‘MASH’s’ Farrell Leads Cast in TV Drama About Patricide

Mike Farrell knew when he took on the role of Paul Gianelli, the attorney who defended a New York teen-ager accused of arranging her father’s murder, that he wanted to put some of himself into the character.

“I saw some videotape of him being interviewed,” said Farrell, best remembered for his “MASH” role as B.J. Hunnicut. “I decided I wasn’t going to do an imitation of him. I was going to create my own character. He was very real within the script.”

In the ABC movie “A Deadly Silence” on Sunday, as in actual events on Long Island, N.Y., Gianelli defends teen-ager Cheryl Pierson on a charge that she hired a schoolmate to kill her father. She contended that she had him killed to stop his sexual abuse.

“I met the reporter who wrote the book,” he said, referring to Dena Kleiman of the New York Times. “She was a terrific source of information. Gianelli was a straightforward lawyer whose practice was mostly domestic, but he had done some corporate work.

“The thing that interested me was that on a human level he really connected with this girl and became very committed to her welfare. The more he found about what her life had been like, the more passionate he became about her case.”

Kleiman’s book related Cheryl’s story of her years-long entrapment in an incestuous relationship with her father, James Pierson. It probed deeper, however, to reveal a conspiracy of silence by friends and relatives.

Pierson was shot to death on Feb. 5, 1986, at his home in Selden. Cheryl, then 16, was accused of paying a classmate $1,000 to kill him. She served 3 1/2 months of her 6-month sentence.

“A Deadly Silence” also stars Charles Haid as Pierson, a robust electrician who clung to such trappings of youth as fast cars and motorcycles; Sally Struthers as social worker Marilyn Adams; Bruce Weitz as Detective James McCready, and Heather Fairfield as Cheryl. John Patterson directed from a screenplay by Jennifer Miller for executive producer Robert Greenwald.

“Because of the circumstances” of Cheryl’s case, Farrell said, “some people felt she should not serve any time at all but should be put on some form of probation. She was a person who was trying to extricate herself, albeit violently, from a terrible situation.

“She hired a classmate to kill her father. Her class had discussed a story about an abused wife who had hired someone to kill her husband. She said, ‘Who would do a thing like that?’ and her classmate said he would.”

Farrell has not been in a series since “MASH” left the air in 1983. He had been a journeyman actor before that, appearing in two other series, but it was “MASH” that gave him star power. He has starred in several unsuccessful pilots, however, including the 1985 movie pilot “Private Sessions,” in which he played a psychologist.

He said he would now prefer to devote his time to movies, as he has done for the last several years. He produces feature and TV movies and appears in some TV films.

His production partner is Marvin Minoff. They produced the feature film “Dominick and Eugene,” and Farrell also directed the TV movie “Run Till You Fall.” He starred in “Memorial Day” and “Choices of the Heart.”

If many of Farrell’s films seem to have messages, it’s no accident. He is passionately committed to causes.

One is fighting pollution; his next movie, “The Smell of Money,” deals with toxic waste. He co-wrote the story with David Reiss. Albert Rubin wrote the screenplay. Farrell will produce and star in the movie for Turner Network Television.

“The movie’s about a man against the system,” Farrell said. “His daughter becomes ill and dies from what he learns is toxic waste dumped into a stream by a factory. It’s a one-factory town, and when he takes on the factory everyone turns on him rather than the polluter. We’ll shoot it on location in Utah.”

Since 1984, Farrell has been married to actress Shelley Fabares, who is co-starring in the ABC series “Coach.”

“I’d just come back from El Salvador in 1982, and CBS asked me to go to their affiliates meeting in San Francisco,” he said. “Shelley was doing ‘One Day at a Time’ and she was there, too. Neither one of us was married, and it turned out very well.”