Word: docudramas
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Dates: during 1978-1978
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Elie Wiesel hated it. NBC'S 9½-hour docudrama, Holocaust, so offended the author and survivor (Buchenwald, Auschwitz) that he wrote: "Untrue, offensive, cheap: as a TV production, the film is an insult to those who perished and to those who survived. What you have seen on the screen is not what happened there." But Wiesel has written almost obsessively about the Holocaust; he has a kind of morally proprietary passion about it. He is a keeper of the flame, a visionary who sees the past as intensely as a prophet sees the future. Many more Americans seemed...
Like Roots, Holocaust is neither documentary nor docudrama, but a fictionalized interpretation of real events. Its dramatic structure is simple: Writer Gerald Green has invented a bourgeois family of assimilated Jewish Berliners and then propelled its members through the events of 1935-45. Shortly after the show opens, the head of the Weiss family, a doctor played by Fritz Weaver, is exiled from Berlin to the Warsaw Ghetto. His wife (Rosemary Harris) soon follows, and eventually the couple end up in Auschwitz. The oldest Weiss son (James Woods), an artist, marries a Roman Catholic (Meryl Streep), only to be sent...
...debated entertainment. When ABC let loose with its twelve-hour Watergate roman à clef, Washington: Behind Closed Doors, last fall, half the critics and columnists in the country attacked the mini-series for playing fast and loose with recent political fact. Then the same network aired a so-called docudrama, The Trial of Lee Harvey Oswald, to even harsher criticism. Now NBC and CBS are getting ready to take their lumps. King, a six-hour miniseries consecrated to the life and times of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., has already been assailed by King's second in command...