Amerika The Controversial

By Richard Zoglin

It is a bright, crisp Midwestern day in 1997, and the small-town parade could be something out of Ronald Reagan's childhood scrapbook. Main Street is lined with townspeople applauding as the baton twirlers, marching bands, basketball squads and quilting clubs make their way past. But the clapping abruptly stops as some bright red banners come into view. Adorning them are the faces of two heroes from history: Abraham Lincoln and Lenin.

This jarring mix of Norman Rockwell and Red Nightmare is one of the more alarming scenes in ABC's upcoming mini-series Amerika. Three years and nearly $40 million in the making, the 14 1/4-hr. epic, which will run for seven installments starting Sunday, Feb. 15, imagines what the U.S. might be like under the domination of the Soviet Union. The fictional takeover has been bloodless (just how it took place is purposely kept hazy), but the consequences are drastic. A puppet President sits in the White House while Soviet officials pull the strings and plot to dismantle the Republic. The economy is such a shambles that people in the once thriving heartland now have to line up for tomatoes. American Gulags have been set up for political opponents, and the countryside is littered with camps of rootless dissidents known as "exiles."

Still two weeks away from its telecast, Amerika has incited what may be the biggest avalanche of protest against any program in TV history. Moscow has denounced it as dangerous propaganda, liberal groups have complained that it will fuel anti-Soviet sentiment, and the United Nations is upset that the movie portrays its troops as ruthless marauders. Critics have raced into print with condemnations of the still unfinished movie, many of them based only on bootleg scripts or a 90-minute presentation tape. Last week the protesters scored a major victory: Chrysler Corp., the show's largest advertiser, announced that it was withdrawing all its commercial spots from the program.

ABC has responded to the furor by agreeing to run a disclaimer at the beginning of each night's program reiterating that the drama is fiction. ABC News is considering airing a special segment of its Viewpoint series to provide a forum for both critics and defenders of the show. But the network has vowed not to cave in to pressure to tone down the controversial movie or cancel it. ABC President John Sias told the New York Times last week, "We're going to run that program come rain, blood or horse manure." Or deadlines: the sprawling project, for which more than 1 million feet of film were shot, is still not done, and 33 editors are working furiously to finish it in time.

The storm over Amerika has all but demolished any chance that the mini- series, when it finally reaches the screen, will be judged on its own merits. Which is too bad, because the segments that have been completed (six hours so far) reveal a far more subtle, challenging and skillfully woven drama than the advance brouhaha would suggest. Its political implications aside, Amerika is the sort of project that network TV seldom tries and even more seldom achieves: a thought-provoking epic.

Written and directed by Donald Wrye, whose previous TV movies include Born Innocent and Death Be Not Proud, the series plunks us into the middle of a small Nebraska community (much of the film was shot near Lincoln) and a cross section of citizens trying to cope with their repressive new society. Devin Milford (Kris Kristofferson), a former antiwar activist and candidate for President, has just been released after six years in a prison camp. Returning home, he finds his proud but disillusioned farm family hanging on to the last vestiges of their dwindling land. A boyhood friend (Robert Urich) has become a county administrator and, almost against his will, a rising star in the new government hierarchy.

Everyday life in Amerika is not hard to recognize. People still complain about the government and the hard economic times, only now it is the Soviets who are to blame. Parents still have fights with their children, only now the argument over whether Dad has pulled strings to get his daughter into a dance company has nasty overtones of political collaboration. Even the smallest details are shrewdly familiar: the bored, hollow-eyed bureaucrat who processes Devin out of prison ("You got a red-tag file . . . It's probably screwed up, most of 'em are"); a forlorn production of The Fantasticks in an underheated school auditorium; a family bickering over dinner about the squatters camping out on their farmland.

The totalitarian regime has its brutal side (storm troopers set farmhouses on fire and destroy exile camps to stifle dissent; a rebellious teen is caught and brainwashed). But for the most part, the melodrama is muted, the mood somber and contemplative, the complexities rich. A KGB colonel (Sam Neill) turns out to be one of the movie's most articulate and charming characters. And, despite the anti-Communist theme, the film is a subtle refutation of Reagan-era optimism. These Americans, after all, are not can-do patriots but meek, dispirited folks who simply want to get along. "Just surviving," says Devin's sister (Christine Lahti). "No heroics, no strength of character, not even dignity."

