Theres no such thing as democracy.
There is no God.
…And Tim is coming to Washington saying, No.
Jonathan Bailey as Tim Laughlin and Matt Bomer as Hawkins “Hawk” Fuller in Fellow TravelersBen Mark Holzberg/Showtime
That is why God put me on Earth is to make the world a better place.'
At one point, he admits that self doubt just overtook me and I thought, Politics.
No one is ever going to make that, but that is what writers do.
Ron Nyswaner at a screening of ‘Fellow Travelers’ in Washington, D.C. last week.Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images
We talk ourselves out of our best ideas.
Rogers brought in Bomer to the project, and then Dan Minahan joined as director and EP.
Then, from that moment on, things just moved forward, Nyswaner said.
Thats the best kind of love story.
Nyswaner said that his life somewhat corresponds to the history.
I wasnt an adult in the 50s.
I grabbed on to that, and I said, I want AIDS to be part of the story.
Im going to go into the 80s.
We are talking about an LGBTQ love story.
We have to talk about AIDS.
(Nyswaner wrote about his own experiences in the 2005 memoirBlue Days, Black Nights).
Obviously there was a relationship between [Cohn and Schine] that was rather obscure.
I dont believe that it was ever consummated.
I just believe that they each got somewhere in being in the presence of the other, Nyswaner said.
Another delicate balance was in conveying the nuances of the closeted gay environment of sixty-plus years ago.
There is no gay identity.
There were other people who had sex with people of the same gender.
But they werent a community yet.
There were bars and clubs, but they hadnt yet found that identity.
We are not doing victimhood here, he said.
They are going to suffer, but they are not victims.
They dont view themselves as victims.
People would not be frightened into not being who they were.
Many of the initial reviews for the miniseries have emphasized its erotic sex scenes.
And its actually really fascinating, and that is really sexy.
For instance, Cohn went on to become a mentor to Donald Trump.
The lesson, he said, is that demagoguery is real.
Lets pay attention to it and lets stop it now.
And he had power to destroy lives.
And valiant people kept trying to stop him.
And thats also encouraging.
He also has some guidance on how to counter it.
Getting on social media and expressing to people who think just like you is totally useless, he said.
