Loyalists try to block Kennedy Miniseries
Burled Frau
By DAVE ITZKOFF
Published: February 16, 2010
A new mini-series about John F. Kennedy's presidency that is being prepared
by the History channel does not yet have a cast or a premiere date. Not a
frame of footage has been shot. It does, however, have prominent critics who
want it brought to a halt.
The critics, including Theodore C. Sorensen, a former Kennedy adviser, say
they have read the scripts for the project and that those contain errors of
fact and emphasis. But like a similar controversy over a 2003 television
film about Ronald Reagan, the dispute over the embryonic Kennedy series
seems to say as much about the enduring place of the Kennedys as a
battleground in the culture wars as it does about history itself.
The mini-series, called "The Kennedys," is the brainchild of Joel Surnow, a
creator of the Fox action show "24" and an outspoken political conservative.
That raised alarms among Kennedy partisans when the History channel said in
December that it would pick up the project.
Now a documentary filmmaker who makes no secret of his liberal politics is
releasing an Internet video in which Kennedy scholars say the scripts offer
a portrait of the president and his family that is, at best, inaccurate, and
at worst, a hatchet job.
"It was political character assassination," the filmmaker, Robert Greenwald,
said of the screenplays in a telephone interview. "It was sexist titillation
and pandering, and it was turning everything into a cheap soap opera of the
worst kind." Mr. Greenwald said he is hoping that his 13-minute video and an
accompanying petition, at stopkennedysmears.com, will take on lives of their
own on the Web. A title card at the film's conclusion reads: "Tell the
History Channel I refuse to watch right-wing character assassination
masquerading as 'history.' "
The charges come as a surprise to the members of the production team behind
"The Kennedys," who say that the scripts for the eight-part series are still
being rewritten, and that criticism of the project is premature.
"Next year, when it's done and it's on the air, if people want to criticize
it, so be it," said Stephen Kronish, the screenwriter of "The Kennedys," who
said he identifies himself as a liberal Democrat. "But at this stage of
evolutionary development it seems that Greenwald's agenda becomes all the
more obvious."
Given the r�sum�s of the players in the debate it is understandable why
everyone sees agendas everywhere. On one side is Mr. Surnow, an Emmy
Award-winning producer and friend of prominent conservatives like Rush
Limbaugh. During Mr. Surnow's tenure as executive producer, his hit series
"24" was criticized for its seemingly permissive attitude toward torture.
On the other side is Mr. Greenwald, the founder of the advocacy media
company Brave New Films, who has created documentaries like "Outfoxed:
Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism," a condemnation of the Fox News Channel,
and "Iraq For Sale: The War Profiteers."
Before turning to nonfiction films Mr. Greenwald was a director and producer
of made-for-television movies. From his contacts in that industry - agents,
managers, casting directors, location scouts - he said he began receiving
copies of "The Kennedys" scripts this year. He then recruited a group of
historians to appear in his video, including Mr. Sorensen and Nigel
Hamilton, whose 1992 best seller "J.F.K.: Reckless Youth" was criticized by
the Kennedy family.
They say the "Kennedys" screenplays contain many factual errors, some benign
and others less so. For example, they say the scripts refer to exit polling
for the 1960 presidential election when exit polling had not yet been
invented; and that President Kennedy introduced the Peace Corps during the
Bay of Pigs crisis in April 1961, when in fact he signed an executive order
creating the corps one month earlier.
Beyond this, they say the scripts invent scenes that never occurred, like an
exchange that suggests Kennedy came up with the idea for the Berlin Wall. As
Mr. Sorensen bluntly says in the video, "Every single conversation with the
president in the Oval Office or elsewhere in which I, according to the
script, participated, never happened."
In another scene cited, a Secret Service agent approaches the president
while he is having sex in a pool with a young woman who is not his wife; in
yet another, the president asks his brother Robert, "What do you do when you're
horny?" and tells him that if he doesn't have sex with unfamiliar women
"every couple of days I get migraines."
In short, "The Kennedys" "does everything in its power to demean and make
them quite disgusting figures," Mr. Greenwald said. "No network or cable
channel has ever done anything anywhere close to this, in the way in treats
a president."
But the debate around "The Kennedys" recalls a similar flare-up around the
mini-series called "The Reagans" that CBS was to show in 2003. In that case
the network canceled its planned broadcast after conservatives criticized
the project - before it was shown, and based on scripts and portions of the
film. The conservatives complained about depictions of Ronald Reagan as
being insensitive to AIDS victims, and that Nancy Reagan was shown as being
reliant on a personal astrologer. ("The Reagans" later played on Showtime,
the cable channel.)
Mr. Kronish, the "Kennedys" screenwriter, said that the History channel's
standards for producing its mini-series are more rigorous than the broadcast
networks', and that his finished scripts will require bibliographic
annotations and legal vetting before filming proceeds. He also said that he
was drawing upon nonfiction works, including books by Seymour Hersh, Robert
Dallek, David Talbot and others. "If I'm wrong," he said, "I guess all of
them are wrong."
Mr. Kronish acknowledged that some factual details, like the date that the
Peace Corps was established, were changed for concision or dramatic license,
but not with malicious intent.
"This is not a documentary," he said. "It is a dramatization." As its
author, Mr. Kronish said, it was his job to "take these people off the dusty
pages of history and make them come alive."
"We do not go into this with an agenda other than to be factually accurate
and entertaining," he said. "The rest of it, let the chips fall where they
may."
David McKillop, the senior vice president of programming and development for
the History channel, said that Mr. Kronish had already begun submitting
annotated drafts of his scripts, and that the channel stands by their
accuracy.
Mr. Greenwald said that he was not seeking to censor the History channel.
"Anyone has a right to do whatever they want," Mr. Greenwald said. "I would
never suggest that History channel doesn't have a right. What I'd suggest is
something called the History channel should not be doing political
propaganda."
Mr. Kronish, for his part, said that he was "not out to destroy the sacred
cow" of the Kennedy presidency, but that in being faithful to history, the
mini-series would necessarily contain elements that might upset Kennedy
adherents.
President Kennedy "was part of my youth and the first president I was aware
of," he said. "But there are things that are part of their story and aren't
admirable, because they were human."
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/17/arts/television/17kennedy.html