Last week the Bowers family sued the film’s makers for $10 million. At least 11 details o the film, they say, were taken from the life of Geoffrey Bowers without credit or compensation. Among them: Hank’s lover, played by Spaniard Antonio Banderas (Bowers’s was Filipino-Mexican), and a dramatic courtroom scene in which Hanks bares his chest covered with red lesions. Geoffrey died in 1987 at the age of 33.
Proving the similarity won’t be easy. The family never signed a contract with the producer, Scott Rudin, who left the project early on. TriStar Pictures insists “Philadelphia” is a work of fiction. “[It’s] not the story of Geoffrey Bowers,” says spokesman Ed Russell. Media coverage of the Bowers case placed much of it in the public doman. And stories of other lawyers with AIDS had already begun to circulate. Even in his ordeal, Geoffrey Bowers was not alone.
