Made-for-TV Heroes : ‘Storm’ Strategically Fuses Reality, Re-Enactments

Newspaper headlines struck a hauntingly familiar chord last week, as Iraq’s refusalto follow United Nations peace resolutions awakened the specter of renewed military action in the Persian Gulf. The nation held its breath--along with executives at ABC.

The network had scheduled its docudrama “The Heroes of Desert Storm” to air this Sunday--six months to the day after the government of Iraq accepted terms for a permanent cease-fire. Suddenly, a movie celebrating the bravery of American men and women in the Persian Gulf seemed premature with the possibility of continued conflict.

Hours before President Bush’s Oval Office address last Friday, Alan Sabinson, ABC vice president of movies and miniseries, said, “Clearly, we are watching the situation carefully, and we are eagerly waiting to see what the President has to say. There are a set of circumstances that could occur that would cause us to reconsider our Sunday air date. Frankly, it’s a case of watch and wait and see.”

It turned out, of course, that the crisis with Iraq was resolved; the movie remains scheduled for Sunday at 9 p.m. But concerns of a different nature--about the film’s form and content--remain.

While most docudramas--those unique television hybrids where entertainment fuses with real-life news events--invite a host of authenticity questions, “Heroes” may be in a class by itself.

The $3-million docudrama is a new style of TV that its producers have dubbed “instant movies,” which seems to have sprouted from the current appetite for reality programming. So carefully interwoven are the elements of “Heroes” that viewers may have a difficult time discerning what’s real and what’s illusion.

“Heroes” reportedly received full Department of Defense cooperation, and includes scripted narrative read by Bush, with on-camera appearances by the Kuwaiti ambassador and a U.S. Army general. The staged re-enactments were shot on videotape to match ABC News clips, stock footage from military defense manufacturers and unreleased Desert Storm combat video provided by the Pentagon. As a result, the entire production has the grainy, sharp-edged feel of a TV newscast.

“The alchemist’s dream in television, the turning of lead into gold, was to remove the wall that distinguishes reality from illusion,” “Heroes” writer Lionel Chetwynd said. “We achieved the alchemist’s dream. You cannot tell where the various gradations of reality and re-enactment cross paths.

“We’ve stumbled on a storytelling device that raises ethical questions. The ultimate danger is that history can be reconstructed in a manner that by definition is not objective, but the product of the attitudes of the people who made the film. The possibilities here are daunting, and they should give everyone cause for concern.”

The video verite foundation for “Heroes” was laid more than a year ago, when executive producer and director Don Ohlmeyer pitched “instant movies” to ABC. By videotaping a hot, topical subject in the news and rushing out a script, he theorized, a producer could turn around a TV movie-of-the-week in one-third the time required to shoot that same movie on film.

“Audiences want to see stories, and they want to see them quickly,” ABC’s Sabinson said. “The question in Don’s mind was: Are there stories we could do in a quick two-minute offense drill? But to do another true-life crime piece just to get it out quickly, I didn’t see the sense in that.”

Then the Persian Gulf War started. “As the war unfolded, it certainly occurred to us that this might be the subject to lend itself to a quick movie,” Sabinson said. “But we wanted to see where the war was going, what the outcome was going to be. Once we saw it was tremendously successful and there was going to be an American and Allied victory, we felt this war was the right subject.”

Sabinson called Ohlmeyer in April after the ground offensive ended. The first decision was to make a movie about the warriors, not the war.

“I think it would have been a problem to try and do a movie of the definitive document of the Persian Gulf War from this perspective of time,” Ohlmeyer said. “It’s going to be years before people can take a step back and say, did we do the right thing? Did we go too far?

“To the media, the war became a Nintendo war where people were just pushing buttons. But what about the Marines down there, who the night before the war fully expected to lose half the people in their battalion? They didn’t know before they went in that there would be only sporadic pockets of resistance and the whole thing would be over in a few days. What went through their minds? How did they feel facing the fourth largest army in the world? That’s what got lost for me in the coverage of the war.”

