TV Reviews : Reenactments Help Tell ‘Story Behind the Story’

The story behind “The Story Behind the Story” is that reenactments continue to have a life on television. They’re the heart of this unevenly entertaining NBC special airing at 8 p.m. Sunday on Channels 4, 36 and 39

Richard Kiley and Jane Wallace are the hosts of the program (from the producers of NBC’s “Unsolved Mysteries”), which fuses actual footage and dramatizations in relating obscure sidebars to headline stories.

The last two segments are extremely thin, bordering on vapid. Easily the hour’s highlight is the story of comics Mitzi McCall and Charlie Brill, who had the misfortune of making their national debut in 1964 on the same episode of “The Ed Sullivan Show” on which the Beatles made their American TV debut.

Even before air time, the comics are in trouble. We see an actor playing Sullivan telling actors playing McCall and Brill an hour before the show: “Your act just isn’t funny.” Sullivan has them run through alternate material, from which he picks the bits he wants them to do, and then later we see videotape of their actual performance that night in front of an unreceptive studio audience consisting mostly of frenzied teens primed for the Beatles, not comedy. This a very charming piece, with the real McCall and Brill, who are married, describing the shattering experience of bombing that night.

Meanwhile, the NBC hour’s lead segment adds some interesting edging to the story of Abraham Zapruder Jr., the late Dallas businessman whose grainy home-movie pictures of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy became a lasting visual record of the horror and crucial part of the investigations that followed.

How times change. Yesterday a lone movie camera, today a zillion camcorders.