Drawing the Line Between Tabloid TV and Re-Enactments

Like today’s tabloid television hits “America’s Most Wanted” and “Unsolved Mysteries,” Arnold Shapiro’s newest documentary, “Fatal Passions,” involves the re-enactment of lurid crimes--in this case, the murder or attempted murder of six people by family members or loved ones.

But producer Shapiro and some others in the documentary film-making business believe that such re-enactment of events and other dramatic means of presenting facts do not necessarily define a project as “tabloid television.”

“I would hate to see advertisers or programmers reject all reality programming because they perceive it as trash or tabloid TV,” said Shapiro. “That’s like rejecting all feature films because some of them are ‘B’ movies. You don’t reject ‘Out of Africa’ because of ‘Beach Ball Bikini,’ or whatever it’s called.”

Shapiro, producer of the Oscar- and Emmy-winning 1979 documentary “Scared Straight” and winner of 11 other Emmys for other TV documentaries, is somewhat annoyed to find himself talking about tabloid TV these days. But a program with a title like “Fatal Passions” (which airs at 8 tonight on KTLA Channel 5) almost begs to be tossed into the same bag as today’s “trash TV” offerings.

Indeed, the original title of the documentary, “Crimes of Passion,” had to be changed because of TV’s tabloid glut. That title was chosen because the program is the second installment of Shapiro’s series exploring violent crimes. The first was “Crimes of Violence,” about violent attacks perpetrated by strangers. The “Crimes of Passion” title, however, already had been snapped up by ABC last fall for several reality-based specials the network picked up to fill holes in its schedule caused by last summer’s 154-day Writers Guild of America strike.

Shapiro said he was satisfied with the “Fatal Passions” title, however, because one of the documentary’s stories mirrors the movie “Fatal Attraction,” in which a woman has a brief affair with a married man and then becomes obsessed with him.

Even “Fatal Passions” host Patty Duke has fallen victim, sort of, to tabloid overdose. According to a publicist for the show, Duke canceled all of her scheduled press interviews to promote “Fatal Passions” because so many journalists wanted to talk to her about the ethics of tabloid TV, rather than exploring Duke’s own past as an abused child or her desire to help others avoid family violence.

“She wasn’t expecting to be categorized in that area; that isn’t what the show is,” Shapiro offered as explanation for Duke’s reticence. “She’s not the creator of the show. She doesn’t feel comfortable” discussing the matter.

Shapiro does feel comfortable discussing tabloid TV, however--but only to make clear that he thinks the label belongs to somebody else.

“I’m not doing anything different now than I have done over my 25 years of producing reality television, and that’s to do meaningful, attention-getting documentaries and other types of reality programming,” he said. “Right now, it’s almost like we’re on a railroad track--we’re going down a tabloid tunnel, and we’re going to come out on the other side.”

Shapiro said his show does not head down that track, despite its focus on lurid crimes and their re-enactment. “I don’t think that ‘re-enactment’ and ‘tabloid’ go hand-in-hand,” Shapiro said. “There were probably re-enactments going back as far as (the 1950s series) ‘You Asked For It.’ “One of the most brilliant documentaries I ever saw was part of the PBS series ‘The American Experience’. . . . It was the true story of a woman named Emmeline, who, through a bizarre series of events, ended up marrying her own son. In this particular documentary, they had re-enacted footage of Emmeline as a little girl with an actress. It was not labeled re-enactment, it was represented in black and white to offset it. It was done tastefully, and there it was. I had no problem with it; I don’t think anybody did. It was a just another way of telling a story.

“Think about doing a documentary about events that have already happened,” Shapiro continued, “and think about the choices you have: talking heads, news footage if it’s available, still photos. Or you have reconstruction of events. You do as much as you can with the first three, and you supplement when necessary.”

In the past, documentary makers labeled all dramatizations as such, but most film makers have dropped that convention, Shapiro said.

The dramatized portions of “Fatal Passions” were shot in black and white to differentiate them from the rest of the film, he said, adding that in recent months even that much differentiation has been scrapped by most documentarians. “I’m a little out of date,” Shapiro said.

Harrison Engle, a documentary film maker and president of the International Documentary Assn., agreed that there exists a trend among documentarians to dispense with cautionary labels and experiment with “a wider palette of techniques,” but he believes that TV’s highly dramatic reality shows--not all of which are documentaries, anyway--represent a trend that has filtered into the commercial mainstream from independent documentary makers, rather than vice versa.

“I agree that nonfiction film makers are working differently now,” Engle said. He cited as an example the documentary “The Thin Blue Line,” produced by former private detective Errol Morris, which was released theatrically in Los Angeles last September: The film blended what one critic called “the B-movie re-enactment” of a bizarre Texas murder with more traditional talking heads of those involved in the crime.

Engle’s own recent documentary “The Indomitable Teddy Roosevelt” mixed re-enactments with archival footage. “Whether it’s good or bad really depends on the film maker,” he said.

Engle said the current trend toward highly stylized documentary fare may represent a reaction to the network television documentaries of the 1960s and 1970s, which were more news and public-affairs programs than historical examinations. But he still cautions film makers to make the line between reality and fantasy perfectly clear to the viewer.

“I do personally think that the film maker’s responsibility to audiences goes beyond ‘Let the buyer beware,’ ” he said.

Michael Renov, an associate professor of USC’s school of cinema and television, disputes both how widespread the use of re-enactments is and its inspiration. Though occasional documentary film makers have done successful work blending re-enactment with existing film, he said, television’s increasingly dramatic presentation of documentary material has yet to filter down to independent film makers.

“To me, it’s on the ludicrous side to say that documentary changes with any rapidity,” he said. “We’re not talking about TV’s sensational subject matter--the main body of documentary work in this country is the product of a lot of time, effort and fund-raising, nonprofit efforts.”

Renov added that most traditional documentary makers remain wary of compromising historical accuracy for dramatic effect.

“I think what (dramatization) does very much is play to narrative and fictional convention, and so it creates a story out of history,” he said. “So on the one hand, we can talk about (audience) sophistication; on the other, we can talk about desensitization, and that can get pretty frightening. To propagate the sense that everything has the same level of reality to it--I don’t think you want to reinforce that.”

For Shapiro, the difference between tabloid TV and good reality programming has more to do with social responsibility than subject matter. He is proud that the last segment of “Fatal Passions” is devoted to public-service information.

“I think one must distinguish between shows that are trying to help people and shows that are (made) pretty much for sensationalism and titillation,” he said. “Sure, I’ll try to come up with a strong title, I’ll try to come up with shocking information, but I want to save lives. . . . To that end, I’ll do the most attention-getting program I can.”