BRAVE NEW FILMS – In The Media

“The Kennedys,” an eight-episode miniseries that premières April 3rd, is being promoted by the channel airing it as “the most controversial TV-movie event of the year”—a phrase, you’ll notice, that doesn’t express pride in the quality of the show or speak to its degree of importance. It’s a fairly empty boast, but a useful one for ReelzChannel, where “The Kennedys” landed after being rejected, in January, by the History Channel, where the project originated. Acquiring a “controversial” show has given this widely available but little watched and ineptly named channel an identity—and a small superhero cape to go with it—that it never would have had if the History Channel (and then Showtime and a couple of other outlets) hadn’t declined to run the series. Reelz is half movie-industry fanzine—with programs devoted to movie trailers and top-ten car-chase scenes or Bond girls; a review show with Leonard Maltin; and a few actual movies—and half grab bag of chestnuts, some of them a little wormy at this point, such as “Cheers,” “Becker,” “3rd Rock from the Sun,” and “Ally McBeal.” And now along comes “The Kennedys,” cannonballing into the pool.

Objections to the series, which was developed by Joel Surnow, the bluntly conservative co-creator of “24,” started appearing more than a year ago, when several Kennedy historians and insiders protested its existence—before it actually did exist, or had even been cast. As reported in the Times, Theodore Sorensen, John F. Kennedy’s adviser and speechwriter, and the crusading filmmaker Robert Greenwald—whose documentaries shine a light on, for example, the ugliness of Rupert Murdoch, Wal-Mart, and the American contractors who capitalized on the war in Iraq—complained about the scripts-in-progress. Greenwald referred to the work as “political character assassination,” and Sorensen, on a Web site that Greenwald set up, called StopKennedySmears.com, argued that “this one-sided, right-wing script” suffers from “a vindictive, malicious approach.” Visitors to the site were encouraged to sign a petition stating, “Until The History Channel stops running politically motivated fiction as historical ‘fact,’ I will refuse to watch their programming.”

In the end, the History Channel executives gave up the project, releasing a statement that said, “After viewing the final product in its totality, we have concluded this dramatic interpretation is not a fit for the History brand.” Lest anyone fear that the channel had suddenly gone mad and was pretending to be something it isn’t—a straight-up history channel that doesn’t allow artistic license—they offered sugary reassurance: “We recognize historical fiction is an important medium for storytelling and commend all the hard work and passion that has gone into the making of the series.” Right: here’s a commendation for you, and don’t let the door hit you on your way out.

Viewers who never worked for the Kennedys or wrote books about them (or for them: Sorensen helped out, shall we say, with John F. Kennedy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Profiles in Courage”) may not be experts, but “The Kennedys” doesn’t actually come across to the semi-knowledgeable, Kennedy-steeped American adult as having a political agenda. It has a dramatic agenda, and, in service of that, its creators—Stephen Kronish, who worked with Surnow on “24,” is his writing partner here—made certain choices that were bound to upset interested parties. Among those reportedly in that camp are Caroline Kennedy and Maria Shriver, who are said to have put pressure on the History Channel’s parent network, A&E, with which they share a web of personal and professional connections, to pull the plug on the show. I suspect that their objections amounted to matters of taste and style: snobbery about the compromises and fakery of docudramas (which I share), a desire not to dwell on the unsavory aspects of their family’s legacy (which I understand), and an intense irritation at not being able to control the narrative as it plays out in public (which anyone can understand). Surely there was also a desire to protect their remaining elders: the miniseries was developed at a time when the last of the parents and aunts and uncles were beginning to die—five of them have gone in the past six years. (Of that older generation only one Kennedy sister, Jean Kennedy Smith, and one spouse, Ethel Kennedy, are still alive.)

By Dorothy Rabinowitz of the  Wall Street Journal

It’s not likely the audience for “The Kennedys” will be spending much time pondering what it was about this potent, lavishly produced eight-hour miniseries airing on ReelzChannel beginning Sunday night that caused former JFK speechwriter Ted Sorensen, self-described political activists like the filmmaker Robert Greenwald, and concerned others to go to so much trouble to get the project quashed. That’s because that audience will be too busily enthralled by this dramatization of the Kennedy family saga—too much in the grip of powers like Tom Wilkinson’s altogether unforgettable portrayal of Joseph P. Kennedy Sr.—to be concerned with such matters.

