A Filming Frenzy : Television: The Carol Stuart murder case in Boston raises a lot of questions, including this one: Is it too early for a TV movie on the subject?

There may be mystery twists left in the Carol Stuart murder case, but--in the most venerable tradition of show business--the TV movie must go on.

It’s been 11 months since the story burst onto the front page and into the nightly news, eight since her husband also died. The Boston grand jury has yet to deliver the results of its investigation of the matter; nevertheless, airing at 9 tonight on CBS is “Good Night, Sweet Wife: A Murder in Boston.”

The mournful salutation is taken from the farewell letter written by husband Charles for her funeral; the subtitle adds the ugly irony, since it was Charles who put her there, according to a preponderance of circumstantial evidence.

As the story of Carol’s death first unfolded, the Stuarts--white, well to do, living in splendid suburbia--were idolized as “the Camelot couple” trapped by urban violence, and black violence at that, since, as “Chuck” Stuart told it, a black man jumped into their car to rob them on their way home from a birthing class, shot the pregnant Carol in the head and wounded him in the stomach. Son Christopher, taken from his mother’s dying body, lived 17 days.

The media went hysterical over what seemed like the biggest Boston story since the Tea Party. Police set off a racial rage by swarming through the black community in search of suspects. One was found and supposedly was close to indictment on Jan. 4, 11 weeks after the attack, when Stuart jumped off the Tobin Bridge to his death in the grim Mystic River, an apparent suicide.

Then it was revealed that police had begun to think that maybe Chuck, perhaps for the insurance money and/or simply to get rid of Carol, had shot her, wounded himself and made up the intruder.

Stuart, who has come to symbolize the yuppie gone mad, is portrayed in the CBS dramatization by Ken Olin, who plays the sensitive yuppie man-hero Michael in “thirtysomething.”

(It may be hard to miss Olin tonight: While he’s killing his wife on CBS, he’ll be opening the “thirtysomething” season on ABC fretting over whether his new son should be circumcised.)

This will also be a special night for executive producer Arnold Shapiro, who takes over CBS’ prime-time schedule, with the season debut of his “Rescue 911” series opening the evening at 8.

The two programs are not unrelated. Fortuitous timing by a “Rescue 911” camera crew helped Shapiro get to the air first with this singularly sensational crime story. Carol Stuart’s death had been a national event because of its bizarre circumstances, but it was Charles’ death that set off a frenzy for TV and book rights, with dozens of writers and producers and perhaps a couple dozen more publishers and literary agents in hot pursuit of deals.

Shapiro had had a “Rescue 911” camera crew stationed in Boston awaiting rescue efforts that could be taped for the show, and they happened to be riding with an emergency rescue team the night that the wounded Stuart used his cellular car phone to summon police. The show eventually did a segment around the rescue effort, and contacts with the family, including Stuart, and other sources gave Shapiro a hefty advantage over other producers seeking to get the story to the screen.

But the question about unanswered questions in the case keeps bobbing up: Is it too early for a movie?

Carol Stuart’s family, the DiMaitis, aren’t pleased. They issued a statement that it was “very disturbing” that the movie was made without their consent or participation “and that such a movie is being broadcast while there is still a sitting grand jury, before anyone, even our family, knows the outcome of the criminal investigation.” The statement added that the movie “sets a dangerous precedent for any innocent individual or family whose life is touched by tragedy to lose all rights to privacy.”

Gary Kessler, executive vice president of television for Fries Entertainment, believes that it is, maintaining that there’s too much unresolved in the case.

Of course, Fries has in mind its own version. It optioned a book by investigative journalist Joe Sharkey, who delivered his 110,000-word text Friday to Prentice-Hall Press, which plans an early spring publication for “Deadly Greed,” the working title.

Sharkey told The Times from his home in Glen Ridge, N.J., that he was “astonished” that a movie has been made so quickly because, for one thing, a major unanswered question is the role of Chuck’s younger brother, Matthew, in the actual crime.

“I know the answer but I’m not ready to discuss it,” said Sharkey, who presumably will discuss it when his book is rolling into the bookstores.

Matthew, supposedly tormented by conscience because he had helped Chuck in the plot, was said to have met with police the day before Chuck’s death.

