Coping With the Blast : ‘Hiroshima: Out of the Ashes’ Was a Tricky Project for Producers and Advertisers

As television drama goes, a film about the destruction of Hiroshima in 1945 has got to be one of the trickier propositions: How many people would pick such a subject for their viewing pleasure? How “Americanized” would this “Japanese” story have to be to please U.S. tastes? Would companies buy time on the program to sell cars and breakfast cereals?

Undaunted by these questions, NBC made the film anyway and will air “Hiroshima: Out of the Ashes” at 9 p.m. Monday--the 45th anniversary of the atomic attack that brought a stunning end to the war in the Pacific.

Essentially the two-hour movie consists of horrifying accounts of the effects of The Bomb on several citizens of the city--including two American POWs--and their struggle to survive the incredible devastation. It deals with the human element and avoids the treacherous political issues.

The cast includes Max Von Sydow as a German Jesuit missionary; Judd Nelson and Ben Wright as downed American airmen; Pat Morita as a postman whose son is missing in the war, and Tamlyn Tomita as Sally, the postman’s pregnant American daughter-in-law.

The movie represents passions coming together, executive producer Robert Greenwald said. He recalled a conversation with a daughter “who knew about Hiroshima, that it was a horrible event, but the reality--that the atomic bomb had been dropped and the effect it had on the human beings there--well, she really didn’t have a sense of it.”

Greenwald mentioned that at a lunch one day with Anthony Masucci, senior vice president of the network’s movies and miniseries. Masucci confided that one of the most affecting books he had read in junior high school was John Hersey’s masterful 1946 “Hiroshima,” then considered a magnificent new style of nonfiction novel. But Hersey wouldn’t release rights, Masucci said.

They finally decided that such a movie could be made, using much the same structure that Hersey did, with parallel stories of a handful of victims.

When they called in writer John McGreevey, they found that he shared their enthusiasm.

“By a strange coincidence,” said McGreevey, “I had always wanted to write something about Hiroshima, too. I still had the original copy of the New Yorker (Aug. 31, 1946) when they devoted the whole issue to Hersey’s book. I brought it with me to my first meeting with Tony and Robert to show my interest.”

For McGreevey, whose credits are legendary, from radio drama to live TV in the 1950s to “My Three Sons,” “Waltons” scripts, “Roots: The Next Generation” and “Murder in Texas,” this was one of his most rugged assignments.

“I think it’s very presumptuous for an Occidental person who was born in Indiana and grew up in the U.S. to try to get inside the head of the Japanese,” he said. “I read a lot and talked to a lot of Japanese people, but it was very challenging. I’ve always had a strong empathy for the Japanese and read a lot of Japanese literature in translation.”

Greenwald praised the network for not insisting on a total American point of view, “the traditional way that foreign subjects are done.” An “American story” wouldn’t do justice to this project, he maintained.

However: “This being television,” McGreevey said, “of course there was a good deal of interest in making it relate more directly to an American audience, and what our research turned up was the fact that there were a couple dozen POWs in Hiroshima, and we did one of the parallel stories on them.” (They all died within two weeks of radiation sickness.)

Looking for other stories to integrate into the script, McGreevey met with perhaps 20 survivors, with the help of a Japanese-American researcher, Joe Ide, who did the preliminary interviewing. After the first draft, Ide collected friends and family and read the script out loud and offered considerable ideas to incorporate Japanese nuances.

Carl Meyer, NBC vice president of network sales on special projects, said that “a couple Japanese automotives” (car manufacturers) had long ago reserved space in the Monday night time period but dropped out after screening the film. He declined to identify which companies but indicated that other advertisers would take their place and said that there would be no financial impact on the network.

Movies are screened for advertisers as a matter of course, he said. “One thing that is true with any film like this, or anything that’s based like this on the Second World War,” he said, “you’re expecting to have any of your Japanese clients not want to run in the film, any more than a movie on the Holocaust would have Mercedes-Benz or Volkswagen in it. That’s a normal kind of accepted problem.”

Likewise, “a few” advertisers have asked for certain positions in the commercial periods because “certain breaks may be more difficult than others. You know, one of the problems you run into with a film that gets into a difficult or heavy subject is the commercial message may be, well, a Pepsi commercial, a Pepsi Generation, upbeat kind of thing. That’s an abrupt change coming out of an act (of “Hiroshima”) into a commercial like that.”

A weary Greenwald returned to town Wednesday after finished shooting Tuesday night in Budapest on a TNT Network film, “Urgent Mission: From the Amnesty Files,” which he directed with stars Ron Silver and Roger Daltrey in a tale of Turkish torture. Greenwald he hopes it’s the first of a series on Amnesty International projects.

While it’s almost a tradition for producers to plead poverty, or possible poverty, he laid out the case for “Hiroshima.” The normal network movie fee is about $2.5 million and, he hinted, NBC gave him a little more. But the actual cost is running upwards of $4.8 million.

His company took out bank loans to make up the difference and hopes to repay them through ancillary sales of the film--in other countries and for home video. Greenwald acknowledged faulty economics at work here but said, “I just had to make the decision that I was going to make this movie and I was going to find a way to get the additional funds.”

It’s not clear if nuclear bomb movies will sell: “I don’t think anybody knows. ‘The Day After’ did very well, but remember, it was a huge publicity thing and it was all white faces in the lens. And as soon as you get into anything other than white and fairly well-known faces, you have a different set of problems.

“I think we’ll find that out in the next few months. We’ll see whether I made a smart decision.”

The interest in Japan is “tremendous,” he said. Videocassette rights already are sold and “nine or 10” companies have declared their interest in buying TV rights.