That’s not to say the matter doesn’t deserve a minute’s pondering. Those who objected to the film’s depiction of some of the not-so-sunny aspects of the Kennedys’ history—hardly any of them exactly unknown to the world—did after all succeed, for a time, in their efforts to keep “The Kennedys” from being broadcast. The History Channel, which had commissioned the work, suddenly declared, in a January statement, that this work and its dramatic interpretation were not, after all, “a fit for the History brand.” That assertion of fastidiousness must have come as news of note to longtime viewers of the History Channel. This is the same channel that broadcast—as a documentary—a 2004 film called “The Guilty Men” that claimed to prove that Lyndon Johnson had personally arranged for the assassination of John Kennedy. In defense of this special from the fever swamps, History Channel spokespersons argued that it had been “meticulously researched”—and did so till outraged response to the film forced them to reconsider.

“The Kennedys” makes no claim to be a documentary; it’s historical drama with all that the genre invariably brings with it, including invented scenes and dialogue. There is also invented atmosphere—a faintly ominous “Wuthering Heights” mood that pervades this Kennedy White House.

By The Independent

A $30m drama about the Kennedys, to be broadcast here next week, caused a furore in America. But does it deserve all the criticism? Sarah Hughes finds out.

It cost a fortune to make, featured an all-star, awards-bait cast including Greg Kinnear, Tom Wilkinson and Katie Holmes, tackled one of America’s most iconic periods, and was supposed to reposition America’s History Channel as having more to offer than Second World War documentaries and reality shows about alligator hunters in Louisiana.

Instead The Kennedys, which airs in the US this Sunday, will do so not on the channel which originally commissioned the glossy eight-part mini series, but on the little known cable network ReelzChannel, which paid $7m for the US rights after a number of bigger names turned it down.

So what went wrong? On paper, The Kennedys, which cost $30m to make, had surefire-hit written all over it. The Kennedy family remains a source of fascination throughout America, with documentaries still clogging up the TV channels and magazines such as Vanity Fair continuing to dedicate acres of coverage to the doings of the 35th President, almost 50 years after his death, and an era popularly known as Camelot.

Yet the first sign that all was not right came before production had even begun, with complaints ranging from the banal (the casting of US tabloid favourite Holmes as Jackie) to the rather more serious (issues surrounding the script’s accuracy). Concerns about the latter saw the left-wing documentary maker Robert Greenwald, best-known for his attack on Fox News, Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism, attacking the script’s most questionable scenes on his website, Stopkennedysmears.com. Greenwald was also among those who raised concerns regarding the political opinions of the series’ executive producer, Joel Surnow, the man behind 24 and that rare thing, a Hollywood conservative.

From then on, the troubled production was rarely out of the news. President Kennedy’s long-term advisor and scriptwriter, Theodore Sorensen, appeared shortly before his death in October 2010 in a video made by Greenwald in which he stated: “Every single conversation with the President in the Oval Office or elsewhere in which I, according to the script, participated, never happened.”

A report in The New York Times suggested that the two historians asked to vet the show for accuracy (Steve Gillon, author of The Kennedy Assassination: 24 Hours After and retired history professor and Pulitzer Prize nominee Robert Dallek) had concerns about the final product and had raised those concerns with History. (The production team behind the series have strongly refuted the Times piece, with Surnow calling suggestions that Gillon or Dallek were unhappy “a fiction”).

Then in January the History Channel dropped the project, their first attempt at a scripted drama, announcing, rather portentously, that: “this dramatic interpretation is not a fit for the History brand” and referring to it as “historical fiction”.

By now, rumours were flying about pressure from the Kennedy family, most notably from John’s daughter Caroline and her cousin, Maria Kennedy Shriver. In particular A&E Television Networks (AETN), History’s parent company, was rumoured to be worried about upsetting Caroline, who is currently editing a book of interviews with her mother, Jackie, for Hyperion Books, an offshoot of Disney, who part-own AETN. Those rumours only intensified after cable channels Showtime, FX and Starz also passed on the project, leaving the barely known Minneapolis-based Reelz to pay $7m for US broadcasting rights.

