Posted on 08/20/2002 11:05:41 AM PDT by GeneD
HOLLYWOOD, Aug. 18 — Can a four-hour CBS mini-series based on the early life of Hitler accurately depict his monstrousness?
To CBS executives and the producers, Alliance Atlantis, a respected Canadian film and television company, the film is to be an accurate study of Hitler as a youth until his ascension to power in 1933.
To the project's critics — most of whom have not read the script — the very idea of a drama about Hitler's youth is appalling and bound unwittingly to create a sense of sympathy for one of history's great villains. "Why the need or the desire to make this monster human?" asked Abraham H. Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League. "The judgment of history is that he was evil, that he was responsible for millions of deaths. Why trivialize that judgment of history by focusing on his childhood and adolescence? Have we run out of subjects to focus on?"
Executives at CBS and Alliance Atlantis disclosed the project recently, and filming is set to start in the next few months in Munich and Prague. An international search is under way for a young actor for the title role. The film is based on "Hitler, 1889-1936: Hubris," the first volume of Ian Kershaw's acclaimed biography, and is scheduled to be presented next year.
"I think there is some adverse reaction to it," Leslie Moonves, president and chief executive officer at CBS, told television critics and reporters last month. "I guess I'm a little surprised by it." Mr. Moonves said that the project was brought to CBS by Alliance Atlantis, and that the network was intrigued. "This is a very timely subject about how bad guys get into power and how it affects the rest of the world."
Nancy Tellem, president of CBS Entertainment, said: "I think everyone's so focused on Hitler and the involvement in World War II and the concentration camps. The focus of `Hitler,' this mini-series, when he's 17 to 34, his rise to power, the society that allowed this to happen, how Hitler became Hitler. I think it's unbelievably compelling."
Critics of the project said that whatever its intentions, a movie dealing with a young Hitler is bound to create a certain sense of sympathy, especially among younger viewers for whom World War II seems like ancient history. Even in a film like "Silence of the Lambs," the Oscar-winning performance of Anthony Hopkins as a cannibalistic killer was so captivating that audiences were alternately revolted and charmed by him.
Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, said that by not dealing with the second part of Hitler's life — and World War II and the Holocaust — CBS and Alliance Atlantis were leaving television viewers without the full implications of Hitler's actions.
"It's telling only half of a terrible story," Rabbi Hier said. "Teenagers may watch the young Hitler and say he just needed more guidance and attention, he wasn't that bad, if he only had a better home life. It creates a kind of sympathy and new attitude toward Hitler."
The script, by G. Ross Parker, has been closely held. But an early draft, dated May 31, offers a portrait of Hitler as an angry and sullen youth who adored his mother and loathed his father (who may have been half-Jewish). Hitler is presented as a struggling bohemian, artist and opportunist with a flare for public speaking.
The script makes clear that Hitler's early relationships with Jews, like a doctor who treated his mother, were friendly. But Germany's loss in World War I and the nation's economic collapse and political chaos, coupled with Hitler's obsessive nationalism, led him to rant publicly against Communists, Social Democrats and Jews.
The script points out that when young Hitler realized that his anti-Jewish remarks especially stirred strong applause among his German audiences, rich and poor, he accelerated his anti-Semitism.
The film concludes with Hitler in power — after ordering the murder of several former associates — watching the documentary film, "Triumph of the Will," the spellbinding propaganda movie that turned Hitler into a godlike figure. The creator of the film, Leni Riefenstahl (who will turn 100 on Thursday), shows him the movie. (Jodie Foster is scheduled to star in a film about Ms. Riefenstahl and help produce it, a project that also dismays Jewish groups.)
Alan Wagner, a CBS executive in the 1970's and 1980's, who was sent the script by a friend, termed the screenplay horrifying. In an e-mail to several reporters, Mr. Wagner said Hitler was merely presented as "idiosyncratic, odd," and there was little sense of the horrors that he would perpetrate. He said the end of the film resembled "Rocky," in which the underdog boxer triumphs. "The underdog has won," Mr. Wagner said.
In a phone interview Mr. Wagner, who is chairman of Boardwalk Entertainment in New York and was once vice president for programming at CBS, said that he was especially concerned that the film did not mention Auschwitz, Gestapo torture, or Hitler's decision to move toward a policy of annihilation of Jews and other groups.
But Peter Sussman, president of the Alliance Atlantis Entertainment Group, said: "It's hard for me to understand how anybody could ever see Hitler as being sympathetic. More important, the devil doesn't always come with horns or spewing fire. Evil isn't always easily recognizable. Sure there were people who believed in Hitler, and thought he was appealing. And that's the worst kind of evil."
Mr. Sussman said he pursued the project because the story of Hitler as a young man had never been done.
"Almost every event that flowed from the behavior and the conduct of the Nazis has been covered extensively by film and TV," Mr. Sussman said. "I realized the seeds from which all this began — how these horrible events happened — has never been done."
He acknowledged, "I didn't realize there would be such a loud concern over a possible negative impact."
Because the banality of evil is the key to the whole tragedy. If Hollywood portrayed the young Hitler as a fanged, brain-devouring ghoul, people might not take offense, but neither will they learn to recognize evil "in the wild," so to speak.
Got anything on that?
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