Nearly 50 million Americans last week watched at least portions of a five- hour, two-part television movie called The Atlanta Child Murders. The CBS production restaged, in summary form, the trial of Wayne Williams, who was convicted in 1982 of murdering two young blacks after a nine-week proceeding in a courtroom that held, at most, 175 spectators. In law, the verdict of the jurors (later affirmed by the Georgia Supreme Court) was definitive. But in the minds of much of the public, the reality of what happened in Atlanta may more likely be what they saw enacted last week on TV. That was not history, not journalism, but crusading entertainment, with the facts carefully organized to sustain a neat story line and to suit a political point of view: Writer-Producer Abby Mann believes that Williams was railroaded. Responding to local hysteria and national scrutiny, Atlanta officials were, Mann contends, so desperate to close the books on as many as 29 allegedly connected murders that they would have blamed absolutely anyone. Mann's position lacks internal logic: while on the one hand accusing the city of a rush to judgment, his film on the other hand charges Atlanta's mostly black city government with racist neglect of the crimes against minority children. To make his helter- skelter charge of injustice, Mann focuses on all the shortcomings and loopholes in the prosecution case, and belittles or simply omits evidence damning to Williams.
The Atlanta story epitomizes the troublesome nature of a burgeoning literary hybrid that the TV networks call docudramas. These video narratives focus on actual events and real people, but often include invented dialogue, characters and even entire scenes. Dozens of docudramas have been made, on subjects ranging from the history of American slavery, in Roots, to the perjury trial of Alger Hiss in last year's Emmy Award-winner Concealed Enemies. Many have dealt with personalities, living or dead, who still figure in national political debate.
Some of these shows have enhanced the public's understanding of issues and its appreciation for the specific accomplishments of public figures. Others, however, have blatantly treated speculation as fact, or even knowingly distorted the truth to advance a cause or enhance a dramatic scene. ABC's The Trial of Lee Harvey Oswald presupposed that President Kennedy's assassin was not murdered by Jack Ruby, then argued the case that Kennedy was slain by a conspiracy. CBS's Kill Me If You Can played down the crimes of Sex Offender Caryl Chessman and dwelt on his slow, gruesome execution in the gas chamber for the explicit purpose of arousing public sentiment against capital punishment. NBC's Kennedy depicted the late FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover as a scheming bureaucratic thug, and the same network's King, also by Abby Mann, suggested that the black civil rights leader was virtually a puppet of white liberals. At minimum, docudramas inevitably distort history by being selective. Ike, which focused on a purported World War II romance between President Dwight Eisenhower and his aide Kay Summersby, exaggerated the importance of individuals with whom Eisenhower worked directly, and sharply undervalued the impact of his offstage superiors, like General George Marshall.