On to the Making of Elian, the Miniseries

The Cuba-Miami custody battle over 6-year-old Elian Gonzalez lumbers forward, a story line layered with so many emotional issues that Hollywood could not have commissioned it.

Instead, they’re developing it.

With or without those pesky story rights.

Trying to make a small-screen version of Elian’s saga is a hasty process. Last month, CBS hired Craig Anderson to create a four-hour miniseries about the boy who survived a November ocean mishap en route from Cuba only to land in a tug-of-war between President Fidel Castro and Miami exiles.

In addition to earning nominations for some of the most prestigious awards in television, Anderson won the George Foster Peabody Award for Excellence in Broadcasting for his 1985 CBS production of August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play “The Piano Lesson.” His latest miniseries, “Sally Hemings, An American Scandal,” appeared this month on CBS. But all the credits in the world don’t necessarily make Elian’s saga legally up for grabs.

Elian’s father lives under a decades-long trade embargo with the United States. Anderson says he is negotiating for story rights with unidentified relatives, but lawyers for the boy’s Miami relatives have not been contacted.

“The Gonzalez family is not interested in commercializing Elian’s story in any way, and no one has sold any rights or agreed to any commercial project,” said Spencer Eig, attorney for family members in Miami who have temporary custody of Elian.

The development deal smudges the blurry line between what is already public knowledge and Elian’s option to tell his own story. And it reveals the parallel pace of a news story with the individuals who strive to reproduce it for Hollywood.

Elian and Anderson’s journeys intersected just after Thanksgiving, when Anderson read the headlines about a doomed escape on a 17-foot aluminum boat from the Communist island. Elian’s mother, her boyfriend and several other adults drowned in the Florida Straits, but the boy clung to an inner tube.

“Because of his age when they left Cuba, they probably didn’t tell him much,” Anderson said excitedly. “They probably just said, ‘Shhhh . . . We’re going.’ Then, of course, to go through the terror of the boat sinking, to have his mother tie him to an inner tube before everyone drowned. It was heartbreaking. It played to my emotions when I first read about it, and [the project] began to percolate.”

According to an agreement between the two countries, Cubans picked up at sea who do not require immediate medical assistance are repatriated to the island. Those who make it to U.S. soil can stay.

Elian was taken to a Miami hospital, and relatives there filed court papers seeking custody to prevent the U.S. government from shipping him back to Cuba.

The story was no longer about where Elian would grow up. His uncertain situation fueled the commitment of fervent exiles in Miami; it underscored the complexities of U.S.-Cuba relations, and it exposed a family long divided between those who sought a new life in Miami and those who stayed behind--all good subplots that would help fill out a miniseries.

In this climate, more than two dozen producers across the country were hard at work assembling their project outlines for an Elian miniseries.

“It is a compelling story when you look at all the issues this poor boy is going through,” said CBS spokesman Chris Ender. “The two countries are playing political football, and the two sides of his family are feuding. There’s a lot of drama there.”

Just after the new year, Anderson pitched the miniseries to CBS executives. By the end of the first week in January, he had been hired.

CBS would not comment on its decision, and Anderson would not elaborate on his efforts to secure the story rights from Elian’s family. The project remains in development, so when--or if--it will air remains in flux.

An unauthorized docudrama would be limited to material in published accounts, court papers and interviews.

Industry insiders said in exceptional cases the competitive aspect of the story drives executives to get a project--authorized or not--off the ground. But, always, rights are preferred.

“That’s the worst thing in the world, to go into a pitch without the rights,” said actor and instructor Conrad Bachmann, who taught a development and pitch class at the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences from 1991 to 1998. “The first thing they say to you is, ‘Do you own what you’re walking in with?’ and if you don’t, you’re wasting their time and yours. . .

You’re whistling in the wind.”

Bachmann invites entertainment attorneys to his class on the first night to outline the rules of story rights.

“[They] stress that no matter how much the story’s in the paper, you need rights. Someone still had to buy the rights to the O.J. Simpson story, and look how public that was,” Bachmann said. “It still pertains to someone’s life.”

True stories have the added benefit of free press before the movie ever airs, but networks do not broadcast the project without errors and omissions insurance. An insurance agent reads the scripts, plucking out any material that could be libelous or constitute an invasion of privacy.

David Wolper, who has spent 50 years creating some of the most famous television movies in history, including projects for ABC, such as “Roots” in 1977, “The Thorn Birds” in 1983 and “North and South” in 1985-86, believes viewers will want to see Elian’s “true” reactions, after news cameras were out of sight: Was he haunted by the ocean journey, how did he feel about the death of his mother, and does he feel safe with his new family?

“If you don’t have the rights, you don’t have the juice,” he said. “You can do it without them, but it won’t be as juicy.”

So far, only one person claims to have the rights to Elian’s story. An attorney in Chicago who wrote a friend of the court brief--at the request of the Cuban government--said Elian’s grandmother gave him permission last month to write a book on Elian. Attorney Jeffrey Leving fights for the expanded rights of fathers with the American Coalition for Fathers & Children and has been involved in the case since its inception. For the past few months, Leving has toured the media circuit, including CNN’s “Larry King Live,” to talk about Elian’s case. “I do want to write a book on this, and the paternal grandmother gave me permission during her trip to the United States [last month]. I taped the whole thing. Her consent is on tape.”

Leving admits that while no monetary deal was struck, he did commit to the content.

“If the miniseries is done incorrectly, it could actually hurt fathers,” he said. “I agreed to be supportive of the father’s wishes to be with his son.”

Though the rights to Elian’s story may be the most immediate problem for the CBS miniseries, to be sure, there are others.

Anderson intends to tell an unbiased story and--if CBS green-lights the project--he hopes to film some scenes in Cuba. But he would need approval from the Cuban government, a wrenching bureaucracy modeled on Russian inefficiency. It could take weeks or months to get the permits, and even then he probably would be confined to pre-approved areas. To say nothing of the difficulties Anderson would face from the political fallout in Cuba if Elian is permitted to stay here.

Lastly, Anderson will have to deal with the Cuban exiles in Miami, who say there is no such thing as a “fair” portrayal that includes Castro’s position. Anderson will face a bilingual metropolis so tied to Cuba that city council members interrupt their meetings at about 3 p.m. for swigs of thick Cuban coffee.

“I don’t even know if I’ll be able to film in Miami at this point,” Anderson said.