Queering the Oscars: "Common Threads: Stories From the Quilt" for Best Documentary Feature

Team Experience has been looking at LGBTQ+ related Oscar nominations. 

by Nick Taylor

Over the course of June, one of my big cinematic missions was to watch as many queer documentaries as I could. A broader understanding and recognition of lived queer experiences, either through art or lived interaction, is something I’m finding increasingly valuable and incredibly grateful for. Past or present lives, always reflecting so many potential futures - cherish that shit! Cinema allows for a unique view on long-gone lives I would never have met. A lot of my dive has been focused on the Criterion Channel’s various LGBTQ+ playlists. If you haven’t already seen Dressed in Blue, Tongues Untied, and Shakedown, watch them all now and learn from their authors, the multitude of voices in front of and behind the camera bravely willing to show us who they are and what they know. 

Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt, was also a recent discovery, equally inspired by this series and by its renewed spotlight on Criterion. To those who want to see it but don’t have this particular streaming service, it is also free on YouTube). The film is one of two Oscar-winning documentaries directed by Rob Epstein in Criterion’s playlist, each representing worlds of grassroots activism on behalf of a queer America grappling with very different realities from each other. The Times of Harvey Milk is as committed to being a joyous celebration of solidarity and advancement as well as a hollowing eulogy for everything violently, permissibly stolen from queer America as Common Threads is, with its own fierce editing and poignant, unabashed political agenda...

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HBO LGBT History: 1989 Oscar Flashback Best Documentary

Last week we enjoyed the eloquent musings of one Stephen Sondheim and quibbled over whether Todd Haynes’s intentionally queasy and dizzying take on “I’m Still Here” was worth including in James Lapine’s documentary on the Broadway composer. This week we’re taking a break from our regular programming and going back in time to celebrate one of HBO’s earliest Oscar victories.

As you may or may not know, films produced by HBO have won over 20 Oscars. Last year alone, HBO dominated both documentary categories with Citizenfour and Crisis Hotline: Veterans Press 1 emerging victorious in their respective categories. And so, let us travel back to March 1990 when Robert Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman’s Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt (discussed here) won the Best Documentary Oscar. [More...]

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HBO’s LGBT History: Common Threads (1989)

Manuel is working his way through all the LGBT-themed films & miniseries produced and distributed by HBO.

Last week we looked at the quietly touching film Tidy Endings (1988), written and starring Harvey Fierstein and a must-see for Stockard Channing completists. We’re not going far this week, since much of HBO’s early LGBT output tried to grapple with the AIDS epidemic that had dominated the cultural conversation about gay men in the 1980s.

Did you know that films produced by HBO have won over 20 Oscars? This past year alone, HBO dominated both documentary categories with Citizenfour and Crisis Hotline: Veterans Press 1 emerging victorious. It has been a stealth awards run which Sheila Nevins (currently the president of HBO Documentary Films but her involvement stretches back to 1979) has all but nurtured herself. 

Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt (1989)
Written & Directed by: Rob Epstein, Jeffrey Friedman (based on the book, The Quilt: Stories From The NAMES Project by Cindy Ruskin)
Narrated by: Dustin Hoffman (who'd just won his 2nd Oscar)

HBO’s commitment to strong documentary storytelling goes back to the late 1980s; their first Oscar win came in 1985 when the American Undercover special Soldiers in Hiding won the Best Documentary Feature award, the first time it was bestowed to a pay cable service. Having hosted the then-surgeon general in their 1987 informative special, AIDS: Everything You and Your Family Need to Know…But Were Afraid to Ask, it’s not surprising HBO would help produce Epstein and Friedman’s Common Threads which won Best Documentary Feature at the 62nd Academy Awards, the year Driving Miss Daisy took Best Picture (how’s that for a double feature?). Common Threads continued the network’s commitment to mining urgent and contemporary social issues in their documentaries...

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