Elian, The Movie!
Plans for a Mini-series Begin Before Legal Drama Ends http://www.abcnews.go.com/sections/us/WolfFiles/wolffiles.html
By Buck Wolf
Elian, The Movie is coming. The only questions are how soon, and how cheesy.
Before deluging The Wolf Files with hate mail, please note that I’m not looking forward to seeing a quickie TV mini-series. I’m just saying that it’s coming, no matter how the sad custody battle turns out, if it ever does.
A four-hour docudrama has been in the works for weeks. Craig Anderson Productions inked a CBS deal in late February. Other movie deals are sure to follow. By this time next year, Elian Gonzalez might be the first elementary school kid with his own film festival.
“It’s a fascinating human drama played out against an intriguing political drama,” says a spokeswoman for Anderson.
“We’re in the research stage,” she says. “But of course, it is still too early to tell how the story will go because it’s evolving so quickly.”
You might think it’s tacky to begin the yet-untitled film before the case is resolved. But it’s not unprecedented to start a real-life drama before the real life event takes place. CBS began production on The Alex Kelly Story before the rape trial of the Connecticut high-school-sports-star-turned-fugitive-ski-bum ended. It’s really quite standard. Discovering the Lethal Lolita Turning a sensational news story into prime-time TV requires a keen eye, lightning reflexes — and perhaps reptilian instincts. Producer Michael Jaffee still remembers in mid-1992 when he and his partner, Howard Braunstein, first came across the story of a 17-year-old high school girl from Long Island who shot the wife of her 38-year-old boyfriend in the head.
That was weeks before Amy Fisher drew national fame as “The Long Island Lolita.” Jaffee’s small production snapped into action, got the rights to Fisher’s story, and sold it to NBC.
“Sex, intrigue, a compelling, young female lead character — this story really had it all,” Jaffee says. “You knew the public wanted it.”
But reality-based TV is not for wimps or slowpokes. Shortly after the story became a tabloid fixture, Jaffee’s team flew to New York to interview Fisher for eight hours at Huntington Hospital, where she was recovering from a tranquilizer overdose.
It was a race against time. CBS had paid Mary Jo and Joey Buttafuoco $300,000 to cooperate on Casualty of Love (the Buttafuocos were even on the set advising actors), and ABC was banging out Beyond Control: The Amy Fisher Story, based largely on the reporting of New York Post columnist Amy Pagnozzi.
Just before the end of the year, Jaffee and his associates at NBC finished first — at least chronologically — airing about two weeks before the competition.
As for the Elian sweepstakes, Jaffee has yet to throw his hat into the ring. “Obviously, there’s a great audience for it,” he says. “But it is a hard story to tell. Who’s position are you going to take? The 6-year-old boy’s? Castro’s? Janet Reno’s? It’s not easy.”
From Thomas Jefferson to Elian Unlike Jaffee, Anderson has no background in TV news dramatizations. His expertise is in bringing Broadway to the smaller screen, including the Peabody Award-winning version of the August Wilson play The Piano Lesson. CBS recently aired his production of Sally Hemings, the story of Thomas Jefferson’s love affair with a mixed-race slave.
In an interview with The New York Times in mid-April, Anderson says he won’t pay central figures in the Elian Gonzalez custody battle for their stories, as producers like Jaffee frequently do. Instead, he has hired Cuban-born journalist Raphael Lima to tell the story.
“I want to make a movie that gets into the legal ramifications, the political ramifications, the family law ramifications,” Anderson told the Times. “I don’t want to do a newsreel. That’s being played out every day. I want to do a movie that tells what’s really going on behind the scenes, from the bedroom in Miami to the Oval Office to Castro’s office in Cuba.”
But let’s see what he delivers. And what other producers deliver. And how the whole thing resolves itself. If it ever does.
The People’s Choice A few days ago, I asked ABCNEWS.com readers what they thought about the prospects of an Elian movie. More than 100 readers responded, many offended by the very notion of dramatizing a young child’s life. “This is not a fairy tale or some fantasy story. This is real life,” writes Jonathan Praff. “And that little boy is suffering,”
Still, dozens of other people happily agreed that Haley Joel Osment, the 12-year-old who saw dead people in The Sixth Sense, would be a perfect Elian, even if he’d be a bit old.
Choosing a straight A-list of actors, readers largely picked Andy Garcia to play the boy’s father, Juan Miguel Gonzalez; Antonio Banderas as the great-uncle Lazaro, and Jennifer Lopez as Marisleysis.
But this is a story that just as many people — perhaps more — love to hate. Many see Elian custody battle as a sad comedy, with the likes of Cheech Marin as the defiant Lazaro, Robert De Niro as Fidel Castro, Robin Williams as Attorney General Janet Reno, and Gary Coleman as Elian.
Perhaps it’s doubtful in either scenario that the facts will get in the way of a bad story. But love it or hate it, we’re a nation of rubberneckers. Most of us can’t help but stare at human suffering, even when it’s pretend human suffering on TV.
Buck Wolf is a producer at ABCNEWS.com. The Wolf Files is a weekly feature.
