Docudramas Send Truth Into Tailspin

Generally speaking, good news is no news and bad news is big news.

Hence, the media are by habit and instinct predators, feasting off the miseries of others in the name of informing or entertaining the public.

It sounds hardhearted to say so, but this process of exploitation is often unavoidable and often serves the greater good, in effect sacrificing the interests of the few for the benefit of the many. There are times when the public’s right to know supersedes most everything.

Is it the public or the entertainment industry, however, that benefits most from TV’s growing plethora of misery docudramas? At what point does all this preoccupation become gratuitous and, by its very weight, risk desensitizing the public to sorrow?

For example, the more tragedies, the more television movies about tragedies, ranging from the rare ones that end happily, like the Jessica McClure story, to those that don’t, like NBC’s “The Hijacking of the Achille Lauro” and ABC’s coming account of the Challenger explosion that killed seven astronauts.

As plane crashes proliferate, moreover, so do TV stories that profit on them without expanding our knowledge of them. As tragedies abound, so do producers who queue up for movie rights, rushing to survivors and the families of victims like voracious piranhas to flesh.

You can just imagine the Hollywood frenzy in response to that New York-bound Pan Am jet being blown apart over Scotland by a terrorist bomb last December. And also reaction to the recent Sioux City, Iowa, crash of that United Airlines DC-10 that many aboard amazingly survived.

Carnivores don’t tarry. So movie and book rights probably have been negotiated and treatments for TV stories already written and pitched to network executives. You don’t need much of an imagination to come up with a title. “Miracle in Iowa: The Air Crash Heard Around the World.”

Although tragedy movies usually feature elements of human interest, the public’s fascination with the potentially morbid seems equally served. Perhaps that’s why TV now has a particular fondness for stories about airline tragedies.

Two are arriving within a month’s time.

Airing at 9 p.m. Sunday on cable’s HBO is “Tailspin: Behind the Korean Airliner Tragedy,” an account of the 1983 downing of a South Korean jet over the Soviet Union that killed everyone aboard. It comes less than nine months after “Shootdown,” an NBC movie on the same subject.

And coming Sept. 13 on cable’s USA Network is “Fire and Rain,” a new movie about the 1985 crash of a Delta airliner at the Dallas/Ft. Worth airport that killed 131 and injured 31.

With air crashes seemingly on the rise, TV stories about them inevitably will increase, too, and become a blur. The genre wasn’t born yesterday.

In 1983, CBS News gave us “The Plane That Fell From the Sky,” about a 1979 TWA jet’s near-crash after diving out of control to 6,000 feet in less than a minute. The program was as much dramatization as documentary, and in the extensive re-creation, crew and passengers played themselves.

NBC followed in 1984 with “Flight 90: Disaster on the Potomac,” an account of a 1982 Air Florida crash into a Washington bridge that killed all 79 aboard.

Even without a crash, an airliner was the venue for terror in last year’s “The Taking of Flight 847: The Uli Derickson Story” on NBC, starring Lindsay Wagner in a harrowing story about the infamous 1985 hijacking of a TWA jet en route to Rome from Athens.

Like “The Taking of Flight 847,” HBO’s “Tailspin” merges jeopardy with international politics, re-creating the volatility and tensions that surrounded and colored the incident in those pre- glasnost days.

NBC’s earlier “Shootdown” traced the personal grief of a woman whose son died in the tragedy, speculating that the Korean jetliner was on a spy mission when it was shot down by a Soviet missile and charging the Reagan Administration with exploiting the incident to advance its anti-Soviet agenda.

“Tailspin” is exciting, suspenseful and incisive, almost immediately making a case for pilot/mechanical error and mistaken identity: The Korean jet strayed into Soviet airspace and was mistaken for a U.S. spy plane that had earlier been in the area.

Director David Darlow’s re-creations of the incident--from the perspectives of the Korean pilot and the U.S. and Soviet military--are masterfully done. Although a ranting, hawkish National Security Council official played by Chris Sarandon is grossly overdrawn, Brian Phelan’s script sets up interesting conflicts among branches of government and between emotional political ideologues and cooler military intelligence observers.

In this scenario, an Air Force intelligence officer played by Michael Moriarty ends up being penalized for his honesty and integrity. His advancement of the mistaken-identity argument--depicted here as the correct analysis--conflicts with his politics-driven superiors. Politics win.

In a very hokey scene, meanwhile, the National Security Council drafts a speech that a news clip shows the real President Reagan delivering (“This is the Soviet Union against the world . . .”), even though the White House knew by then that the Soviets were unaware the Korean jet was a civilian craft when shooting it down. At least, that’s the movie’s account.

Paradoxes surface. On a sad and grisly level, this is very entertaining. But can we trust a story that advises us that it contains some “composite characters,” some “representative incidents” and some changes? Although some re-creations are obvious, some may not be. And which characters are composites? The Sarandon character? The Moriarty character?

When history meets docudrama, the casualty is often truth. Meanwhile, on to the next crash.