On Television
KITMAN, MARVIN
On Television PLArING FOR BUCKS BY MARVIN KITMAN o ne of the television season's more intriguing mysteries is how CBS came up with Vanessa Redgrave for the role of Fania Fenelon in the three-hour...
...Here, suddenly, we were given subtlety...
...Some CBS people told me that if they could get out of the situation gracefully they would, but they couldn't bow to pressure...
...Then there was Redgrave's reported anti-Semitism, or at the very least, her open hostility to the idea of Israel as a Jewish homeland...
...As it happened, though, the network also was considering a miniser-ies on another Nazi concentration camp in Poland, entitled Treblinka...
...Even if the philosophy today were not "cast 'em young," Fania Fenelon was 22 when she was at Auschwitz and Vanessa Redgrave is old enough to have played her bubba...
...You had to read between the lines for any kind of historical context...
...Once the protests started mounting last summer, the CBS line was that even if the network had made a casting error, it couldn't be expected to back down...
...this is the free world...
...She informed us, among other things, that Yassir Arafat was "a pussycat...
...But I doubt that Miller's views counted for much here...
...When Koreans play Japanese or whites play Indians, everybody is in an uproar...
...It was almost as if nobody else was at Auschwitz besides Fania, or as if CBS wanted to maximize the treasure built up in the casting of Redgrave...
...A wasp dramatist might at least have been appalled by the material...
...I gave up trying to understand our great intellectual playwright when he married Marilyn Monroe...
...Vanessa Redgrave is a real charmer...
...For believe it or not, 1 don't think the network executives anticipated the depth of the reaction in the Jewish community to the Redgrave assignment...
...Bowing, in fact, is the major pastime out there, nipping out doing drugs by a nose...
...The TV treatment of Playing for Time, written by none other than Arthur Miller, was originally commissioned by ABC...
...There is more morality in an episode of M*A*S*H than in all of Playing for Time...
...Once again she gave an outstanding performance...
...She may sometimes act childish at Oscar ceremonies...
...You will never convince me that she was the only actress available for the part of the Jewish pianist in the orchestra at Auschwitz...
...Nevertheless, it is true that the conventional wisdom on casting was defied...
...The movie was a morbid, frequently horrifying drama—as sickening and shocking a television experience as I've had since Holocaust...
...Dropping Redgrave for her political beliefs, it was said, would be tantamount to blacklisting and take us back to the days of Red Channels...
...They bow to pressure every day in TV...
...CBS, after all, is supposed to be the Tiffany of the networks, never doing anything that would reflect badly on the integrity of the sales department...
...There seems little point in a dramatist getting involved in a project like this one unless he can shout something to the sky: "Look at what they did" or "How are we going to prevent it from ever happening again...
...Something special would be needed to make it sell...
...The situation was not helped by the German guards coming across as music lovers, making you think at times that Auschwitz was a perverted camp in the Berkshires...
...Yet he blew it...
...My educated guess is that the moment of decision came at a nervous meeting of top CBS executives...
...So many issues extraneous to the artistic ones were raised by her presence that I couldn't even feel proper sympathy for the poor woman in the story...
...I'll bet Miller would have drawn a powerful moral if he was dramatizing the My Lai story...
...The Redgrave affair, however, was more than simply another instance of ignoring ethnic minorities jockeying for equal employment opportunities...
...Perhaps the assignment should have gone to William Styron, who covered similar ground in Sophie's Choice...
...One of them probably blurted out: "Hey, here's a nice little gimmick to pump up the show...
...I'm not so sure...
...Newspaper stories last year claimed that casting Vanessa Redgrave was Arthur Miller's brainstorm...
...I myself have protested about a Jew playing an Italian, as in Pelrocelli...
...What did this little man in the white lab coat do, I kept thinking, aside from listening to good classical music...
...He certainly has a fertile imagination and might have agreed that Yassir Arafat's friend was the perfect choice—Miss Right?to play an Auschwitz survivor...
...And it already was producing Masada, a mini-series about the fortress in the Judean wilderness overlooking the Dead Sea where a group of Jews made their last stand against the conquering Romans...
...It lacked the compelling characterizations that got the audience so involved in the earlier blockbuster...
...she's sharp enough to know that the capitalist pigs at CBS pay more than any other kind of pigs...
...Although I hate to admit it, the people who run the networks aren't altogether stupid, the abundant evidence to the contrary notwithstanding...
...Miller had our horrified attention for three hours...
...She was smoke in our eyes...
...It's hard to describe how out of it people in the Big Orange (Los Angeles) can be...
...yet in the eyes of the network executives she had to be a member of the over-the-hill gang...
...Miller is one of the great moralists of our day, according to the New York Times, yet he apparently couldn't find a lesson in all the horrifying experiences he was portraying, couldn't make a simple statement for the masses...
...Unless, that is, there's money in it...
