Hostage Drama Centers on the Ensuing Media Circus

In his long career as a politically conscious filmmaker, Costa-Gavras has studied the ways of military dictators, assassins, clandestine intelligence operatives, war criminals and neo-Nazi extremists. But his new film took him into an even more unnerving terrain--the world of local TV news.

During his research for “Mad City,” the new John Travolta and Dustin Hoffman film which opened Friday about a hostage drama that mutates into a media circus, Costa-Gavras stopped to gawk at something he found on a local TV news anchorman’s desk.

The anchorman had adorned each page of the script for his nightly news broadcast with a simple code. Being a good filmmaker, Costa-Gavras doesn’t tell you the code. He shows you, scrawling it on a pad of paper in his hotel room. At the top of each page is a crudely drawn face. A happy face for an upbeat story, a sad face for a tragedy.

The look on Costa-Gavras’ face isn’t happy or sad--he’s bemused. “It was quite an unusual sight,” he says. “The newsman had these visual cues for how he should feel about each story he was reading.”

At first, Costa-Gavras was determined to use the happy faces in his film. What could be a better metaphor for a film that depicts TV news as a medium that best communicates emotion, not information? But after talking it over with Alan Alda, who plays a ratings-conscious network anchorman in the film, he abandoned the idea.

“It’s an example of where something is real--I saw it with my own eyes--but it wouldn’t be believable in the film,” he says. “It’s so cheap, so cartoonish.”

The truth was too farfetched? “Exactly,” he says with a laugh. “Whenever I thought we were being too harsh, our consultant would say, ‘Oh no, don’t worry, TV news people say things that are much worse than that!’ ”

Born in Greece, now a longtime resident of France, Costa-Gavras has always been fascinated with the abuse of power, most memorably in films like “Z,” “Missing,” “State of Siege” and “The Music Box.” In recent years, he has been intrigued by TV news, a global behemoth with far more reach than CIA agents or right-wing death squads. When a media-themed project fell apart at TriStar Pictures, he turned to “Mad City.”

As it turned out, producer Arnold Kopelson was also interested in the script--and in working with Costa-Gavras. “I’d been sending him projects over the years,” Kopelson says. “He’s a very savvy guy. He was perfect for this story because he thinks like an American and he has strong feelings about what’s going on in the media.”

Scripted by Tom Matthews, with an uncredited rewrite by “Falling Down” screenwriter Ebbe Roe Smith, “Mad City” was inspired by Billy Wilder’s “Ace in the Hole,” a scathing account of an unscrupulous newspaperman who keeps a man buried in a cave-in until he squeezes the story dry.

“Mad City” gives the story a topical TV spin. It depicts an ambitious local news reporter, played by Hoffman, orchestrating coverage of a museum security guard, played by Travolta, who inadvertently shoots a fellow guard and takes a group of children hostage after he is fired from his job.

Costa-Gavras knows journalists intimately. His wife, Michele Ray, covered the Vietnam War as a young reporter in the 1960s when TV news film footage often aired days after the actual event.

“The problem with today’s electronic media isn’t the accuracy, but the immediacy,” Costa-Gavras says. “Everything goes directly from the satellite to the TV screen. But you lose something extraordinary--the point of view of the messenger. As my wife says, it is very difficult to write a story with emotion but have the distance to speak about the emotion.”

At first, Costa-Gavras and Kopelson wanted Travolta to play the reporter. But at a script reading with another actor, Travolta found himself more interested in the other role.

“I thought the journalist was a good character, but I became very preoccupied with the way the other actor was playing the security guard,” Travolta recalls. “That’s when I realized--hey, I want to play the security guard.”

Soon afterward, Travolta met Hoffman and Costa-Gavras at a Westside restaurant. Lunch began at 1 p.m., with the two actors bouncing ideas off each other. At 5 p.m., everyone was still there. “Finally the waiters had to get rid of us so they could prepare for dinner,” Costa-Gavras recalls. “The actors did all the talking--I was just a spectator.”

Travolta said Costa-Gavras gave him an extraordinary amount of freedom to flesh out his character, down to the long sideburns he wears. “You really feel you’re in the hands of a master,” he says. “He lets you trust your instincts, which, as an actor, gives you an extra confidence and certainty.”

Costa-Gavras says Travolta unveiled his sideburns before filming began, much to the consternation of certain people involved with the film. “Some people, I won’t say who, were very alarmed,” Costa-Gavras says. “They said, ‘That’s not Travolta.’ And I said, ‘That’s what’s so good. He’s not John Travolta, he’s our character.’ ”

Costa-Gavras describes Travolta as an actor without vanity. “He knows how to make you forget that he’s a movie star. We gave him a shirt one size too small to wear, so you could see his belly hang out more, and he had no problem at all, because that’s his character. He’s this guy who’s been having lots of beer with his friends at the local bar.”

To ensure that the film’s TV newsman character was equally authentic, Kopelson hired CBS News producer Roberta Hollander, who was taking a post-O.J. trial leave of absence from the network. It’s not a big jump from TV news to Hollywood: Hollander came recommended by former CBS News colleague Maria Shriver, who had befriended Kopelson when he was making “Eraser,” which starred Shriver’s husband, Arnold Schwarzenegger.

After reading various drafts of the script, Hollander met with the filmmakers, offering advice and criticism. Recent films on the subject, especially “Up Close and Personal,” had been, to use Hollander’s phrase, hilariously inauthentic. Even though “Mad City” has received mixed early reviews, she gives the film good grades for accuracy.

“I tried to give them a sense of the texture of a news event--the lingo, the attitude, the technology,” she says. “And when it comes to that, particularly the attitude, they really captured it well.”

Hollander acknowledges that certain scenes appear farfetched, including ones in which Hoffman’s character stalks away from an on-camera interview with his network anchorman, who later criticizes his coverage--on the air. She says that another scene, which shows network executives polling viewers for their feelings about Travolta’s character, was not something she has seen happen.

“Like newspapers, TV news does audience polling, to sample the public’s feelings about a story,” Hollander says. “But we wouldn’t let the results influence the way we cover a story. This movie is a cautionary tale. The story it tells is just an extreme example, but there’s a lot of truth there.”

Costa-Gavras says his biggest concern is that TV news’ fondness for spectacle has turned viewers into voyeurs. “In France, we just had a trial involving our minister of justice, who was charged with signing, as a young man, papers that sent Jews to concentration camps. And as I saw a particularly dramatic moment on TV, they cut to a commercial that showed these young women jumping up and down, selling face cream.

“I had to turn my head, I couldn’t watch it. On TV, everything is equal, so everything is without importance. That’s the big question in ‘Mad City.’ There’s so much pressure in TV for you to ignore ethics. But what happens when your decision affects people’s lives?”

Costa-Gavras gestures toward the pad of paper where he sketched the happy faces. “You know, all our TV anchors come to America to see what you do and apply it to their news shows. Our private stations are only 15 years old, so they’re trying to catch up to you.”

He shrugs. “Everything happens fast in TV news. I’m sure it won’t take them very long.”