always been very traditional, anti-abortion, anti-homogeneous, anti-black, supported racial segregation, and prohibited marriage between different races. They see homosexuality as a violation of the natural and moral bottom line set forth in the Bible.
So it is very reasonable from the beginning of the film that Ron reacts so much to the "gay" attitude and finally he fully accepts the group, and it is not surprising that Ron's co-workers have a clear change in their attitude towards him after learning that Ron has HIV.
Although Ron is not a "gay", because of HIV, he first pursued his own interests from the beginning, then through close contact with the "gay" group, and later self-awakened to fight for the rights of all AIDS patients, and also took the FDA to court. It is also in this context that the understanding of AIDS and homosexuality in American society has gradually changed.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="9" > written at the end</h1>
Finally, some backgrounds for the film's production Released in 2013, Dallas Buyers Club is a film based on a true story based on a report on the life of Ron Woodruff in the Dallas Morning Post, Texas. In fact, the film's script was completed as early as 1992, but after 20 years, it began shooting in 2012, and it is said that this film is the most difficult film project in Hollywood history.
From the content of the film, we can see that the film is completely supported by the story and the protagonist, due to the limited cost, the film only cost 5 million US dollars, and the shooting cycle is only a short period of 25 days. But the film's final box office is as high as 55 million US dollars, a 10 times the rate of return of the film, and the film received the 86th Academy Award for Best Picture nominations, male protagonist Matthew McConaughey and male supporting Jerry Deletto both won the Oscar and Golden Globe Award for Best Actor Actor, Douban TOP250 ranked 127, enough to prove the excellence and greatness of this movie.
Great life is never from the beginning of the whole movie, all the scenes and pictures are slowly unfolded from the perspective of a Texas cowboy, in the film Ron from the beginning of riding a bull, to the end of the bull riding, in the bones flowing is the blood of the untamed cowboy, itself is a metaphor, as a cowboy, he has always wanted to control his own destiny, can make his efforts into extending in the bullback mountain for a longer time, although he knows that eventually he will also be thrown down, But he wasn't willing to give up from the start.
Those who are terminally ill know what the ultimate fate will be, but if you let the doctor directly resist surrender after the physiological sentence, we will find that many of these people do not hold out to the last moment; on the contrary, those who hold the "my life is up to me", and those who dare to face the disease and death often surprise the doctor who was diagnosed before, it is obvious that Ron is the latter, and he also made the god of death wait for him for 7 years.
In the film, Ron used the last few years of his life to fight against the entire medical and drug system and disease in the United States, almost single-handedly changing the government's medical policy, and officially under his unremitting efforts, more patients can get more effective and affordable treatment, and he finally gained friendship and the respect of others, and also found the meaning of life.
Some people, though not born great, died brilliantly.
Keep digging into the history behind the film, which I've been doing all along.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="67" > click on the links below to read more original articles</h1>
History Behind History Series 29 – The History Behind the Movie The Assassination
History Behind History Series 28 – The History Behind the Movie Mob Town
History Behind history series 27 – The history behind the movie "The Great Heist of the Century"