...The entire Redgrave affair was finally all too scuzzy...
...For three hours the movie showed us how cruel the human race can be...
...In fact, on the basis of my sleuthing, I have deducted that all the ballyhoo about ability was merely a coverup for a coldly calculated case of "casting cute," of going for the shock value and the attendant publicity...
...The basic shortcoming was Miller's script...
...She also revealed that she was anticapitalist, calling America "a nation of capitalist pigs...
...His colleagues no doubt responded in relief: "It sings...
...To begin with, there was the matter of age...
...What a moment for him as a playwright and as a moralist...
...Who would have been talking about Playing for Time during the one year prescreen-ing buildup if the part of Fania Fenelon had gone to a competent TV actress like Tovah Feldshuh...
...Other big name actresses—Maude Adams, Viveca Lindfors and Marissa Berenson—were all reduced to walk-ons...
...Certainly for most young TV viewers, World War II is Hogan's Heroes...
...What should Miller's message have been...
...The millionaire TV executives spend their whole lives going from the racquet ball courts to their Mercedes Benz' to their hot tubs...
...The networks traditionally treat writers as lower than the low, particularly when it comes to picking the stars who will breathe life into their creations...
...Instead of seeing Fania Fenelon, I kept thinking this is Vanessa Redgrave...
...Maybe it was a mistake to have a Jew like Miller do the script in the first place...
...I usually leave such questions to the playwright, but as a starter how about "This is bad...
...Ice cream is something you like, vanilla or chocolate...
...But what did it all mean...
...Playing for Time was not going to have anything like the impact of NBC's Holocaust, they noted...
...Anything about Vietnam would have stirred his rage...
...If you need specific evidence of how out of touch the Californians really are, consider that the two people with ultimate responsibility for the Vanessa "thing" were Jewish: Bernie Sofronsky, the CBS executive in charge, and Linda Yellen, the producer...
...Had any bland TV actress played the role it probably would have soared...
...They are so isolated, they don't know anything about real life in Los Paradise, let alone the rest of the country...
...Of course, it could be argued that an artist's personal political views should have nothing to do with appreciating his or her talent—but that gets into the area of principle, which the TV industry generally avoids like a gas chamber...
...That was baloney...
...Still, I think the hiring of Vanessa Redgrave was the most insensitive TV decision of the year...
...Men-gele, Herr Kommandant...
...After CBS bought the show, Miller said it was the best thing he had ever done...
...And they didn't get Martin Borman to do the narration live from Argentina...
...is hard for me to say whether I liked the show itself...
...It was unredeemingly depressing...
...How inappropriate for a presentation recapitulating such awful events almost four decades after they occured...
...The assumption, I suppose, was that everyone watching already knew what went on during World War II...
...Especially disturbing was the incomplete portrait of Dr...
...I won't go into the question of a network using its own news shows to hype one of its big investments, even though the film clip of Vanessa doing the rifle dance in a PLO camp could be calculated to add 3-4 Nielsen points to Playing for Time when it eventually ran...
...In addition, she was too tall...
...They are strangely obtuse as well, a factor that may help explain their gross insensitivity...
...Television dramas usually are starkly simple...
...Nervous about being dubbed "the Jewish network," ABC finally passed on the Miller project...
...He never really managed to tell us why the Nazis were torturing the poor people we saw...
...At the height of the controversy over her selection, Redgrave appeared on CBS' 60 Minutes to give Mike Wallace a piece of her mind, such as it is...
...But everything in the production was focused completely on her...
...He was lucky to have Vanessa...
...At least they didn't choose to run Playing for Time three days earlier, on Yom Kippur...
...I suppose it could have been worse, though...
...All conflict is presented in black and white, so that we can get the point quickly...
...To be sure, complaining about television casting is the country's second major indoor sport (after watching the shows that stir the complaints...
...Choosing her for the Fenelon role was the equivalent of hiring a Klansman to play Martin Luther King...
...What about Vanessa Redgrave in a concentration camp...
...Others who had meanwhile read his script (a copy was available at the Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies, at Yeshiva University's Los Angeles Campus) marveled at the way writers can anesthetize themselves...
...she looks 6'3" and Fenelon is 4'11...
...Indeed, the casting was so bizarre that I decided to investigate...
...But there is nothing wrong with an actress being a little over her head politically...
...Having made herself an anti-Zionist, pro-PLO symbol, she was offensive to many Jewish people...
...On Television PLArING FOR BUCKS BY MARVIN KITMAN o ne of the television season's more intriguing mysteries is how CBS came up with Vanessa Redgrave for the role of Fania Fenelon in the three-hour movie based on Fenelon's memoir, Playing for Time (September 23...
...As for Vanessa Redgrave, nobody ever questioned her ability as an actress...
...Nor do 1 blame her for accepting the Fenelon role...
Vol. 63 • November 1980 • No. 20