“I don’t know if that’s the case; I’ve heard the rumours, but that’s all that they are, and I doubt that the Kennedys had the show pulled,” says the series director Jon Cassar, who worked with Surnow on 24. “The fact is that any true story is going to have people who like it and people who object to it, and a true story about politics is even worse because people can not help but take sides. It’s just instinctive, especially here in the US. It happened with the Reagan miniseries [which was dropped by CBS following complaints by conservative pressure groups about bias and eventually picked up by Showtime] and with the recent The Path to 9/11. People condemned them, a lot of times without even seeing the finished product.”

The bullish Surnow, however, has little doubt that, Kennedys or not, his involvement ultimately led to the History Channel’s refusal to show the series. “Because I am a known conservative, it appears that I was deemed unfit to be the person to produce this miniseries,” he told The Hollywood Reporter last week. “I am a proud American, proud of the Kennedys for their accomplishments and their place in history, but none of that was given voice. I wasn’t Emmy Award-winning Joel Surnow; I was Rush Limbaugh’s and Roger Ailes’s [President of Fox News Channel] friend Joel Surnow. And that’s all that mattered.”

Cassar strikes a more conciliatory note. “You have to realise that Greenwald was using a very early script to draw his conclusions. Do I think that Joel’s political beliefs fuelled accusations of bias? In any true-life political story accusations of bias will come into play, but the thing that people should remember is that this programme was commissioned by the History Channel. We had two respected historians checking every detail and were making script changes to ensure accuracy right up to the 11th hour. It was important to everyone involved that we made no mistakes with the subject matter.”

By New York Times

When the first episode of “The Kennedys,” the costly and controversial mini-series about that American political dynasty, makes its debut on Sunday, a chapter in television history will be closed, but a debate about the balance between accuracy and creative license in historical dramas

Arriving on television shortly after an Oscars race between “The King’s Speech” and “The Social Network,” movies that put their own spin on real-life events, “The Kennedys” employs many of the same narrative devices. In chronicling the presidency of John F. Kennedy, it compresses time, consolidates characters and invents dialogue for moments never recorded by history’s pen.

It also dwells on the sexual appetites of the Kennedy men, the use of prescription drugs by the president and his wife, and Joseph P. Kennedy’s interactions with the Mafia, in ways that, depending on your point of view, expose the flaws of historical figures or besmirch the legacy of an American hero.

That would be complicated enough, even without two additional factors. The producer of “The Kennedys,” Joel Surnow, a co-creator of the Fox action series “24,” is an outspoken conservative. (He says that despite his personal politics, the mini-series depicts the family “in an honest yet really reverential and patriotic light.”)

And the History Channel, which commissioned the $25 million series, ultimately rejected it in January after deciding that its “dramatic interpretation” was “not a fit for the History brand.”

By David Itzkoff  of the New York Times

Before a frame of “The Kennedys,” a television mini-series about that political clan, has been broadcast, here is its track record so far:

Months prior to filming, it was criticized for its perceived inaccuracies by historians (including Theodore C. Sorensen) who were shown early drafts of its screenplays by a left-leaning filmmaker, Robert Greenwald.

In January, the History Channel, which had ordered and produced the mini-series for $25 million, announced that it was dropping the project, saying only that the mini-series did not fit its brand. Concerns about the accuracy of “The Kennedys” had persisted throughout its production, and there were reports that Kennedy family members had reached out to the History Channel board, seeking to stop it.

In February, ReelzChannel, a film-oriented cable network, announced it had acquired “The Kennedys. On April 3 its first episode will be shown there.

The mini-series, which stars Greg Kinnear as John F. Kennedy, Katie Holmes as Jacqueline Kennedy, Barry Pepper as Robert F. Kennedy and Tom Wilkinson as Joseph P. Kennedy, is produced by Joel Surnow, a co-creator of the Fox series “24″ and an outspoken political conservative, and written by Stephen Kronish, a “24″ producer who identifies himself as a liberal. Mr. Surnow and Mr. Kronish spoke recently to ArtsBeat about the controversy surrounding “The Kennedys,” their experiences working on the mini-series and the inherent challenges of making biographical films. These are excerpts from that conversation.