By portraying a U.S. turned into a wasteland by repressive Soviet invaders, Amerika will undoubtedly provide support for conservatives who advocate constant vigilance against the Soviet threat. Indeed, the project was spurred by complaints about ABC's controversial antinuclear drama The Day After. In a 1983 newspaper column, Author and Critic Ben Stein (The View from Sunset Boulevard) proposed that to balance that film's allegedly liberal tilt the network ought to make a movie about what life in the U.S. would be like under a Soviet regime. Brandon Stoddard, then head of ABC movies and mini-series and now programming chief, hired Wrye to develop the idea. Envisioned as a three- hour TV movie, the project grew into a 1,350-page script, which was eventually pruned to a more manageable 570 pages.

The show started drawing fire even before it went into production. In December 1985, Soviet officials attacked the movie as another example of Hollywood Red-bashing and hinted at possible repercussions for ABC News' Moscow bureau. The project was put on hold temporarily (only to make budget revisions, Stoddard now says), but shooting went ahead last March. Soviet officials have since expressed interest in buying the show for telecast in their country. "It would be useful if Soviet TV viewers were shown how public opinion in the U.S.A. is formed," says Leonid Kravchenko, deputy chairman of Gosteleradio, the Soviet agency in charge of radio and TV.

Back home, an estimated 150 groups have lodged protests against Amerika. "The film takes the most complicated issue in international affairs and reduces it to Soviets in black hats and Americans in white hats," says Jonathan Halperin, program director of the Committee for National Security, a liberal institute chaired by former Arms Negotiator Paul Warnke. "It reinforces stereotypes and hinders public awareness." Yet some right-wing groups are unhappy too, claiming that the mini-series is too soft on the Soviets. Says Reed Irvine, head of Accuracy in Media: "There is a total lack of realism about what a Soviet occupation is really like, no evidence of a reign of terror."

Perhaps the loudest outcry has come from the United Nations, which has objected that the military troops in the movie are dubbed the United Nations Special Service Unit. A letter signed by, among others, three former Secretaries of State, Alexander Haig, Edmund Muskie and Dean Rusk, protested to ABC that the "portrayal of the U.N. peacekeeping forces as brutal oppressors . . . will undermine public support for one of the most valuable aspects of the U.N.'s work." The organization has hired Theodore Sorensen, John F. Kennedy's former speechwriter, to act as its attorney vis-a-vis ABC. Among his requests: a de-emphasis of the U.N. insignia in the program, on-air disclaimers, and broadcast time for U.N. representatives to respond.

The biggest blow came last week, when Chrysler Chairman Lee Iacocca approved a decision to withdraw all 36 of the 30-second ads his company had planned to run on the mini-series, at a cost of more than $6 million. A company statement said the commercials, which have an upbeat "born in America" theme, would be "both inappropriate and of diminished effectiveness" in the context of the program. ABC is trying to sell the time elsewhere, but will force Chrysler to make up the difference for any lost ad revenue. Two other advertisers, General Foods Corp. and Northwestern Mutual ! Life Insurance Co., have said they will keep their ads in the show. But commercial time is not yet sold out, and industry sources say ABC is being forced to cut prices from an original $175,000 per 30-second spot.

ABC Program Chief Stoddard charges that the onslaught of protest against Amerika before the show is even finished is an attempt at "precensorship of ideas." The movie, he insists, is not an anti-Soviet tract but a rumination on what it means to be American: "I think it can make people ask some questions about their behavior as citizens. It might even make them think about the responsibility part of freedom." Wrye, who describes himself as a Kennedy Democrat, says he "wasn't remotely interested in doing something anti-Soviet" and charges that opponents of the movie have a double standard. "It's okay in Top Gun for Tom Cruise to shoot down Russian planes. That's much more scary to me, because it is subliminal. Our picture is very different. It is very thoughtful."

The furor over Amerika highlights a persistent TV dilemma. Network programming is frequently derided as bland and mindless, but whenever a provocative show comes along that purveys a controversial point of view, it is assaulted by interest groups on one side or another, often scaring off advertisers and making the network less likely to try other risky ventures. The critics of Amerika, meanwhile, have their own irony to face. The attention they have focused on a program they despise has set the stage for what could be one of TV's highest-rated mini-series since Roots.

With reporting by Mary Cronin/New York and D. Blake Hallanan/Los Angeles