‘Investigative Reports’ Goes Wide, Starting With Guns

He didn’t get an interview with National Rifle Assn. President Charlton Heston, but Bill Kurtis seems to have cornered just about everyone else with a finger on the gun debate for a special report titled “Guns in America,” a theme week that relaunches the current-events series “Investigative Reports,” expanding from its Monday night berth to five nights a week, Monday on A&E.;

How, then, can the hot-button issue of the day be covered thoroughly without holding the feet of the No. 1 symbol of the rights to bear arms to the fire? Kurtis, a former “CBS Morning News” anchor now in his eighth year of producing what he calls long-form documentary TV for A&E;, dug into the vaults for snippets of Heston’s videotaped speeches, and, while some are somewhat platitudinous--America is engaged in “cultural warfare!” Heston thunders from the podium--they satisfactorily blend into what emerges as a bend-over-backward effort to show gun users as sincere and well-reasoned.

“We’re sensitive to giving the pro-gun people their due because they’re always getting shorted,” Kurtis said. “We’ve [already] heard the two extremes, the NRA on one side and the Rosie O’Donnells on the other. There is little room for the middle ground we hoped to get in there.”

A&E;’s documentary chief and series executive producer Mike Cascio agrees with that approach.

“My reason for doing this is that there are too many people who are rational people who have very good reasons for believing in the 2nd Amendment, who are law-abiding citizens and it’s too easy to go on one side or the other,” Cascio said. “You have to look at the people who like guns for all the right reasons, and the people who are against them for all the right reasons. There . . . is this great, interesting middle ground that is far more interesting.”

Kurtis said that failing to corral Heston was an aberration for this project. Kurtis, whose golden baritone and chisel-jawed bearing--he was a member of the Marine Corps--are virtual A&E; icons, believes Heston “pulled out because they didn’t like a show we did last year called ‘The Firearms Freeway.’ ”

Kurtis has in recent seasons occupied the hour after “A&E; Biography” with a varied lineup of topics of which “Investigative Reports” was the Monday entry (with a Saturday night repeat). While the “Biography” strip has been considered the tent-pole hour of the network’s weekday lineup, viewership for Kurtis’ hour is up 6% thus far in 1999, according to Nielsen Media Research, averaging 1.6 million homes, and in many cases Kurtis’ show has out-rated “Biography.” The network’s demographic is skewed a bit younger and more gender-balanced than the older, male audiences that cable generally draws, Cascio said. The move to an “Investigative Reports” strip will strengthen the network’s ratings, he said.

Kurtis acknowledged the move also follows a proliferation of “60 Minutes” clones on the commercial networks, but pointed out that they almost invariably follow the newsmagazine format of 7- to 20-minute segments balanced over an hour with a profile, an investigation and a lifestyle report--a mix that some wags have dubbed “chocolate, vanilla and strawberry.”

“Our viewers prefer longer versions, different angles, the pros and cons, where you can really get into a story,” Cascio said. He said “Investigative Reports” has a variety of multipart shows in production, like the “Guns in America” series, including a three-parter on Los Angeles International Airport.

“We spent many months there, and we’re going to show what really goes on at a major airport,” Cascio said. “There’s a lot of tension, a lot of fun and interesting things.”

Other shows will look at police procedures around the world, IRS abuses and an underwater volcano near Hawaii. “The world is our canvas,” Cascio said. “We can do an hour or five hours on anything.”

Kurtis, who was a CBS newsman for 30 years before A&E;, has varied interests off the job as well. He lives on a 35-acre estate of gardens and meadows located 40 minutes from Chicago. He is restoring a portion of the acreage, under the Kurtis Conservation Foundation, as a native prairie, and he’s using other portions for experiments on global warming. The inspiration for that avocation came from the series “New Explorers” that he formerly produced for PBS.

Back in Chicago, he produces “Investigative Reports” in a high-tech virtual studio that can be digitally reformatted to provide large, dramatic backdrops for his anchor segments.

“When we put it in, people said, ‘Aha! You can do stand-ups and make it look like you’re in Indonesia.’ But what we’re doing is simply building a set that we can change for every show,” Kurtis said. He expects to produce and host 150 hourlong shows a year from the studio, in which he kicks off a new phase of his career with the “Guns in America” special.

While “Guns in America” offers nothing new from Heston, Kurtis has lined up a fair assortment of interviewees. One is longtime civil rights leader Roy Innis--who, despite having had two sons die of bullet wounds, is an NRA board member. Another is Elizabeth Saunders, president of Waco, Texas-based American Derringer Corp. She gained a certain notoriety by advertising her company’s guns by posing in lingerie as “Lady Derringer,” then, later, her 21-year-old son was fatally injured while working as a gunsmith in the company workshop when a pistol accidentally discharged into his abdomen.

Later in the week the show hears from Sarah Brady, the wife of former White House press secretary James Brady, who was wounded in the 1981 assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan, and checks into government efforts in Chicago and elsewhere to sue firearms manufacturers to recover costs of gun-related injuries. It ends the week with a disturbing look at children living in the Bronx who carry guns.

And it turns out that Heston wasn’t the only one who wouldn’t talk. In one bit of theatrics, a group of gun lovers at a major firearms fest is shown ejecting an “Investigative Reports” crew, while loudly deriding them as part of the anti-gun liberal establishment. Although if they watch this series, they might well invite them all over for a cold one the next time they’re in town.

* “Investigative Reports” is seen at 10 p.m. Mondays through Fridays on A&E.;