The art of the ordeal

The September air in the Rhoads Farm cornfield was cold, and as midnight approached freezing rain started to spit down. That brought a close to the evening’s shooting on ABC’s “The Pennsylvania Miners’ Story,” which recounts the ordeal and rescue of nine trapped miners, a news story that mesmerized the nation for three days in July.

Before the weather sent everyone home, it was hard to tell the actors from the locals among the dozens of hard-hatted, big-muscled, somber-faced men swarming around. Bob Long was there. The civil engineer was warily watching a man, wearing Long’s own gold chain, reenact a tense scene from the real rescue, when Long used GPS technology to pinpoint the location where a drill would dig toward the nine miners trapped 240 feet below ground. Long’s real-life colleague from that night was there too, but he was getting ready for his role as an extra helping on the rescue.

The melding of reality and fiction in Somerset was dizzying.

Long couldn’t lend the shirt he wore the night of the real rescue: It had already been snatched up by the Windber Coal Heritage Center, which had its own filmmaker on the movie set, making a documentary about the making of the movie. That project will become part of the museum’s exhibit on the rescue, as integral to the story as the rescue itself.

Getting the details right was important to the Walt Disney Co., ABC’s parent and the movie’s producer, which spent an unusually high $8.5 million to shoot the TV film, in part, at the real Quecreek mine entrance; at the real clapboard Sipesville volunteer fire hall where family members sat on folding chairs and waited days for news; and at Somerset General Hospital, where the miners were treated. The real 30-inch drill even roared to life to re-create parts of the rescue. Doug Custer, one of the so-called Forgotten 9 who escaped the mine before it flooded -- trapping nine others inside -- has a speaking part in the movie. If real players from the drama weren’t on set as extras, their children or relatives were; the actors wore their real counterparts’ T-shirts, as well as their jewelry, and got their hair cut by their real counterpart’s barber. “The Pennsylvania Miners’ Story” airs tonight at 9 on ABC.

As for the actors, the producers chose mostly unknown faces -- with the exception of “Cheers” alum John Ratzenberger -- to add to the project’s verisimilitude.

“It’s the closest blurring of fact and movie I’ve ever seen,” says executive producer Larry Sanitsky, whose credits include such TV movies as “The Last Don” and “Tommyknockers,” as well as fact-based TV films about the Titanic and Aristotle Onassis.

Disney, which paid a record $1.5 million to the miners and Long for the rights to the story (up from a usual $25,000), went to great lengths to protect its property by shutting out fact-based accounts of the ordeal in the news media.

On July 28, as the nation followed closely on TV news, the miners were pulled up one-by-one in a yellow steel hoist. Disney and ABC quickly went into high gear. By Aug. 1, the deal had been struck for the movie and a book recounting the experience, with exclusivity on the story written into the contract. (The book, “Our Story” by the Quecreek miners, as told to Jeff Goodell, was just released.)

Before the deal was made, only a very few national media outlets got their questions in: One miner appeared on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” on July 29; all nine sat for a July 30 talk with NBC’s “Dateline.” Miner Blaine Mayhugh appeared on CBS’ “Late Show With David Letterman.” People magazine did a news story, but there was no “Oprah,” at least not then.

“When we bought the rights ... we did put a small fence around them,” says Quinn Taylor, ABC’s executive overseeing movies. “We wanted to limit for the immediate future, until we got the right script and could get going, who they talked to and what they talked about.”

Made-for-TV movies have already been in decline at the networks, which have greatly cut back on them in favor of more easily promoted series that also have a better financial afterlife. The problem with true-story movies in particular, Taylor says, is the proliferation of prime-time newsmagazines, one or more nearly every night of the week, and the “ ‘Extras,’ ‘ETs,’ ‘Accesses’ and all that. By the time the movie hits the air, there’s nothing new, and why invest millions when you can’t introduce something new?”

Reality: a hot commodity

The isolation strategy worked. “They were pretty virgin,” the movie’s writer Elwood Reid says of the miners. When Reid, Sanitsky and Goodell sat down just weeks later to debrief their subjects, many were telling intimate details of their 77 hours underground for the first time. “No one knew what happened down there,” says Taylor.

