North Star Joins Galaxy of American Screen Heroes : Hearings Providing You-Are-There Drama That TV Now Lacks

The substance and the cast of characters of the Irangate hearings are attractions enough to disrupt the patterns of national life, as they have been doing.

But the hearings, with their engrossing urgency, immediacy and spontaneity, are also a reminder that over the years television has surrendered most of those qualities to the comfort of tape.

In these post-live days, we can be sure that the set will not collapse (as they occasionally did) nor the actors flub their lines (as they often did) nor the blank cartridge fail to fire in the crucial death scene. If a Carson guest says the unspeakable, it will be excised or bleeped for both coasts, through the tidying miracle of tape.

It may be comforting, but it also drains off the urgency that works for television like leavening works for bread and cakes. The appeal of local talk shows, the local news and most sporting events is that they are happening as you watch.

The lengths to which sports freaks will go not to know the outcome of a tape-delayed game are a kind of desperate artificial respiration to pump the immediacy back into the home screen.

But now there are the hearings, blissfully disrupting all kinds of schedules and continuing a Washington-based history of crowd-pleasers that go back to Sen. Estes Kefauver’s explorations into organized crime (so long ago that television was still black and white, lending the testimonies an additional newsreel urgency) and to the hearings instigated by Sen. Joseph McCarthy. Those, too, were in glorious black and white, as befitted a black comedy, an unfunny black comedy.

These hearings, as entertainment, are like an Equity-waiver production in a small house where all the action is necessarily offstage, but talked about.

Simply as talk, they provide all the urgency, immediacy and you-are-there drama that so much of television now lacks. They are obviously of urgent national consequence, for all the larger questions they pose about just who is in charge of the country’s foreign policy.

But there is an additional mesmerizing aspect of the revelations, and that is the suspicion that governmental nature has been imitating fictional art.

You would have said that a long tradition of spy-tellers, culminating, perhaps, in John le Carre, Robert Ludlum, the Elmore Leonard of “Bandits,” as well as a legion of lesser operatives, were basing their tales on what they knew or could surmise of the cynical covert capers done in the name of patriotism.

Now the suspicion grows that the novelists (and the screenwriters and television authors) have in fact been providing the operations manuals for the real-life players in Washington and McLean, Va.

Philosophy by Rambo, plot-lines and foreign policy from Action Comics, with Ian Fleming hovering in the background as the philosophical father figure with his neat division of the world into Good versus Evil.

It is not impossible to think of everybody in the basement bucking to be either 007 or M, and eager to airlift shredders and encoders wherever on Earth they’re required. The urbane Mr. Fleming would likely have been appalled by that kind of celebrity, and his James Bond, like Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot, seems to have become a burdensome success.

A Hollywood friend said, “It’s got to be a great movie, but who could you cast as North except Ollie himself?”

But that’s really not the question. The question is how could you write him for a movie--or even a miniseries to match the drama of his present miniseries--and preserve the ambiguities and the seeming contradictions of character that make him so uniquely fascinating? The zealous ideologue--”a rather alarming Boy Scout,” London’s Daily Telegraph called him--serenely sure that the end justifies any guileful means; the nice guy functioning--thriving--in what begins to sound like an amazing vacuum of leadership; the man of action clearly not surrounded by men of careful thought: Will it do as a high concept? Will ambivalence work in the neighborhoods?

Ollie is a phenomenon and the fun isn’t over yet. Stay tuned; it’s now, it’s live and all it may ultimately lack is the neat and satisfactory ending novelists and screenwriters are so good at.