On Television

...But even that reconstruction was tactfully tentative...

...The bare truth can get in the way of a good story...

...In addition, we got the PLO position and the anti-Christian Lebanese position...

...A second panel was needed to rebut the rebutters and seriously present the other side...

...Here was a perfectly disinterested bystander, Mobil, asking the Public Broadcasting System to review its decision to run the show...

...The object was to present the "other side...

...The film wasn't a condemnation of Saudi society or a negative examination of Islamic culture...

...That was enough to make me believe in Allah...

...Truth is the last refuge of scoundrels," Dr...

...Facts themselves simply aren't what they used to be...

...My favorite came from the editor of a leading Saudi newspaper...

...So were all the episodes of Moviola...

...None of the screams of anguish from oil company executives, State Department officials...

...he night of May 12, when we finally got to see Death of a Princess on the Public Broadcasting System (PBS), will go down in television history as the Arabian night...

...You will all recall the way ABC Sports, in its coverage of the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal, held back the news of Mark Spitz winning another gold medal until the last five minutes of prime time, even though the events took place hours earlier and everybody heard the outcome on radio and the other network's news shows...

...1 couldn't figure out what everyone was complaining about...

...It's almost as if there is a deliberate blackout, particularly of negative stories...

...Roots was faction...

...After the British reporter's lengthy questions were put to him by the translator, the Saudi editor replied at what also seemed like great length...

...The show was so popular, it beat out the competition on the commercial networks...

...Evidently, today there are at least two kinds of facts going...

...What can Ali Schmertz have been thinking of...

...During the course of the film we heard 12 different people telling the true story of what really happened, most of them contradicting each other...

...This is in marked contrast with negative stories about Israel...

...Apparently the grandfather, the (sometime playboy) prince, did it...

...tribal law, not Islamic law...

...The Day Christ Died was certainly faction...

...In English it came out, "What princess...

...In the same spirit, I offer Saudi Arabia this constructive suggestion: Do a made-for-TV movie for public television entitled, "Death of a Merchant Prince"??a faction film about the last 12 hours in the life of Nelson Rockefeller, including "interviews" with members of his family, art researchers, etc., climaxed by the step-by-step staging of the death scene...

...I thought it was a super made-for-TV movie...

...If anything, I felt the victim of public TV propaganda for the Saudi Arabian way of life...

...Helter Skelter was faction...

...For the success of Death of a Princess in this country was made possible, as they say, by Herb Schmertz, a vice president at the Mobil Public TV & Oil Company: The advertisement he took out against the program on the op-ed page of the New York Times is widely credited with building its big box office...

...Donald Kaplan, the noted psychologist and aphorist has observed in a major epigram coined especially for the electronic age...

...The King was against the execution, so he didn't do it...

...From what 1 could make out, the whole project was sparked by a mumbled comment overheard at a dinner party...

...T. E. Lawrence wasn't on the hastily-assembled panel, but a number of other noted Arabists were, and they offered a boring rehash of the Arab position that had just been set forth in the film...

...Commercials are the most common instance of faction...

...True, Allah works in strange ways...

...So, since the Saudis respect for tradition is well-known, I want to call their attention to a venerable Hollywood commandment, "Don't get mad, get even...

...it was still a made-lor-TV-movie-of-t he-week...

...The biggest shock was that Death of a Princess turned out to be sympathetic...

...This is the "Vaz-you-dere, Chollie...

...If not for all the publicity, 1 wouldn't have known there was anything wrong with it...

...But on May 12 they were determined to get educated, thanks to the fuss raised by Mobil and its Bedouins...

...In this country, though, the Saudis can look forward to re-runs...

...Moreover, the public loved it...

...And why not a series (there must be plenty more gals laid away, so to speak, in the palaces...

...And Chase Manhattan Bank could take out the ads denouncing it...

...Indeed, it was an incredible package public TV put together for them, the kind of exposure money couldn't buy, certainly not oil money...

...Real names and places were used, but the dialogue sprang from the imagination of the nov-elist-screenplay-teleplay writer...

...This calls lor a new Emmy category: "For the best teleplay based on an original mumbled comment at a dinner party . . . the envelope please...

...On top of all that, the people at WGBH in Boston??who co-sponsored the show with the BBC and packaged it for their World series??gave us an hour-long panel discussion...

...On a news show, "file footage" sounds impressively archival...

...It was a family affair...

...This is an updated version of the old "they wouldn't print it if it wasn't true" mentality...