To write the script, Ohlmeyer selected Chetwynd, an activist for Vietnam veterans whose TV work includes “To Heal a Nation,” about the movement to build the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington. Chetwynd conducted three weeks of interviews with Desert Storm veterans to find compelling personal stories.

“The same problems existed in the public perception of the Persian Gulf War that existed for those who fought in Vietnam,” observed Chetwynd, who interviewed about 500 Vietnam POWs over 10 years for his 1987 feature film “The Hanoi Hilton.” “It didn’t matter if you vilified the troops, as in Vietnam, or lionized them, as in Desert Storm. In both events, you were able to avoid humanizing them. Desert Storm was a tremendous human tragedy. But it seemed so sanitary.”

Chetwynd, Ohlmeyer and ABC concurred that they would make an apolitical docudrama about the individual exploits and sacrifices of people, and avoid policy issues at all costs. “If this movie suddenly becomes an instrument that supports people going to war, or whips up a pro-war sentiment, then we failed,” Chetwynd said. “Because that’s not what we tried to do.”

The mere mention of a “Desert Storm” movie, so close on the heels of the real thing, seems to generate strong reactions. Actor Kris Kamm, who portrays a Silver Star recipient, found himself in several major arguments. “With one woman, it was really heated,” the 27-year-old actor recalled.

“She said, ‘You’re a warmonger! You’re making propaganda! You’re pro-military! You make me sick!’ And it was really awkward, because this woman had been a friend of mine for two years. How do you defend yourself against that? I read the script and accepted the role. I thought it had some nice things to say about the people who fought.”

Desert Storm veterans contacted for this story did not appear troubled by the movie; some even embraced it as an affirmation of their effort.

“I think a lot of people are excited, and want to see how the movie is going to portray what really happened, like they did in Vietnam, and how close they’ll come,” said Lorraine Barclift, 24, of Amarillo, Tex.

But Barclift, whose husband had to quit his truck-driving job to take care of the couple’s 18-month-old son when she was called to the Persian Gulf, refused to allow her story to become part of the docudrama when she was approached. She never sent her consent form back to the producers.

“Basically, the way it was worded was not good for me,” she explained. “Anything I said could be changed for the movie. I did not want the Army coming back to me if they got it wrong.”

And in the grand style of Hollywood, some events do appear to have been punched up a bit. In one true-life incident, after Navy F-14 pilot Devon Jones went down 186 miles into Iraqi territory, para-rescue specialist Ben Pennington’s 41st Air Rescue squadron scoured the desert for seven hours before locating Jones just as an enemy truck was bearing down on him.

“They had this guy (who played Jones) all bloodied to death, like he was in major trauma. But Jones had done real well for himself in terms of survival skills,” Pennington said from Cocoa Beach, Fla. In the script, Pennington’s character hoists Jones like a sack of potatoes and carries him back to the helicopter.

“I didn’t carry him,” Pennington said. “I grabbed him by the back of the collar and ran with him. I didn’t have to pick him up. So here they’re going to make me look like this big hero who throws this helpless guy over his shoulders and runs with him, and that’s not what happened. When I first heard that, I was, like, you’ve got to be kidding.”

Jonathan Alston, 27, hopes the glorified elements of “Heroes” don’t turn Desert Storm into something it was not. Alston, a specialist for the Army, was awarded a Silver Star for volunteering to cross a mine field. After taking metal fragments in his leg when he hit a trip wire and getting caught in enemy fire, he went on to kill several snipers and destroy a dozen enemy bunkers.

“I’m for the movie in some ways and in other ways--I’m not against it--I just don’t want people to get the wrong idea,” Alston said from his home in Killeen, Tex. “I hope parents sit down with their children if they watch this and let them know we did something because we had to do it. I don’t want children to think that war and killing somebody, taking somebody’s life, is good. Because it’s not. That’s the problem when TV portrays a war.”