TRIVIA AND THE HOLOCAUST
KITMAN, MARVIN
On Television TRIVIA AND THE HOLOCAUST BY MARVIN KITMAN On that Monday night (February 27) when NBC began running Part III of Loose Change, instead of the regularly scheduled Part II, I couldn't...
...Perhaps if 1 could have sat through a private screening with Vanessa Redgrave, and been able to listen to her interesting discussion of Zionist hoodlums, I could have summoned up the courage...
...They're all busy making dubs of Saturday Night Live...
...Don't miss it...
...So I turned to the program, leaned back in my chair and soon felt confident that I knew all I needed to know about the characters and the previous day's developments...
...From what I had read about the TV adaptation of Sara Davidson's book, which described the impact of the 1960s on three Berkeley women, I assumed the NBC/Universal version was going to be a cheap sort of film with perhaps a few so-called sizzling sex scenes thrown in...
...Then, suddenly, the most amazing announcement of the year came out of the set...
...The announcer's voice sounded shaky as he informed us that for the last 17 minutes the network had been broadcasting the wrong episode: The movie was being stopped, and the proper segment would be put on from the beginning...
...First, the production had the look of a Pepsi promo-the Pepsi Generation goes to Vietnam War protests...
...I had been invited to watch the first seven hours of this series one lovely spring morning in April, and I went with mixed feelings...
...A tired '60s radical, the author of the book the television-ization was based on was the only one with a motive...
...It could have been if the ratings were bad...
...The acting was strong...
...It blew the whistle on the medium once and for all...
...I have to see this, I thought to myself, it is my duty as a critic...
...Already there has been at least one journalist on public television saying the number was not 6 million, it was only 1.9 million...
...Although I didn't know exactly what was happening in 1937, being only eight when I first started hearing relatives talk about the murders in Europe, I should have done something, anyway-have done more or known more...
...He considers: Will anyone realize that Part III is playing...
...They ranged from bad (what an awful idea) to disbelieving...
...Imagine what the ordinary person, the commercial TV viewer, understands of those years...
...Obviously NBC and Universal felt the television audience was not ready to have TV-movie heroines who were not of the Middle American persuasion...
...In the light of those eight nights in January 1976, everything else on the air began to seem absurd, reduced, inconsequential, insipid...
...But they can't make me look at it: I will sit here and not see anything, and it will go away...
...Is it, in fact, worth making fools of ourselves just to have an orderly playoff of a miniseries that nobody seems interested in anyway...
...You'll love it...
...An alarm bell immediately rings in this executive's head as he absorbs the news: Something is seriously wrong...
...Still, I felt inadequate...
...True, the very young are not expected to know or do anything-that's one of the advantages of being young...
...I was crying inside and out in the darkness of the little theater...
...I am referring, of course, to Gerald Green's Holocaust (April 16-20...
...Nevertheless, this is only a foot in the door...
...On Television TRIVIA AND THE HOLOCAUST BY MARVIN KITMAN On that Monday night (February 27) when NBC began running Part III of Loose Change, instead of the regularly scheduled Part II, I couldn't tell anything was wrong...
...Another failure like King would have finished serious programming for a decade...
...I am a coward...
...Being a cynic, part of me predicted the network's new historical appreciation would lead to the rediscovery of such classics characters as Amos and Andy, Stepin' Fetchit and Little Black Sambo for animated Saturday morning kiddie ghetto shows...
...Naturally, the year after Roots did not live up to expectations-expectations that were twice as large as they had ever been...
...And the show gets worse," cheerfully explained my colleague, Dan Lewis of the Bergen Record, as NBC marched us into a magnificent buffet lunch...
...I found myself with a longing for Love Boat and Fantasy Island...
...I'm just glad so many people watched...
...Her reputation was being ruined by the minute...
...Film versions of Elie Wiesel's works may also be in the cards now that the networks know audiences like to see Jews being killed...
...Yet there is no denying that anything seemed possible in those days...
...Space limitations prevent a list of all the crimes perpetrated against Davidson...
...Yet here, too, I have my own theory: I think Sara Davidson did it...
...The call is processed upstairs to the duty officer in charge of minding the store, who at 9 pm is in the process of pinching a secretary's bottom, or whatever they do to keep awake...
...That it took 17 minutes to stop a wrong reel-keep in mind this was prime-time, not 3 am-and insert the right one confirmed a pet theory I have had: Nobody at the network watches the stuff sent out to exhausted viewers relaxing at home...
