On Television
KITMAN, MARVIN
On Television SEEING MURROW NOW BY MARVIN KITMAN Anything goes on television, apparently, as long as it is designated a doeudrama. Earlier this season Mussolini: The Untold Story, starring George...
...That broke new ground in jurisprudence by finding the convicted murderer not guilty...
...The most exciting books about current events when I was growing up were Upton Sinclair's Lanny Budd volumes...
...Nonetheless, the advance fire against the show was heavy...
...In the case of Fred W. Friendly, it even put in a cigar...
...It is not public TV either...
...But he has since gone on to fashion a whole new career for himself as a popular historian-writer...
...Everybody stopped to watch the moment...
...That's what the stomach aches are about...
...Nothing less than their version of a situation would satisfy them...
...Paley and Frank Stanton...
...The handwriting was on the wall for See It Now and everything Murrow represented...
...You might be able to get away with that when all the leading characters are dead...
...He has a social conscience...
...Why does Murrow have to be Murrow...
...And the acting is brilliant...
...The doeudrama never did answer the question of why she was more important in John's cultural development than Ringo's wife, or the first Mrs...
...After Mann's two-night doeudrama aired, I was surprised the Mayor of Atlanta and his 500,000 constituents were not in jail...
...Although Kinoy won't win the Pulitzer Prize for reporting, his writing is superb...
...He is a writer who has discovered the art of remaining true to his principles and making TV pay for it...
...It surpasses any true story, or documentary...
...But since Yoko "produced" the show—she had virtual veto power over its content because the actual producer of record wanted the rights to John's music, and she controls them—NBC gave us a wonderful, warm, loving portrayal of the relationship...
...Those were all actual people Jackie Susann used in her novels about the real Hollywood...
...She came out as Yoko of Arc...
...People in a bar are shown watching Murrow's program transfixed, silently, intent, as if it is a crucial Monday Night Football game...
...It plays like the real thing...
...Social histories such as Valley of the Dolls fall into the same category...
...Murrow is not hypothetical creation, a psychodrama at J-School, or an author's projection of what might have happened...
...It is particularly fascinating to observe how CBS got rid of See It Now, probably the best documentary series of all time...
...Understandably, the living are offended and outraged by the distortions of context...
...In the process, it imputes a bottom line mentality to Stanton...
...Shirer was on the brink of failing as abroadcast-er then...
...I thought of this as I watched the fascinating reconstruction of a confrontation between William Shirer and Murrow in the first half of the movie—their own Munich, with Murrow playing Chamberlain...
...I'm sure Shirer could do a whole other version of what happened at the lunch where the two battled over basic issues of journalistic practice and paranoia in the corporate broadcast world: who said what to whom, and who accused whom of selling out...
...They think viewers will not watch a great drama about a newscaster, but will watch Murrow because it's about Edward R. Murrow...
...A poor choice, his supporters argue...
...Hollywood screenwriter Abby Mann had turned himself into a one-man forensic swat team, serving as investigator, judge and jury...
...It's not even enough that Paley or Stanton or Murrow or Friendly may have once said something, and that they have a transcript (wave, wave) to prove it...
...That may be an impossible condition...
...She was a zero, nothing...
...I'll be with you tonight, Ed," he says before the famous See It Now McCarthy broadcast, but Murrow and Friendly had to pay for that show's ads out of their own pocket...
...Lennon...
...The only thing he left out was how his old man won the Nobel Peace Prize and discovered penicillin...
...They are inventing conversations Stanton had with Paley and Murrow about Joe McCarthy...
...The characters were combinations, like the pills they took...
...One can suspect themoti\esof the protesters, too...
...The further back the incident, the greater the disparity...
...Moreover, to viewers—except possibly Hewett, Stanton, Paley, Friendly, Joe Wershba and other survivors— it comes across as a documentary...
...How do we separate a true fact from a "fact" merely meant to enhance the drama...
...In fact, no one connected with the production of the show marched to the usual Hollywood TV tune...
...To begin with, it is only two hours long...
...Edward Hermann is Fred Friendly, even with the cigars...
...She had as much to do with John Lennon's Beatles music as Mozart's wife, or Mick Jagger's cocker spaniel...
