LEO FRANK CASE ON SCREEN : 1913 ‘MOB LAW’ MURDER COMES TO LIFE

On April 26, 1913, a 14-year-old girl named Mary Phagan was brutally murdered and her body left to be found in the basement of the National Pencil Co. in Atlanta, where she and other young girls worked. Charged with the slaying was Leo Frank, 29, a Jewish Northerner who ran the factory.

Frank was found guilty of the murder, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, and was sentenced to be hanged. Gov. John Slaton commuted the sentence to life imprisonment, but an enraged citizenry rose up in protest, and what became known as “mob law” prevailed: Frank was forcibly removed from his prison cell by 25 “Knights of Mary Phagan,” taken to an old oak grove and lynched.

The Leo Frank case was what today would be called a media event. It also resulted in what is considered one of the single worst outbreaks of anti-Semitism in American history. It sparked the birth of the B’nai B’rith’s Anti-Defamation League as well as the modern-day Ku Klux Klan. It destroyed the promising political career of Slaton and advanced the careers of his detractors. And it led to a later U.S. Supreme Court ruling that mob rule does not constitute justice.

Seventy years later, in 1983, an 86-year-old Atlanta man came forward with the acknowledgement that he was at the scene of Phagan’s murder and witnessed a fellow factory worker with her dead body. In 1985, the Georgia state legislature voted to pardon Frank on the basis that he was denied due process. But he was not exonerated of the crime; no new, conclusive evidence has been introduced; and to the present, his guilt or innocence remains a matter of speculation.

Television audiences will be given the opportunity to make up their own minds when a four-hour NBC-TV movie about the Frank case, “The Ballad of Mary Phagan,” airs sometime this fall. The TV movie, starring Peter Gallagher as Frank and Jack Lemmon as Slaton, with Robert Prosky of “Hill Street Blues” as Boss Watson, just completed production in this sleepy, southern town--standing in for the modernized Atlanta.

“This is a story of anti-Semitism . . . of irresponsible press . . . of political ambition . . . of mob violence . . . but what we’ve tried to do is bring these themes together into a good story about human emotions and relationships,” said producer George Stevens Jr.

Stevens, the son of the late director George Stevens, acknowledged that he was “returning to my roots” with his latest project, after years as the founder and guiding force behind the American Film Institute and producer of such documentary films as “John F. Kennedy: Years of Lightning, Day of Drums,” and “George Stevens: A Filmmaker’s Journey.” But as he broke away from daily duties on the turn-of-the-century Richmond locations to discuss the film, he was always on guard to avoid pretentions.

“I’m proud that we’re doing a drama of ideas, but we’re trying to avoid saying it’s ‘an important drama for our age,’ ” he said. “The best lesson I learned from my father was respect for the audience, which is receptive to intelligent drama and need not be pampered to.”

Stevens noted that the apprenticeship--”boot camp” he called it--that he served with his father was on films such as “A Place in the Sun,” “Giant,” “Shane” and “The Diary of Anne Frank”--films with “components of drama and ideas and ideals.”

He said that “The Ballad of Mary Phagan” was first suggested to him as a possible collaborative vehicle by director Billy Hale, a native Georgian familiar with the case. Hale, whose directing credits include the TV movie “Murder in Texas,” had come to know Stevens while working with his father on “The Greatest Story Ever Told.”

Stevens chronicled a five-year effort on the project--which once was considered as a vehicle for James Stewart in the role now being played by Lemmon--that included vacillating interest on the part of NBC (“At one point, they said, ‘People aren’t interested in this 1913 stuff,’ ” he recalled); the involvement of writer Larry McMurtry, and eventually of Jeffrey Lane; and the support of Orion Pictures Television with the project’s $7-million budget. In the interim, the Atlanta eyewitness came forth with the new evidence that now provides a coda for the TV movie.

“We wanted to tell the story on television, because we would have more time for detail, and because 30 million people might see it,” Stevens said.

He recalled first proposing the movie to Lemmon “on the sixth tee at Hillcrest (Country Club).” According to Stevens, the actor, who rarely has made dramatic appearances on television, agreed to play the part of Slaton within four days of reading the final script.

Gallagher, a distinguished young New York stage actor whose few film appearances include the starring role in “The Idolmaker,” also was signed on to the project early, according to Stevens.

All the principals on location here spoke of the influence that the Frank case--until now an obscure, historical footnote for most Americans--has come to have on them during the making of the TV drama. Hale spoke of examining his innate “prejudice,” as a Southerner; Gallagher spoke of rethinking his views about capital punishment; Lemmon said he has been made curious about “what the hell really did happen” in that pencil factory in 1913.

“I really wanted to be a part of this project, in the way I wanted to be part of ‘The China Syndrome’ and ‘Missing,’ ” Lemmon said. “(The Frank case) is a horrifying part of American history that is only vaguely known to most people, but it’s history that we should be reminded of, because these kinds of things still do happen. . . . The Klan still is active, after all.

“It’s one of those rare projects that comes along that has a strong dramatic pull, and that also really makes you think,” Lemmon said.