Can Truth Conform to Three Acts?

The elusiveness of truth is an idea woven throughout the movie “A Civil Action,” which chronicles the real-life legal battle waged by eight Boston-area families against two corporations they held responsible for their children’s deaths.

Robert Duvall, who plays a lawyer for one of the accused companies, insists that truth can only be found “at the bottom of a bottomless pit.” John Travolta, the lawyer for the families, disagrees, lamenting at one point that the jury in the case is being asked to “create a fiction that will stand for the truth, but won’t be the truth.”

Steven Zaillian, the film’s writer-director, has searched for--and struggled with--the truth, too. It fell to Zaillian, who adapted the screenplay from Jonathan Harr’s best-selling book, to turn events spanning nine years into a two-hour film, and his desire to stay true to reality--or at least to the spirit of it--while also making a commercial film made that job enormously difficult.

“Real life is dramatic--I think more dramatic than fiction. But it’s also messy,” said Zaillian, who won an Academy Award for his “Schindler’s List” screenplay and who has adapted several other true stories for the screen. He is proud of “A Civil Action,” which opened in Los Angeles and New York on Christmas Day and opens nationwide on Jan. 8. But he admits that its intertwining themes of legal gamesmanship and enormous personal loss were difficult to fit into the three-act structure of a traditional Hollywood screenplay.

“The movies that affected me most--’Bonnie and Clyde,’ ‘The Godfather,’ ‘The Conversation’--are not the movies that go to an expected place and they don’t have ‘happy’ endings,” he said. To him, “A Civil Action” is “really a story in which everybody was tested in some way. And some of them failed the test.”

Much more than any fictional movie, a film based on reality--and particularly on a modern-day legal fight--faces a variety of obstacles, both creative and commercial. The need to compress real events competes with the desire to balance the interests of myriad constituencies. The goal of staying close to the truth sometimes is at odds with making a movie that entertains and satisfies. Finally, the film must be marketed--with or without the help of the real-life protagonists.

“This is the tough thing about making a movie about people who still exist. You have them in your head. You’ve met them. You owe them something. But you also owe your studio,” said Rachel Pfeffer, who produced the Disney film with Scott Rudin and Robert Redford. “This was a tough project. There are no easy heroes. There are many victims. And you can’t quite put your finger on the villains. But I always had faith in Steve.”

Zaillian spent a year and a half adapting Harr’s book, which tells the story of Jan Schlichtmann, a personal injury lawyer whose small firm sued two corporate giants--Beatrice Foods and W.R. Grace & Co.--in 1983. The suit alleged that the companies had polluted the ground water in East Woburn, Mass., where eight children had died of leukemia. The children are the emotional heart of the story, but the movie’s real focus is Schlichtmann (Travolta) and his evolution from a heartless huckster to a man with a mission to do good.

Schlichtmann, who Disney hired as a consultant on the project, has seen the movie twice and says it gave him “a lot of new things to think about.” He singled out a scene in which Travolta and Duvall, awaiting the verdict in a courthouse hallway, discuss the nature of the truth. That discussion never took place in real life.

“For Duvall, truth is something somebody can bury at the bottom of a bottomless pit. For Travolta, there’s some sort of an absolute truth that favors one side over the other. Both of them look at the truth as if it’s a commodity,” said Schlichtmann, who is now a Massachusetts environmental lawyer. “I’ve come to learn through this experience that the truth is all around us. It’s not something you go and get or that you take from another, but it actually comes to us when we all work together.

“When we think of it as something to be fought over, we destroy the very thing we claim we’re trying to achieve. I think that’s the message of the film.”

The real-life lawyer for Beatrice Foods, meanwhile, Jerome Facher, sounded amused by the idea of being immortalized by Duvall. Facher, who still practices law in Boston, has coined a phrase to describe the film: “The fourth degree of separation.” (First came the actual events, then the trial, then the book and now the movie.)

“I don’t eat jelly doughnuts,” he said, commenting on a scene in which Duvall wolfs one down. He also complained that “they dressed poor Duvall in some ratty coat. Even I wouldn’t wear that.”