The Sharkey book would be produced for TV by Louis Rudolph, who has done some major docudramas (“A Case of Rape,” “Guilty or Innocent: The Sam Sheppard Case,” “Small Sacrifices”). A UCLA classmate of Shapiro’s in theater arts/television and a longtime friend, Rudolph said that the Sharkey book would necessarily need to add new elements to the story before another Stuart movie would be made.

But, he noted, “Look how long it has been since the grand jury has been back. The silence is deafening.”

Sharkey, who has done investigative duty for the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Wall Street Journal, said that the crime itself is uncomplicated: “Guy shoots his wife and when they come to get him, he jumps off the bridge,” but the idea of a movie now “is very odd (because) to me the case is characterized by three things: No. 1, the hype; No. 2, police misconduct and No. 3, a cover-up that is continuing. How the movie sorts that out is beyond me. That hasn’t been sorted out yet.”

A primary focus of his book is likely to be the print press: “The story was driven not by journalistic concerns,” Sharkey said, “but by marketing concerns, which I think is more and more a problem in our business. This story was seen as a hell of a marketing device.

“The Globe and the Herald (the Boston dailies) are in a tremendous competition to cover local news and this was a barn burner, they thought. They saw it (the Stuart case) as a metaphor. They emptied the newsrooms and basic journalistic practices were trampled in the process.” The papers snapped up Stuart’s version so quickly “that they didn’t ask the hard questions.”

Shapiro acknowledged that his movie might eventually need an epilogue tag “if some startling fact comes to light.” But very little has developed since the movie project was earnestly started in January: “The grand jury was supposed to be done Feb. 1, then March 1, then April 1 . . . and they’re still not done,” he said.

The scramble over movies about Page 1 news stories “isn’t the game that I’ve ever played,” said Shapiro, “and now (that this one is over), I personally am happy to remove myself from it.”

He reflected on the days after Stuart’s alleged suicide: “It’s almost like we were casually strolling down the trail toward a television movie (based on the shooting of the Stuarts) and suddenly this herd came along and surrounded us and was beginning to pass us up. And that’s when we realized that there was going to be a movie and here we were already three months into this.”

Would-be producers kept dropping along the trail until the only ones left were Shapiro and Mark Wolper, son of David L. Wolper, the veteran documentary and docudrama producer.

The younger Wolper was in “the race” for the Stuart movie for about four months, hiring writers, getting rights (he wouldn’t say whose). Then he quit, because to beat the Shapiro project, he pleaded, it would “hurt the quality of the film, and we were not willing to do that”--which is the normal invocation for producers in such situations.

(Shapiro noted interesting history here: that he had worked twice for David Wolper: “I mean, he is Mr. Documentary. He handed me my Academy Award for ‘Scared Straight’ at the Oscars in 1979 and later that year he handed me my Emmy for ‘Scared Straight.’ ”)

Shapiro hired Dan Freudenberger (“Do You Know the Muffin Man?”) to write his script: “I think the reason that they called me is that I pride myself on being able to do this quickly,” the writer said. “I told them that, because I wanted the job--and they told me how fast they wanted it and I couldn’t believe it!”

The first air deadline was the May ratings sweeps, meaning that the producers needed to start production March 15--which might well have caught the interest of the Guinness Book of World Records for haste.

Freudenberger had his first meeting Jan. 26 and delivered his first outline Feb. 10, while chasing in and out of Boston interviewing virtually everybody but the ever-silent police, although he said he found a detective who was willing to talk without being identified.

The only way to make the May date would have been to get a rough script outline so that the movie could be “storyboarded”--sketches drawn of each scene so locations could be found and sets built--and then write the script as shooting was going on, he said.

“We finally told the network that if NBC (the network interested in the Wolper project) makes it (first), fine,” Freudenberger related, “but we can’t in good conscience make it accurately this fast. They said, ‘OK, we’ll shoot in May, because we don’t want to shoot it in summer because it’s going to be too hot to have actors in winter clothes for January and shooting someplace in August.”

Wolper and NBC quit about May 1. “What I heard was that they never got a script they were happy enough with to go out and shoot,” Shapiro said.

Freudenberger was in Chicago for the last three days before filming (the movie was shot May 29 to June 27), polishing the script while the actors were rehearsing it, “but by that point, it (the script) had stopped keeping you up at night.”