Commentary : When Reel and Real-Life Merge Into One Image

The writer has directed a number of dramatic television films based on real and sometimes historical events, most recently “A Dangerous Life,” a six-hour HBO miniseries chronicling the fall of Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines.

Life and real life collided the other night when Oliver North the man and Oliver North the actor walked across our television screens almost hand in hand on the 6 o’clock news.

The real Oliver North was arriving for his courthouse trial. The actor playing Oliver North, David Keith, was rehearsing a scene for a coming television movie about the life of the Marine colonel. The stories were aired back to back on the local NBC station, and as I watched them I knew it would not be long before the two Ollies would become one in our hearts and minds.

Americans have tumbled through a cultural looking glass. Television bombards us every hour of every day of every year with electronic tonnage of information and misinformation, with little guidance as to what is real and what is not. That is because the medium serves two purposes at once, news and entertainment. Today the line between the two is blurred. But it was not always the case.

Back in the 1970s, I worked at CBS News where I made documentaries about the important subjects of the day. In those days the networks were regulated and we were considered journalists, not film makers, and getting a controversial story on the air was an exacting process. Sometimes the process for a one-hour broadcast took a year and came under the intense scrutiny of mature executives with first-rate minds, who were themselves journalists.

Television today is an aggressive medium, with programmers yelling and screaming for our attention. Regulation is all but gone and the viewers are on their own. Fact and fiction are tossed about with little thought on talk shows and so-called reality programming. The complex questions of our time, once examined so carefully on the commercial networks by people like Edward R. Murrow, now come as entertainment packaged with a TV star in a movie of the week or in a miniseries. These stories, now called projects, are often made in great haste and under the burden of even greater economic pressures. Their purpose is not so much to inform but to win sweeps week.

All of this, I think, can cause confusion in a society that needs hard information in trying to understand the hard choices it faces. When our news programs are spiced with entertainment and our entertainment is “based on fact,” it’s difficult to know what to believe.

An example. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein wrote a precise account of Richard Nixon’s last days in the White House in their book “Final Days.” The journalists describe a broken President and his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, down on their knees in the Lincoln Sitting Room, praying. Many felt it was fiction. But not long afterward, when John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd satirized the moment on “Saturday Night Live,” Woodward, who was watching the show at home, turned to his wife and said: “Now it’s real.”

“Final Days,” the television movie, is coming soon to a TV set near you. And when the actor playing Richard Nixon falls to his knees in prayer, the event will not only be real, it will have become history.

It is easy to understand why and how television film makers stripmine the headlines. The stories are already written, and the network executives who buy them only need to think about the casting. But for the millions who watched the real events with their own eyes, often as it was happening, one wonders what they hope to find in the recycled drama that they don’t already know. A glimpse of North in his skivvies? Imelda’s shoes? I don’t think so. I think the answer is in familiarity, the comfort of knowing the story’s outcome in an uncertain world.

The stories first unfold on news at 11. Follow-ups in the morning headlines. Photo spread in the weekly magazines. Pounded into our consciousness on radio talk shows. And when the movie is made, the actors playing either Oliver North or Richard Nixon are on the Johnny Carson show getting us ready to relive the story. The real North and Nixon are then walking promotion for the films about their lives.

These are the issues of our time, no doubt about that, and often they are explored with integrity and in meaningful ways. But even if they are done well, and do inform us, their proliferation does something else. As the issues grow larger, our imaginations shrink. Creative energies are poured into enhancing realities we already know rather than into the pursuit of the profound unknown. Viewers become voyeurs to pop history.

The films are already beginning to feel familiar and inevitably the audiences for them also will shrink. Endless theatrical movie sequels, remakes of recent award-winning foreign films, and the coming onslaught of $30-million movies about comic-strip characters makes me wonder whether we are on the brink of creative bankruptcy.

Where are the stories about men’s souls, the private fears that haunt Everyman before he escapes into sleep at night? Where are the stories about the stuff of life that Paddy Chayefsky wrote about, and who is going to write and direct them if all of us are probing the 6 o’clock news for movie ideas?

Despite our multiplying mediums--television sets with 100 channels ready and movie theaters with 14 screens waiting for “product”--our national attention narrows. This at a time in human history when the real issues are hidden in the privacy of our hearts.

Fears of global warming and nuclear winter are leading to international discontent. America’s boundaries, cultural as well as political, once clearly defined, are open on every front. The global village is here. Spiritual questions are before us. Our internal lives are haunted by them. The answers will not be found on the special five-part series for sweeps week. Nor in the docudrama. It will take the sweep of great imagination and knowing clearly what is real and what is not.

What we will need, then, is an artist or artists who probe the human heart and speak in a voice that is unique. We will need also at least one courageous executive who will make the air time available. And with that we can begin the process of looking at what is really bothering us. That, at least, would be a beginning.