Months ago, Facher hired noted entertainment lawyer Pierce O’Donnell to pepper Disney with letters containing proposed corrections to the script. Specifically, he said, he worried about a few scenes that might impugn his reputation. Still, he insists that for once he’s not in a litigious mood.

“We’re not in an adversarial position,” Facher said, noting that from what he’s heard (when interviewed, he had not yet seen the film) much of the movie--and particularly its portrayal of his eccentricities--is right on. “I mean, I’ve been called names by experts, so this is kind of fun.”

Adapting Truth to the Story

Zaillian has experience turning facts into films. In addition to “Schindler’s List,” he adapted the screenplays for “Awakenings,” “The Falcon and the Snowman” and “Searching for Bobby Fischer”--all from books based on real people and events. By now, he has something of a system.

For example, while he does voluminous research, he intentionally does not meet the principal characters until he has figured out “how I think they should sound, their patterns of speech.” And while he tries to retain as much real detail as he can, he is clearly comfortable doing what’s necessary--whether melding several characters into one, omitting facts or even inventing new scenes--to make the story work.

But even for a veteran screenwriter, this project was a challenge. If it were fiction, Zaillian said, he would have created just one corporate defendant, so Travolta could have gone mano a mano with a single opponent. But in real life, there were two, meaning the film had to portray, in all, three lawyers and three law firms.

And if it were fiction, it would be tempting to resolve the relationships between the movie’s main characters toward the end of the film. But in real life, Facher exited the story about two-thirds of the way through--a fact that troubled Zaillian so much that he invented, wrote and shot a scene that brought Facher back at the end of the movie. The scene, which involved Schlichtmann confronting Facher at Boston’s Fenway Park, was in the film until the 11th hour, when Zaillian decided it just didn’t work.

“My objections weren’t about whether it was [strictly] true or not true, because I think you can have a scene take place in a setting that never happened and still be true to the spirit of what happened,” he said. “It was more that it wasn’t true to the character. It was making Facher the bad guy and Schlichtmann the good guy, and I just thought it was more complicated than that.”

A typical Ending Creates Marketing Challenge

There were other complications, like the fact that Anne Anderson, the parent who spearheaded the lawsuit, has had a falling out with her former lawyer, Schlichtmann. All of which made it impossible to tack on what Joe Roth, chairman of Disney Studios, calls a typical ending to a courtroom drama: “People exploding out of the courtroom doors screaming, ‘Yeah!’ ”

“Does it work 100%? From a Hollywood standpoint, probably not,” Roth said. “Some people are going to like it more because of that. And some people are going to be disappointed.”

So how do you market a project like this?

Despite Zaillian’s own description of “A Civil Action”--”a quiet study of how people behave when faced with tragedy”--Disney’s official Web site describes it as “an epic courtroom showdown.” The previews, meanwhile, pitch it as a legal thriller, making it clear that eight children are dead and leaving viewers to guess at who, or what, has killed them. Travolta is clearly the main selling point; toxic pollution and leukemia are not mentioned.

“Disney doesn’t want to sell this movie as a dose of medicine you have to take,” said author Harr, who noted that Disney was initially put out to learn that the real-life Schlichtmann had joined with environmental groups to use the movie to draw attention to pollution and children’s health. (After some negotiations, the campaign, dubbed Civil Active, is unfolding with support from Disney.)

For his part, Harr is very pleased with the movie--even with the parts that deviate from the facts. For example, the film leaves the impression that without Schlichtmann, the federal Environmental Protection Agency might never have investigated Woburn, when in fact the agency had named the area a Superfund site long before Schlichtmann took on the case.

“That is a distortion. The EPA was already out there,” Harr conceded. But he said that to him, oddly, the movie’s distortion feels truer than what really happened. “It was [at the time] an EPA that wasn’t doing anything. The Woburn families and Jan Schlichtmann drew attention and motivated the EPA to act, and the movie is true to that feeling.”