...Coleman is not the Paley you recall from formal profiles, he is the other side...
...Murrow tells us Fred Friendly's real name...
...The script for the TVmovie was written by Ernest Kinoy, a distinguished dramatist whose heart and typewriter are always in the right place (from.Roo?sto Holocaust to Skokie...
...These are ordinary people in a bar, and it is so quiet you could hear Howard Cosell's toupee slip...
...You are never sure in a doeudrama, that's why I hate the genre...
...But Murrow has changed my mind...
...There is no way you could avoid thinking it is telling everything exactly the way it was...
...Alas, the HBO Murrow is it for dramas about the nation's most inspiring TV journalist, the farm boy who became our first great communicator...
...Granted, according to Mussolini: The Untold Story the critical issue in Europe between 1936-45 was whether II Duce should sleep with his wife, his girl friend or the new mistress...
...I can see why they are so upset...
...Dabney Coleman is Bill Paley...
...He is a complex businessman, an idealist almost, who wrestles with his conscience (losing two bouts to one...
...Who knew Murrow would be the end of the line in broadcasting...
...They are pretty much the only way we can get any history onthe air...
...Maybe that historical portrait was so sympathetic because it was written by Vittorio Mussolini, who made his father sound like Saint Benito...
...Nor does the world...
...This is the true story, so to speak, of Edward R. Murrow, founding father of CBS News, champion of integrity and ethics in j ournalism, and the closest we have to a folk hero in the annals of TV reporting...
...The bitter truth is very few TV viewers know who Murrow was, let alone what he stood for...
...No one thinks he is reading non-fiction...
...Of course, it could be argued that the growing number of people now who have never heard of Murrow or Friendly or Paley or Stanton wouldn't know the difference anyway...
...The movie uses the dramatic device of making up conversations...
...His credits, beginning with The Defenders, read like a What's What of honorable quality programming...
...There is a lot more of the Buffalo Bill Bittinger in his interpretation than we usually see in Paley on TV, but it works...
...It's too bad Murrow the movie compromised the truth and integrity you stood for...
...You wouldn't believe the level of the young people assuming the seats of TV power...
...Friendly asks incredulously...
...Somebody had dug a trench down Madison Avenue and decided to fight...
...Herb Brodkin, the producer, is a symbol of truth, beauty and justice in the business...
...He seems genuinely troubled by all the "bad" decisions he has to make...
...Such is the power of TV...
...He's not the bad guy...
...Walter Cronkite, Richard Salant, Don Hewett, Fred Friendly—all survivors of the Murrow Age at CBS News—were among the Big Berthas blasting off...
...So they made Frank Stanton into one...
...It was Paley who took the heat for Murrow during the early years, and made him possible...
...It is great that Paley was so supportive...
...That's the sort of thing McCarthy used to do on television—take hearsay and make it sound as if it were a veritable truth...
...Good night, and good luck, Ed, anyway...
...This was the drawing of a line...
...One of the many meaningful scenes for me focuses on the night of the Mur-row-takes-on-McCarthy episode of See It Now...
...It finally convinced me of the incompatible nature of the two horses docudramas ride: presenting the genuine facts, as a documentary does, and making up facts, to provide a dramatic story...
...In some respects Paley is the hero of the show...
...Murrow is damn good, the carping of critics who prefer to concentrate on the charges and countercharges notwithstanding...
...John McMartin is Frank Stanton...
...Or was he...
...The previous season, you will surely recall, we were all elevated when television took us into the legal field with an amazing doeudrama on The Atlanta Child Murders (CBS, February 10 and 12, 1985...
...Another TV contribution to the field of modern history this season was the untold story of John and Yoko (NBC, December 8, 1985), orchestrated by Yoko Ono...
...He is on the tiger and he can't get of f in supporting Murrow against his board, against McCarthy...
...They are putting words into Paley's mouth before it's closed...
...That could be a question on a game show...
...If they change the time or the place, the context, then the meaning could be very different despite the accuracy of the individual words...
...I'll be with you tomorrow, too, Ed...
...Who's going to watch unrelieved greed...
...Friendly, who fell to the wayside in thestruggles at CBS during the period described, may think less highly of Stanton...