...In the opening scene, we saw an actor playing a journalist listening to another actor playing a diplomat stammer something about the execution of a princess and her lover...

...The part of the movie that is said to have ticked off Riyadh's rulers most was the revelation that Saudi princesses are interested in men...

...I can understand how stung and puzzled the Saudis must be by the complexities of media life in the United States, and the orneriness of an American viewing public that is always running toward the fire instead of away from it...

...To be sure, Death of a Princess was not to be confused with scrupulous journalism...

...And rearranging events to make them seem more interesting is an old and respected practice on TV news shows...

...Now there's a project I bet Mobil Oil would put their shekels into...

...at the end, our reporter was still piecing together the story...

...Gloria Steinem or Letty Pogrebin of Ms...

...You know how people say, "Let me tell you the true facts...

...Israel, underwritten by Mobil...

...That's why all these movies are so involving and entertaining...

...Never mind that offscreen filmmakers Antony Thomas and David Fanning called it a documentary, or even "doc-u-drama...

...Congressmen and other acute TV critics had prepared me for such a compelling mystery flick...

...For two minutes of the two-hour production, the young ladies were shown cruising about in their air-conditioned Rolls Royces, sizing up what was available in the marketplace...

...Thus as far as TV viewers are concerned everything in Death of a Princess definitely did happen and is true...

...PBS awarded itself medals for not knuckling under, but hardly a discouraging word was heard about the Saudis...

...Some people, your hardcore viewers, have been known to go whole years without watching public TV...

...No moral conclusions were drawn...

...Yet ABC Sports won medals itself (Em-mys and Peabodys) for its faction sports coverage...

...All underwritten by Mobil Oil, of course...

...This was "faction," a piece of fiction based on facts...

...magazine would have given that group whiplash...

...The wild ratings have "sequel" written all over them...

...If a notice is flashed on the screen declaring, "this is a simulation," many viewers??those who remember how to read??think that's good...

...Amazingly, not a single feminist was there to ask, "Well, what about the role of women in Saudi Arabia...

...Yet Schmertz, a media maven, must have known that the surest way to attract an audience is to attempt censorship...

...In England, where the program was first broadcast, Foreign Minister Lord Carrington prostrated himself before the Saudis, reportedly saying, "We offer you in friendship the hand of the producer...

...On commercial TV news programs, Saudi Arabia is a vast wasteland...

...Not that the genre is limited to movies...

...Not surprisingly, it backfired...

...Now, people on camera hide their real meaning by telling the truth as they know it...

...There appears to be no way, in the current state of things, that TV can adequately alert people to faction...

...Holocaust was faction...

...It was a work in progress...

...The Women's issue, for example, was never raised...

...Death of Another Princess" perhaps...

...The fellaheen who read the op-ed pages tuned in en masse to see the event that would be bad for our country, our gas, our gallbladder, or whatever...

...Far from tastelessly prying into the delicate matter of sex and decapitation among the idle oil-rich, the producers seemed to have deliberately loaded the drama??essentially a detective story about getting a story??with long explanations of the Saudi system...

...JL lmost every television movie seems to be faction these days: FDR: The Last Year, starring Jason Ro-bards, was a brilliant example...

...Television viewers, it would seem, can't get no satis without faction...

...There was no trial, so the judicial system didn't do it...

...Even 60 Minutes has been known to set up a confrontation to make a story more dramatic...

...By their protests they have managed to make just another TV movie a classic...

...Otherwise it wouldn't have been on television, particularly public television...

...A magazine show like 20/20 dabbles in it as well, especially when Geraldo Rivera is hot on a story...

...It was what might be called "slight pressure" from your average oil-company-in-the-street, which also happens to be PBS' largest underwriter...

...The follow-up, however, looked more like "The $1.98 Death of a Princess," produced by Chuck Barris...

...I'd like to see a serious study of network news coverage of Saudi Arabia vs...

...A JL...

...They could call it a giraffe or a dirigible...

...Did he have some dark, subliminal reason for giving the needle to the Saudis...

...Or was he just an innocent dupe in this case...

...Gradually, though, the producers made sure we gathered from the various accounts that the existing regime was not to blame for the princess' death...

...More amazing than all the hoopla preceding it was the film itself...

...A variety of natives told us about the great progress being made in education, the special role of women in Saudi society, changing attitudes toward dress, sex, mores...

...school of writing...

...The ritual seemed quaint and romantic, reminding me of the promenade custom in Spain with the chauffeurs serving as chaperons...