Reality, or something that passes for it, is a hot commodity in today’s TV world, as viewers flock to shows about real people scheming to win millions or a husband or a chance at stardom. But increasingly, feeding that demand has meant a blurring of the lines between fiction and non-fiction. “With the entertainment division doing reality programming, it does start to blur those distinctions even more,” says Sanitsky.

“The appetite for real people and real events has [network executives] looking to take news and goose it up, to give it some good narrative structure,” says Robert Thompson, director of Syracuse University’s Center for the Study of Popular Television. Conversely, he says, with viewers used to grazing over to the news channels for big stories such as the Washington sniper or the miners, “expectations in entertainment have risen dramatically. I really believe the reason ‘CSI’ has so much realistic blood and guts has a lot to do with CNN. It used to be to make something look gritty and realistic, all it took was shaking cameras, but now people have seen so much news coverage, entertainment is responding.”

At Disney and ABC, it has sometimes been hard to tell where one genre stops and another begins. This summer, ABC News developed a four-part documentary show about life at an Arkansas children’s hospital, but it played second fiddle to a similar six-part series about life inside a Houston hospital that was developed by ABC’s entertainment division. For fall, ABC News’ “20/20” was planning a guaranteed ratings-grabber program on paralyzed actor Christopher Reeve regaining movement in his limbs, until the news program was told to abandon the project because ABC Entertainment was buying a film on the same subject by Reeve’s son, at substantially greater cost. Even some of the network’s programming on the anniversary of the Sept. 11 terror attacks was produced by the entertainment division, not ABC News, which has a different set of standards.

The distancing of the real players in the mine story from the news media didn’t start with Disney, however. During the actual event, reporters were kept at a Giant Eagle supermarket to afford privacy for family members several miles away in the firehouse. The actual rescue was televised only because the wives, who were barred from the site, voted to allow it so they could see their loved ones emerge.

The miners have recently done more interviews, most, like a joint appearance on “Oprah” on Nov. 12, to promote the movie and book. Taylor says the miners “were very happy, frankly,” to not have to deal with the overwhelming number of media requests for interviews at the time.

Indeed, over a spaghetti lunch at a local cafe, Mayhugh and his wife, Leslie, recall the crush of calls: local radio talk shows, 10 newsmagazines, book writers, actors, producers. Their caller ID box, which stores 80 numbers, maxed out numerous times. Relatives came in to answer the phone. Once, Leslie says, they turned the phone off to get some relief and when they turned it back on to make a call, someone was already on the line.

Average people who had watched the rescue on TV called too, many to talk about faith in God. “They think I’m part of a miracle,” Blaine Mayhugh says, adding, “You didn’t mind talking to people like that.”

Mayhugh jokes about how he wanted Disney to hire wrestling star the Rock to play him in the movie, but he and his wife are much more circumspect about the rest of the onslaught of attention. The Disney clampdown didn’t stop other journalists from hounding townspeople. British journalist Andrew Morton, best known for his celebrity biography of Princess Diana, pestered Leslie’s friends for tidbits for his own just-published “Nine for Nine: The Pennsylvania Mine Rescue Miracle,” she says. Neighbors gossiped about the $150,000 the Mayhughs got for the movie. “People inside the community talk about you,” Blaine Mayhugh says. “Nothing for nothing,” he repeats several times, referring to the quid pro quo of celebrity. “It’s good, but it isn’t.”

Faithful to the true events

ALL reality is colored by an element of perception. After it bought the rights, Disney brought in several producers to pitch the job over lunch with the miners; some miners said later that they chose Sanitsky, a former senior CBS executive and veteran producer married to a top ICM agent, because of his regular-guy jeans and T-shirt. “What they don’t know is that it was all by Gucci,” Taylor jokes.

Nonetheless, with the miners stressing their desire for the movie to be accurate, Taylor, Sanitsky and the rest of those involved went to great pains to reward that essentially blind trust by remaining faithful to the story.

