Hollywood Deaths : Reality Broadsides Fantasy Land

Hollywood is in the business of illusions, of artfully blurring--but not crossing--the line that separates make-believe and real life.

This week, though, the line was lost. Reality broadsided fantasy. In a city where scripts often read like police reports, police reports began reading like scripts:

--A young actress, with an ingenue freshness that got her hired for the kid-sister TV role that was her big break, is shot to death on her own doorstep, perhaps by a deranged fan. She had returned home from Italy after filming a miniseries about the brutal terrorist murder of a wheelchair-bound American man aboard a cruise ship.

--A man with a grudge and a gun smashes his way into Lorimar Studios, shoots up a sound stage, then kills himself. He was a one-time business partner of a “Dallas” TV show actor, in a failed venture in the staple food of movie palaces, popcorn. Lot workers said later that they thought it was a special-effects stunt. Before he shot up Lorimar, the man handed the guard an envelope that held a news article. Its headline: “Dreams, Feuds, Love, Lawsuits--and Popcorn.”

--A young bit actor who once appeared in a TV show about two highway patrolmen who pursue and arrest evildoers is killed on the spot when a brand-new stolen Chevrolet being chased by police slams into his car on a street near Koreatown.

--And even as Shakespeare’s grimmest dramas have moments of slapstick, a sidewalk preacher in fine moral dudgeon over actor Rob Lowe’s blue-movie videotapes goes to court to try to stop the actor from filming movie scenes in the mid-Wilshire apartment building where the preacher lives. The preacher loses.

The ripples have scarcely ceased moving through the sets and studios and office suites of Hollywood.

“I think everybody in L.A. right now feels terrible--everyone’s talking about it,” said actress Theresa Saldana, who nearly died in a knife attack by a deranged fan bent on killing her as his “divine mission.” She has fought to keep him in prison, and fought too for victims’ rights.

They talk about coincidence. They talk about the triad mythology, that disasters arrive in threes. They talk about the twin irritants of heat and humidity. Even the moon. “Well,” postulated one Lorimar worker, “it was a full moon last night. That’s one explanation for it.”

Out at Lorimar, Bob Peacock, who works in the film lab, did not see the shooting, but around there, you never know “whether the sound of a gun is the real McCoy--it is the movie industry. If you were looking down on the stages and saw some guy blowing up the wall with a gun, you wouldn’t think anything about it. They knew this was no act only when the cops showed up.”

Said an executive on a daytime soap opera, whose actors find that fans often do not distinguish between the actors and the characters they play, insulting them or commiserating with them if they happen to encounter them in real life:

“Well, we live in a land of illusion. They make movies so real now, and in movies, it’s nothing to walk up and start shooting. So you have to consider. A lot of people say violence doesn’t cross over into people’s everyday lives, (but) things happen like this and you have to think twice about it. . . .

‘Always Tragic’

“It’s always tragic, but it’s not surprising in today’s world.”

A radio performer pointed to “the city of L.A. itself--you’ve got not only people picking off high-profile people in general, but just driving down the freeway, gang wars, people at fast-food restaurants getting bumped off. There’s a thin line anyway between fantasy and reality, and for people who live in a nether kind of world, maybe that (a movie, an actor or actress admired or reviled) spurred something.”

Psychologist Dr. Stuart Fischoff, who has produced and written TV movies--most recently “Miles to Go” with Jill Clayburgh--sees Tuesday’s swath of violence as another piece of the pattern without a pattern: a society where frustration creates violence and where that violence intrudes on every level of life and life style, seeping even into the charmed circle of Hollywood as surely as it does in South-Central Los Angeles.

Still, he said, “it’s been pretty well documented by research that TV tends to blur the real world; reality becomes less real. The intersection of these two experiences is going to occur a lot more often”--not necessarily with violent consequences, but as a matter of perception.

“Especially,” Fischoff added, “with people relying more and more on electronic relations--me and the TV, me and the fax machine, me and the computer”--the cocooning-retreat from complex social challenges to less demanding electronic ones.

The fictions of television and movies provide a new kind of community; their inhabitants are our neighbors, and thus their impact is almost personal, even when the tragedies occur to people we do not meet.

Fantasy tragedies can make us cry--Dr. Jerry Clark, president of the media division of the American Psychological Assn., recently sniffled his way through the movie “Field of Dreams.” That is the art of it. But when for certain imbalanced fans the line between the actor and the person is not clear, danger emerges.

The man who killed Rebecca Schaeffer “probably had fantasized an intimate relationship with her,” Fischoff said. “What happens with TV is even the people who are too psychologically weak to go outside and relate to people . . . can relate to people in television, and then if it goes far enough you get the Hinckleys and (Jacksons, Saldana’s attacker) who probably feel very righteous in what they did.”

The intrusion of real life on Hollywood is of course not new, but it does seem to many to be escalating. There have been movie-set accidents, where fantasy disintegrates into tragic reality, from the earliest movies, when Lillian Gish slid from a cake of ice into freezing water in “Way Down East” and survived, to recent deaths and injuries of stunt men, and the death of three performers, Vic Morrow and two children, in the “Twilight Zone” movie, which precipitated an industry-wide safety scare.

But the personalizing of violence to the performer is something else.

Just the recent instances: the man who showed up at Universal Studios to kill actor Michael Landon, and allegedly killed two security guards; a man being held in Illinois who allegedly threatened singer Olivia Newton-John and several others; a woman who just pleaded not guilty to sending more than 5,000 threatening letters to actor Michael J. Fox, and a woman who broke into late-night host David Letterman’s house and believes herself to be his wife.

Security consultant Gavin de Becker, who has advised Saldana, Fox and others and has talked to legislators about special security problems for celebrities, sees “a blurring of the line” of behavior toward actors “that we come to feel intimately involved with, characters we really don’t know but think we do.”

“When you look at the American dream, this is the flip side. . . . When they tell you you’ll be free and you’ll be famous and well-to-do, well compensated, they don’t also tell you you’ll be at the center of a hurricane of desperate people.”

Jerry Clark, the psychologist, says it is “coincidental” that three deaths should occur in one day, “but it’s not coincidental that there’s more violence than ever before.”

It points to the need to “reduce the amount of violence” on TV and in films.

“Who needs ‘Lethal Weapon 2’? I really do like the two actors but. . . . “

Times staff writer Elizabeth J. Mann contributed to this story.

RELATED STORIES: Metro, Pages 1 and 3.