Ratings Aside, Producers of TV Docudramas See Opportunity to Provide a Public Service

There are certainly enough crass, venal motivations at the networks to go around. But to hear some of the makers of TV movies talk, there are some loftier goals as well.

Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward are allowing a made-for-TV production for ABC of their book “The Final Days,” in hopes of reminding people about the constitutional crisis and the personal drama behind Watergate. So maybe they’ll make a few bucks, too.

Prosecutor Joe Hynes, who reaped a lovely free ticket to Los Angeles to sit in a hot room with a lot of TV critics, is cooperating on NBC’s “Howard Beach: Making the Case for Murder.” He hopes it will enlighten the public about the much-publicized case of a vicious New York racial attack.

Elaine Shannon is cooperating with the NBC movie “Drug Wars: The Kiki Camarena Story,” based on her book, “Desperados: Latin Drug Lords, U.S. Lawmen, and the War America Can’t Win,” in hopes it will inspire the public to demand that the government get serious about the drug problem.

ABC is also making a movie about the Challenger disaster, Rock Hudson’s battle against AIDS, a Florida child molestation case and the so-called “preppy murder,” a New York sex-and-death case that made headlines for months.

“There’s no question these ripped-from-the-news stories make it a lot easier for television programmers to go out and market a film. The audience has heard about them,” said Allen Sabinson, ABC’s vice president for motion pictures for television and miniseries. “And there’s no question we have some predilection to do them and do a lot of them. The question that we’re sitting and asking is, is there a reason to do it that goes beyond simply getting a (rating) number?”

Some of the movies are made without the permission of the real-life participants, but are based on material in the public domain, such as news accounts or trial transcripts.

Sabinson said “Unspeakable Acts,” about the molestation of tots at a Florida day-care center, will serve the purpose of teaching the public the warning signs of child abuse. “Challenger,” about the space shuttle explosion, aims to educate audiences on the risks of technological achievement. “The Preppy Murder” will try to reveal the anguish of the victim’s family, not just because of the crime, but because of the ensuing publicity. Whether the family will welcome even more publicity in the form of the TV movie remains to be seen.

Ken Kaufman, the producer of “Howard Beach,” said he hopes that the film will present the facts of the case accurately and let the public draw from it what they will.

Daniel J. Travanti portrays Hynes in the movie about the successful prosecution of a group of white youths charged with attacking a group of blacks and chasing one of them to his death on a highway.

“If it saves the life, or if it saves the trauma of one single family,” Hynes said, “it’s worth it.”

“Drug Wars” is a real-life tale produced by Michael Mann, whose “Miami Vice” was a stylized, fictional homage to drug-fighting cops. Shannon, a journalist whose investigative book is an angry account of America’s anti-drug policies and their effect on the agents in the field, said she was impressed by the authenticity of the movie, directed by Brian Gibson.

“There are anecdotes that are compressed in time. You have to do that in order to get it intelligible for television, but I am very satisfied that the spirit of the story is there, and it’s real,” she said.

Mann said the movie will not depict the torture and murder of Camarena, a Guadalajara-based Drug Enforcement Administration agent killed by traffickers. “I would never put that scene in,” he said. “It would be too strong. It’s not to the point. What is to the point is the people’s reactions to the fact of it.”

Bernstein attended a news conference with the makers of the three-hour “Final Days.” He said he would have preferred that the book be made into the stage play, but praised the TV movie, in which Lane Smith plays Richard Nixon.

“I feel strongly, you know, that we need to know about what happened in this epoch of our history, and what this President did,” Bernstein said. “A lot of people in this country don’t know about it, or they’ve forgotten about it.”