Twenty-five years ago, it was considered important news in the world of literary journalism that Norman Mailer was doing a book about Utah murderer Gary Gilmore. Back then, Mailer exploring the mind of a notorious American criminal was generally considered a good thing.
In fact, Mailer's 1979 book on Gilmore, The Executioner's Song, won a Pulitzer Prize, and the 1982 miniseries of the same title created by Mailer and producer-director Lawrence Schiller, a former photographer for Life magazine, won an Emmy.
Tonight at 9, CBS begins airing Master Spy: The Robert Hanssen Story, a two-part miniseries researched and written by Mailer and produced and directed by Schiller. It, too, explores the mind of a notorious American criminal. Hanssen, now serving a life sentence in federal prison, is a former FBI agent from Virginia who, during 22 years as a Russian spy, committed one of the greatest breaches ever of national security.
But these days, such combustible combinations of fact and fiction are called "exploitative docudrama," and are not generally considered good things at all. With a decidedly low-end docudrama also having its premiere this week - the USA cable film Dominick Dunne Presents Murder in Greenwich, which revisits the 1975 killing of 15-year-old Martha Moxley by Michael Skakel - it seems like a good time to draw some distinctions.
Shakespearean device
The docudrama, which came of age in the 1970s as the networks embraced made-for-TV movies and miniseries as programming staples, has always been a controversial genre. In fact, it's been under fire as far back as Elizabethan England, when Shakespeare used docudrama to pack the Globe for all those productions about kings named Henry. The main criticism is the way the historical record gets bent, folded and mutilated to fit show-biz dictates.
There was no shortage of critical acclaim for the '70s docudramas such as ABC's Missiles in October, about the Cuban missile crisis of 1962; Friendly Fire, the story of Iowa parents who discover how their son was killed in Vietnam; and Roots, based on Alex Haley's book about the slave Kunta Kinte; or NBC's Holocaust. In fact, these docudramas are among the proudest moments of prime-time television.
If you want a year for when critical consensus turned on the genre, 1992 is as good as any. Then, no less than three networks rushed to produce docudramas based on the story of 16-year-old Amy Fisher, who shot the wife of her older boyfriend, Joey Buttafuoco. It's hard to say which was worse, NBC's Amy Fisher: My Story, ABC's The Amy Fisher Story, or CBS's Casualties of Love: The Long Island Lolita Story.
All three earned top 15 Nielsen ratings, and the race was on. Down-and-dirty was the mantra that gave us such great television as Honor Thy Father and Mother: The True Story of the Menendez Brothers and Menendez: A Killing in Beverly Hills back to back on Fox and CBS in April and May 1994.
The networks so cheapened the formula with quickie, true-crime films and miniseries that we (critics included) now often pre-judge and condemn the entire genre, thus missing the high-end productions that offer important insights about crime and the American psyche. That's a shame particularly when there's a talent as large as Mailer's involved.
Top quality
Surely there have been changes in the quality of some of the 79-year-old author's work as he has aged. But there's nothing wrong with the writing in Master Spy. In fact, Mailer's script provides the platform for one of the better performances by Academy-Award winner William Hurt (who plays Hanssen) since The Accidental Tourist.
Changes in attitude toward true crime and docudrama have not been lost on Schiller or Mailer, but they say they have not changed course in their work. "When someone says 'exploitative docudrama,' I don't even really understand what a docudrama is. I mean, I understand what it is clinically, that it's a drama based on a series of documents, OK? But I don't believe I've ever made a docudrama in my life, because I've never made a film to fit a category or format like that," Schiller said last week in a telephone interview.
"What I do is make films about things that excite me, things I want to explore. No one has ever hired me to make a film for them. It's always something I went out and did and then sold to someone. It started with Executioner's Song. I brought Norman in on that, and what he wanted to explore was the psychological portrait."
It was also the psychology of the criminal mind in "Master Spy" that intrigued Mailer.
"Larry called me a week after Hanssen was arrested [in February 2001] and asked me if I'd be interested, and I immediately said yes," Mailer said in a transcript of a CBS interview."Hanssen was, on the one hand, an extreme right-wing figure and on the other, he was working with the Russians all those years. Since he had done it successfully for so long, he obviously was not clinically insane.
"So, here was a man with enormous opposites who had managed to keep his sanity - and that appealed to me. I thought that is going to be someone who is going to be interesting to write about and to try and understand," Mailer explained.
It will come as no surprise to those familiar with Mailer's work that he was also fascinated by Hanssen's sex life. Hanssen, a suburban father of six and an active member of a conservative group within the Roman Catholic Church known as Opus Dei, was deeply involved in a relationship with a female stripper. He also shared nude photos of his wife with his best male friend and invited him to watch them making love.
"On the one hand, he was a technically excellent FBI agent, and on the other hand, he was spying for the Russians - that's contradicting enough," Mailer said. "But then to find out he had this very bizarre, kinky sex life, and without his wife knowing about it ...
And, just as was done in The Executioner's Song, the director and writer then positioned that psychological profile within a larger cultural context. "In The Executioner's Song, we explored in some ways, the underbelly of America." Schiller said. "Here we explore in some ways the extremism in blind faith and religion and how it plays into a bureaucratic structure like the FBI.
"Mailer and I knew very little about Opus Dei when we started, but we learned. And what we are trying to do in the film is explore that system of beliefs in terms of its place in our society. That's what's exciting for us, that kind of cultural journey."
New Journalism
Terms like "underbelly of American life" and "cultural journey" are not in the lexicon of most true-crime docudrama producers. Schiller's words resonate more closely with the language of New Journalism, the 1960s hybrid of journalism and novelistic storytelling techniques that Mailer helped popularize, along with Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote and others. Has any American writer gone deeper into the criminal mind than Capote did with his landmark 1965 account of the killing of a Kansas family, In Cold Blood? And the other seminal text of New Journalism, The Armies of the Night, was written by Mailer in 1968 and won both a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award.
While New Journalism was not without its own controversies as to the way it blended fact and fiction, one of the reasons that its best practitioners won such prestigious awards was that they were able to put the stories they told in a larger cultural context - just as Schiller and Mailer try to do in their docudramas. In Master Spy, they offer a coherent psychological profile that explains how the rigid and dogmatic mindset that embraced the beliefs of Opus Dei could also make for a successful career in the FBI as well as a secret sex life. (Think J. Edgar Hoover.) Most true-crime documentaries wouldn't even bother looking for such coherence, let alone trying to map the points of intersection in American institutional life.
"What I'm doing is taking my journalistic instincts and bringing them to films. And Mailer is taking the combination of his novelistic instincts and his journalistic instincts and bringing them to film, doing fiction based on fact," said Schiller.
"I mean, all films are fiction, OK? They can't be strictly factual dramas because they have to have composite characters and you have to do things like putting events in a slightly different timeline for dramatic structure. I mean, all film is a construction. But that doesn't mean they aren't telling the truth about people like Hanssen or Gilmore. And I think we still want that."