Does CBS Vietnam Show Mean Return of Documentaries?

CBS is airing “The Wall Within” tonight. This one-hour “CBS Reports” special is about Vietnam veterans still mentally suffering from the war. It’s an old-fashioned kind of TV documentary.

“The Wall Within” is not a quick-hit, hot-topic production. According to Dan Rather, who anchors that kind of effort on CBS’s “48 Hours,” tonight’s special, which he also anchors and reports, was 14 months in the making.

And it’s only the first “CBS Reports” this year.

That’s a far cry from the glory days of the early ‘60s when, in a burst of image-restoring fervor provoked by the quiz-show scandals, network documentaries were commonplace, with 23 “CBS Reports” in one year alone.

True, CBS leads the networks in news series, with three prime-time hours a week for its veteran “60 Minutes” and newer, flashier “West 57th” and “48 Hours.” The last is being preempted tonight for “The Wall Within” (airing at 8:30 p.m. on Channels 2 and 8).

But there ought to be more documentaries in addition to the three series, said Rather, whose program tonight and last year’s “The Battle for Afghanistan” had as their executive producer Perry Wolff, a “CBS Reports” veteran.

If he had his druthers, Rather said, “I’d love to do 30 a year. I don’t think that’s realistic. I’d certainly like to do 18 or 20 a year. But under the current (economic) situation, I know that’s not practical.

“I do think that eight or 10 is a reasonable, minimum standard that we can meet,” added the anchorman, interviewed last month before he and his “CBS Evening News” crew went to Moscow for a week of Reagan-Gorbachev summit coverage.

CBS News President Howard Stringer, himself a “CBS Reports” alumnus, also wants more documentaries this year. Probably four or five new ones are afoot, but “I’m shooting for more,” he said.

“My problem is that I have to get ’48 Hours’ established,” Stringer said of his newest series, which was just renewed for a second season. The program applies massive coverage to a single subject over a 2-day period.

Its topics have been a mixed lot--military training, the war on drugs and one effort that stirred critical snickers: a New York dog show.

“I had always intended to preempt ’48 Hours’ with documentaries,” Stringer said. “But in the initial going, I have to get ’48 Hours’ established. That’s the compromise, and I’ve no apologies for that compromise.”

If CBS should produce up to 10 “CBS Reports”-style documentaries each year, it would signal perhaps a modest change in a decade when the tale of the dwindling network documentary is oft-told, with these factors (among others) blamed:

--The reluctance of networks to spend weeks, even months and up to $500,000 on a single serious news program that usually gets low ratings--a problem worsened by the cable shows, home video players and independent stations that are today’s fiercely competitive network rivals.

--Government deregulation of television, specifically the Federal Communications Commission’s dropping, in 1983, of a requirement that television stations air public affairs programs.

--A new, cost-conscious management at all three networks, a change that, with the new competition for audiences and advertising revenues, has created hard times for old-style documentaries.

Jay McMullen, who made such notable CBS documentaries as “Diary of a Bookie Joint” in 1961 and “The Tenement” in 1968, recalls that there once was “a nice sort of arrangement” at the networks.

Entertainment wares were supposed to make money, and news and public affairs didn’t have to. “That’s all changed,” said McMullen, who worked with “CBS Reports” from 1959 until 1986, when he left CBS News.

“Part of the reason for the change is political,” he said, referring to federal deregulation. “And part is economic.”

The “CBS Reports” unit is down to about 16 staffers and three producers (although, as Stringer noted, “an awful lot” of other documentary-making staffers are “tied up on ‘48’ and ‘57th,’ and I obviously can’t have everything”).

ABC News--which this year has aired five prime-time specials, one of them on the doings of the Yellow River in China and another on last week’s cultural “Omnibus”--last November ended its “Closeup” documentary unit as a separate arm of the news division.

It put “Closeup”--whose programs had won 20 Emmys and three Peabody awards since 1974--into a new “long-form” news programming department that plans to air 10 to 12 specials this year.

NBC News disbanded its documentary unit several years ago. It now has a “special programs” unit that last year had 13 specials, most of them serious, but not all--”Life in the Fat Lane” being a prime example.

NBC began this year with a special on the homeless. But the titles of two news specials aired in April, “Women Behind Bars” and “Stressed to Kill,” and another coming up, “Men in the Eighties,” indicate that in some quarters the documentary form could be suffering weight loss.

Still, NBC News this summer will air six more documentaries on Tuesdays. The only topic that has been announced is an examination of the uses of huge pension-fund portfolios.

Tentatively titled “The Pension Cookie Jar,” it represents the last hurrah at NBC News of Reuven Frank, who in 38 years with the network has been a documentary maker, newscast producer and twice its news division president.

Frank, who is leaving this fall to be a senior Gannett Fellow at Columbia University, in 1962 won a program-of-the-year Emmy for his “The Tunnel,” an account of a secret tunnel dug under Berlin to transport refugees from the East to the West.

Everyone agrees there’s no future for documentaries, he says, except TV critics.

“News management and news anchors all want to do them . . . because it makes them feel good,” Frank said. “And they think they will be taken seriously.”

Does that mean, then, that so-called “serious” documentaries are doomed?

“I don’t know,” he said. “There’s still a lot that they can do. But it’s so hard to get the public interested.”

Pamela Hill, head of ABC’s scaled-down “Closeup” unit, says the future of such documentaries is unclear because “the industry is very much in transition.”

“Right now, I would say the (documentary) emphasis is on immediacy,” she said. “There has been a move away from large-issue coverage” in the industry.

But big-issue documentaries that take time and money to make could make a comeback, she said, because “classic hard, journalistic examinations have always been important to the reputation and prestige of a news division.”

With many of his documentary crew members tied up on “48 Hours,” CBS News chief Stringer conceded that “what we gain in timeliness we lose in long-range reflection” that the old-style, take-a-while documentary provides.

“And sometimes that’s unfortunate. . . . I’d like to have both.”

But if “48 Hours” catches on, rises in the ratings and otherwise becomes established, it could prove good news for what some call the traditional documentary form, he said.

Then, having a ready-made time period for such programs, he said, “I can float as many as a dozen” documentaries each year in the series’ time period.