Most ripped-from-the-headlines TV movies are eventually accused of bending facts to serve fiction. This time, those involved say, there was little need because the story was so powerful. “It’s a movie about men confronting death and women confronting loss,” says director David Frankel, who’d previously directed installments of HBO’s “From the Earth to the Moon” and “Band of Brothers,” among others.

Writer Reid, sitting on the set in his favorite oversized bear-hunting shirt with its spectacular camouflage pattern of leaves and tree branches, says his job was made easier because the miners, rehashing the ordeal on nearly 70 hours of tape, “saw life in a story arc,” complete with foreshadowing and parallels and other dramatic elements viewers expect from entertainment. One wife talked about the soccer ball that had become impossibly stuck in a culvert before the accident and its coming free during the ordeal as a sign that the miners would be saved. The details, he says, “were oddly poetic.”

“If you veer from the reality of it, it lessens the movie,” says Sanitsky. And, he adds, the miners and their families have been “so decent, you really want to get it right.” But he adds, “This is still a movie.”

The movie’s plot is straightforward, following the nine miners from the night before the accident through the accident itself and their ordeal underground, interspersed with reaction of the family members above as they follow the rescue efforts.

The focus on the nine who were trapped has rankled some. At the Brandywine Restaurant 15 miles away, a sign out front proclaims “We remember the Forgotten 9.” The rescuers working aboveground “are the guys that really made it happen,” says Chris Barkley, director of the Windber museum, as he stands watching the late-night shooting scene, picturesque silos lighted up in the distance.

The decision to shoot much of the movie in Somerset came from wanting to give something back, Taylor says. (The interior of the flooded mine was re-created on a set in Valencia.) Somerset is just 13 miles from where United Airlines Flight 93 crashed in a field as terrorists tried to use it to attack Washington on Sept. 11, 2001; the miners’ tale, some 10 months later, was a story with an opposite, happy ending.

Taylor says that, although it may sound pretentious, “These people never lost faith in each other, in God, in themselves and they survived, and in that spirit it made sense for Disney, the family company, to attempt to do right.” And, he adds, when the budget for on-site shooting came in, “Executives could just have easily said, ‘Send a bunch of cookies, we’re shooting in Toronto.’ ”

Syracuse University’s Thompson thinks more true-story made-for-TV movies will have to adopt a similar approach of exact re-creation. Today’s viewers have already watched the real version, on CNN, Fox or MSNBC, “so they know the texture, and the made-for-TV movie has got to live up to it stylistically. That’s a major shift.”

“When I watched for the first time, I was overwhelmed with the authenticity,” Taylor says. “Will the average viewer see it? Maybe,” he says, but more important, “you just get it.”

How the miners feel won’t be known until they see it; they weren’t scheduled to until this past Friday. In September, Leslie Mayhugh wasn’t sure she would be watching tonight. Reading Goodell’s book made her cry. The event? “It still doesn’t seem real.”

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Drawn to true grit

It’s an enduring love affair: movies and TV are fascinated by miners. The intimate spaces, hard struggles and gritty faces combine to draw filmmakers of all stripes and approaches.

“Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” (1937) Hi-ho, hi-ho, it’s off to work they go in the mines.

“How Green Was My Valley” (1941) John Ford’s best picture Oscar winner, set in a Welsh coal-mining village, is the template for all mining movies. Remade as a 1975 TV miniseries.

“The Molly Maguires” (1971) Miners and management square off in 1876 Pennsylvania.

“Coal Miner’s Daughter” (1980) Sissy Spacek won an Oscar playing Loretta Lynn, opposite Levon Helm as her daddy.

“Matewan” (1987) John Sayles took a less pastoral view in this gritty coal-mining tale set in West Virginia.

“October Sky” (1999) Jake Gyllenhaal played rocket scientist Homer Hickam, at odds with his coal miner father.

“Billy Elliot” (2000) Jamie Bell played the dancing son of a striking British coal miner.

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‘Pennsylvania Miners’ Story’

The movie will be shown tonight at 9 on ABC. The network has rated it TV-PG-L (may be unsuitable for children, with an advisory for coarse language).