...Murrow demonstrated the danger of docudrama for me...
...Not even a Linda McCartney...
...Murrow is as much a fictitious character to the younger generation as Furrow...
...Yet at least the show mentioned World War II—in passing...
...It also invents scenes and situations, what happened when Murrow did this or Paley did that...
...Who said what to whom when and where—the five Ws—is no less important in journalism than in a court of law...
...Where is that game show tonight...
...It looked like the beginning of something big...
...Otherwise CBS could not have gotten away with hiring the likes of Phyllis George...
...But it strikes me as a sad state of affairs in a democracy when the only defense against misinformation is ignorance...
...DanTravanti is Murrow...
...Pondering the dilemma posed by well-done docudramas, I found myself wondering why television had not adopted literature's solution to a similar problem...
...I don't remember...
...The outrage over The Atlanta Child Murders, though, was nothing compared with the controversy that has been stirred by the maj or doeudrama of 1986, simply entitled Murrow (HBO, January...
...You can't get eyewitnesses at an accident that occurred five minutes ago to agree...
...Hewett and Salant, two of Stanton's most vocal defenders, benefited from his pushing their careers...
...The trouble is not merely that they don't know literature, they don't trust it...
...It sounds like something out of a Mad comics satire...
...They don't make Mur-rows anymore, but they also don't make Paleys...
...The important element is the drama, which is as it should be in movies...
...They follow the same procedure now, step by step—doubling the length of the targeted show, taking away its regular time slot...
...People today don't remember which side the Russians were on back then...
...Murrow could not have wanted a better biographical team to go through the skeletons in his closet...
...His reasons for attacking the show, though, include his concern that anyone might think/iehad something to do with its conception and production, since lie emerges as a good guy...
...The Unrelievedly greedy," Murrow says...
...The curse of TV is that the better a show the more we are deceived by it...
...Good night, and good luck, Ed...
...Unfortunately, they're so ignorant in television today that they probably wouldn't know a roman a clef from a cleft palate...
...There is no clear central villain in the Murrow tale, a serious weakness for a TV movie...
...Yet there are Friendly and Murrow sitting in the control room, waiting for See It Now to go on after The $64,000 Question...
...Travanti is tense as a coil spring, evoking Murrow puffing away on'his cigarettes even when doing the first documentary on cancer and cigarette smoking...
...Did you ever compare two or three accounts of an event...
...Not only was Stanton a student of ratings, statistics and research, but he was a fighter for good at CBS as well...
...Brod-kin and Kinoy have in effect written history...
...A Van Gordon Sauter, a Larry Grossman still operates in the classic pattern...
...Instead of docudramas, why not rontons a clef on TV...
...Murrow, however, concerns many people who are still living...
...On the other hand, a true story should be the whole truth and nothing else...
...n the past, I have been sympathetic to docudramas on television...
...The finest men in television today worked on Murrow...
...Ire-member the show...
...it is CBS, back in the days before everyone got zonked-out from TV...
...Suggesting that the then president of CBS was only interested in ratings seems to have especially enraged the old boy network and is widely disputed...
...Earlier this season Mussolini: The Untold Story, starring George C. Scott (NBC, November 24, 1985), told us what a terrific guy II Duce was and explained how swell fascism could be...
...It was like that in the 1950s, too...
...It puts words into themouthsofsuchpeopleasWilliamS...
...She mixed them up to protect the guilty...
...How do we know whether to believe that his name was "Ferdinand Friendly Wackenheimer," as the dialogue says...
...Part of the fun was guessing who Lanny really was, who the bad guy was, who did this or that to the world, and so forth...
...The network wanted to replace Murrow with a game show in 1962, and it did...
...The series enabled Sinclair to put forward what he thought had taken place in the highest councils of power...
...Perhaps success has mellowed his recollections, or sharpened them...
...Why not call him Lance Furrow...
...It was Lanny and the arms races, Lanny at the peace talks, Lanny and FDR...
...they didn't drag it out for a week...
...In a roman d clef, the novelist tells a true story, except he changes the names of the principal character and melds what is known with hopefully honest conjecture about what happened in between...
Vol. 69 • January 1986 • No. 2
