Why Dramatize When We Were All Eyewitnesses?

Greg Braxton’s musings as to why no one has planned a TV movie about the 1992 L.A. riots misses the most obvious reason (“Network Steering Clear of TV Projects on the L.A. Riots,” Calendar, April 28). He interviewed people who claimed the riots are too big and all-encompassing to make a movie, or too violent and painful, or that racism prevents executives from being interested. The reason is much simpler if you think about why we have docudramas in the first place.

News stories about even the most monumental events are generally limited by their very nature. Except in the most unusual cases, news reporters, like the police, don’t get to the scene until the juiciest stuff has already happened. What we generally see on the news is the aftermath of some terrible occurrence: the grieving widow, the mutilated body, the effects rather than the events.

The reason we love drama is that it takes us right to the heart of events. Action is what makes drama compelling. TV news reports, like testimony from witnesses in court, has dramatic content, but the drama is once removed. It’s not often that Action News can actually show us action, that Eyewitness News is really an eyewitness.

That is the appeal of docudramas. They can take us imaginatively where cameras and reporters could not go. The examples of TV movies Braxton cites illustrate this reality.

From Tonya and Nancy to the World Trade Center bombing to the Waco tragedy, TV docudramas took the audience into those parts of the story that we could only hear about on the news. We had seen Nancy Kerrigan’s pained face, but what led up to that moment? What was going on inside in the Branch Davidian compound, or behind the scenes with the federal agents, that the news couldn’t show us?

Unlike those events, the L.A. riots occurred before our very eyes. From the videotape of Rodney G. King’s beating, through news footage of the parallel brutality Reginald O. Denny survived, and on to the fires, the looting, the sheer chaos that engulfed the city, we have already seen the most dramatic events the riots had to offer.

No square inch of the city was camera-less as the riots unfolded. Since we’ve already seen just about all the action there was to see, there would be no more reason to re-enact those events in a TV movie than there would be to re-enact a Super Bowl.

The fact that anyone even wants a TV movie about the riots demonstrates a sad fact about our culture--how much we rely on other people’s imaginations in our story-sodden age. Docudrama writers have access to the same universe of facts, lies and competing stories the rest of us do. Out of that chaos, they select what they imagine to be the “real” story. But given the fact that people lie, sometimes very well, every “real” story is usually just a series of best guesses, intuitions about the truth. Docudrama exploits this, appeals to our discomfort with contradiction; that is why they usually claim to be the True Story of (fill in the blank).

But, aside from imagination, there is no universally accepted story of the Menendez murders for those of us who were not there. That’s why there are two docudramas about what happened that night. There were three about Amy Fisher. Any one of us could come up with a coherent version of events after sifting through the complex facts of those and other stories the news has inflated into sensation. But it’s easier to let someone else do the imagining.

There is nothing fundamentally wrong with docudramas, I guess, as long as we realize they’re based on convenience, voyeurism and not much else. The problem with Braxton’s article is that it makes it appear that the lack of a TV movie about the riots is somehow important. It’s not. On the contrary, maybe the riots are too important to be diminished by docudrama’s relentless pandering to our own passivity. That kind of thing is acceptable when the subject is Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan. It’s not when you’re dealing with something as profound as what happened in April of 1992.