A MISPLACED ‘WOMEN OF VALOR’?

Director Buzz Kulik must feel like a guy watching his horse gain speed rounding the far turn, wishing he could go back and lay more money on him.

Kulik, who has done films for both television and theaters, is in post-production on “Women of Valor,” a TV movie that Kulik now hopes will get an American theatrical run.

“I think we made a mistake, OK?” Kulik said, when asked why he took Jonas McCord’s script about a group of captured World War II nurses to a TV network instead of to a movie studio. “We have a strong story, we have a theatrical cast. We made a boo-boo.”

“Women of Valor,” based mostly on oral histories given by American Army nurses who spent more than two years in a Japanese POW camp in the Philippines, stars Susan Sarandon and Kristy McNichol and is scheduled to air on CBS this fall.

Kulik, co-executive producer with McCord, is already preparing a version for international theatrical release, and he and McCord said they would like to book the film for a one-week Academy Award-qualifying run in Los Angeles before the end of the year. It is not uncommon for documentaries to get theatrical releases after being aired on television, but it’s a rare honor for a movie.

The immediate fate of “Women of Valor” in the United States and Canada is in the hands of CBS, which put up the $3-million budget.

“CBS has three years to air it twice,” Kulik said. “Unless the network lets it loose, it will have to wait that long for a domestic theatrical release.”

Kulik, whose “Brian’s Song” went on to healthy theatrical and videocassette lives after its TV dates, said he attempted to buy “Women of Valor” back from CBS, but the network wasn’t interested in selling.

When the movie airs in November, it is bound to provoke debate among scholars of the Japanese occupation of the Philippines and, no doubt, some anger in the Japanese-American community. The story follows a group of Army nurses from a life of nearly country club luxury on the island of Luzon through the Japanese invasion, the American surrender in Bataan, the infamous Death March and through more than two years of atrocities in a Japanese POW camp.

McCord, an Emmy Award winner for his “Vietnam Requiem” documentary, said he got the idea for the story from a brief White House ceremony honoring women combat nurses, a group of veterans virtually ignored for four decades.

“Not only had these women endured the worst hardships imaginable, but they were ignored by everyone,” McCord said. “Even the military ignored them.”

McCord concentrated his research on the experiences of 104 American nurses, all of whom survived a variety of diseases, torture and malnutrition in a Japanese POW camp following the withdrawal of Gen. Douglas MacArthur and the surrender of 37,000 American-Filipino troops.

Japanese soldiers are portrayed as sadists and rapists in a script that has violence written into nearly every scene. None of the 104 American women in the Philippine camp reported being raped, but McCord said there is documentation of Japanese soldiers raping civilians elsewhere, and he said he’s not sure the American women would have acknowledged rapes had they occurred.

“Remember, these are 1940s women coming home to 1940s men,” McCord said. “What did happen, only they know.”

McCord and Kulik said that the general behavior of the Japanese has been documented by the postwar testimony of both men and women POWs.

“During the war, we knew very little of what happened in Bataan,” McCord said. “Afterward, there was pretty much a lid on it while we helped rebuild Japan. The movies, from ‘Bridge on the River Kwai’ to ‘Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence,’ have all been good human stories, but they were very limited as far as the violence and brutality that existed.

“What we went back to face and to deal with was one of the most brutal moments of the war, which was Bataan.”

“Women of Valor,” which was filmed in the Philippines immediately after the overthrow of the Marcos government, is a TV movie on one level. It does not trust its audience to get the messages (in this instance, that women are as courageous as men and that after suffering the same hardships, they deserve the same honors) without stating them.

The story is told in flashback by one of the nurses (Sarandon) testifying before a Senate hearing on women in the draft. McCord has written a powerful drama that, assuming its historical legitimacy, makes its own case.

Ironically, its prospects for a theatrical release now hinge on the reviews it receives from TV critics.

The small and big screens grow ever closer.

FOR THE CAUSE: David Puttnam is getting off to a running start as chairman and chief executive officer of Columbia Pictures. In his first announcement in his new post, Puttnam said Tuesday that Bill Cosby has agreed to produce and star in a movie that will be released by the studio at Christmastime, 1987.

The deal was undoubtedly made before Puttnam joined the studio (his appointment was announced less than a week ago), but Puttnam said it “helps to signify exactly what Columbia will be all about--entertainment with a heart and a mind.”

Columbia released neither a title nor a plotline, but said the film will be based on an original idea by Cosby and that it will go into production during next spring’s TV hiatus of the No. 1 rated “The Cosby Show.”

Down the road, Universal Pictures announced Tuesday that it has signed a three-year production deal with Jessica Lange’s Prairie Films Production Co. Lange will be the executive producer of all the Universal/Prairie projects, but the deal does not require her to star in any of them.