...I remember how ebullient we all were after the success of Roots last year...
...Anyway, degaussing (a tape erasing process) had somehow converted the Jewish girls into Charlie's Angels with brains...
...Dejudification...
...The exec reaches up and pulls the emergency cord, and the network slams to a halt like a subway train tripped between stops...
...Every time I hear the story of the Holocaust-which is part of my heritage-I am overcome by guilt...
...But given its success, Holocaust was probably only the beginning in a rip-off medium like TV...
...But if nobody was watching, you may ask, how did they discover (to use the technical term) the fuck-up...
...What was this, I asked myself, excited by television at last?the new Evelyn Wood Speed Viewing School...
...No jury would convict her of tampering after seeing what Universal Studios had done to her interesting story...
...NBC claims that the fault for the 17-minute tape gap-a distant relative to the Nixon 18-minute gap-lies with bungling in the engineering department...
...The episode closed with 300 old people being burned in a wooden synagogue at the border...
...Is there such a word in the TV vocabulary...
...The success of Holocaust saved the day for good programming...
...There are times when we brain surgeons and other professionals, tired from the day's intellectual strain, will watch anything that moves...
...Who can tell if it will change anything...
...Part I was a dog in the ratings...
...Thus I approached the first three-hour session that morning at NBC with my eyes closed, figuratively...
...But the latter was a much greater achievement in terms of drama, difficulty of subject matter and risk...
...The TV audience is not too smart...
...A note to those who fear that Holocaust was the end of the telling of this event...
...I wasn't hungry...
...I guess I wasn't concentrating, since counting the loose change on my dresser was infinitely more absorbing than watching what was on the television screen...
...I had a sense of going to a memorial service, not a preview of a program for television, the most lightweight communications medium since papyrus...
...I couldn't believe the horror piled upon horror I was witnessing...
...Susie Berman became Jenny Reston, etc...
...It was strong television, not one of your average made-for-TV movies...
...The experts claimed a new age was beginning for drama, and there was excited talk about opportunities for other shows dealing with the black experience...
...Accordingly, I missed Part I of what NBC had billed as "The Big Event," and was planning to miss Part II...
...For me, it was impossible to sit through all four parts of the mini-series...
...It is simply that they don't want to...
...The first episode was my most painful experience as a TV critic...
...This attitude is particularly incredible when one considers that only a few weeks later, on the same network, we were watching 6 million Jews being exterminated over a four-night period...
...The best stuff would take place during the commercials, as usual...
...Will anyone care if they don't see Part II...
...The way the big network moguls were talking I wouldn't have been surprised if they had programmed lessons in Man-dinka between Happy Days and Laverne & Shirley...
...All passengers on Part III change for Part II...
...I suppose I didn't want to see because I felt guilty about what was being recounted on the screen...
...These people can't be living on the same planet as 1 am, can't have been watching TV during the last year, or even the last 10 years...
...For a moment, I thought doomsday, or even something really serious, had happened...
...We now realize that it isn't that the boys can't offer good programming...
...The last 25 years have been the biggest hustle in Western civilization, and it will be harder than ever to sit through new drek like rollergirls and Joe and Valerie...
...But those who did watch the entire series got some kind of education...
...They called Green's adaptation of his novel, Holocaust, a trivial work, a soap opera and far worse...
...The minutes tick away...
...If Holocaust was a success, what could I say about nine-and-a-half hours of genocide...
...Roots made Holocaust possible...
...Well, here is my reconstruction of that night at NBC: A viewer watching Loose Change calls NBC corporate headquarters in New York to report the mistake...
...The story was strong...
...But you know how it is on Monday nights...
...Second, characters popped in and out of bed so often you would think the teleplay writer of Loose Change was some Proustian paraplegic who suffered from mal de siecle...
...It forgets, or simply doesn't know...
...But the most amazing change was the way the three major characters were converted...
...The production was strong...
...know that the New York Times has printed various essays and letters from people who did not like the quality of what they saw...
...They could put on Bowling for Dollars every night and none of them would notice," one of my sources said...
...A few of the worst, however, demand notice...
...I had not done anything lately to deserve this kind of involvement on prime time television...
...That was a journalist, mind you, on public TV, the highbrow intellectual medium...
Vol. 61 • May 1978 • No. 11
