In Hollywood, a Hero Ain’t Nothin’ but a Sandwich

How do you define an American hero?

Is it the guy who passes for four touchdowns on Sunday or scores 50 points on a basketball court and then demands to renegotiate his zillion-dollar contract? Is it downed airman Scott O’Grady, but somehow not his saviors who scooped him up from enemy terrain in the Balkans? Is it TV’s icon of the week, granted three minutes of obligatory adulation on network morning shows? Or is it a volunteer or pastor or social worker or devoted teacher or anyone else doing a critical job routinely without fanfare?

“Not in Our Town,” a valuable short documentary rerunning tonight on KCET-TV Channel 28, defines heroes as individuals who publicly resist bigotry and hate crimes.

In quite a different arena in Los Angeles, independent producer Craig Serling has his own definition of heroes: Those whose stories aren’t salable as a series to a TV industry interested in “reality” shows that nourish negativity and cynicism, not optimism.

Serling and his partner, Roland Seeman, have an idea for a weekly half-hour series that’s hardly unique, but nonetheless gleams appealingly against the grayness of TV’s present landscape. It’s titled “American Heroes.” The producers have made a pilot--nothing fancy, but a worthy, professional one with good production values and moving, inspirational human interest tales free of schmaltz--profiling three Americans who have made sacrifices to work abroad for others in what narrator Mike Watkiss calls “the madness called Bosnia.”

The Simon Wiesenthal Center and the Museum of Tolerance have offered to host the West Coast premiere. Very ambitious, but get real here. What premiere? So far, “American Heroes” is a firm no sale.

Serling and Seeman say they have been coolly received while making the usual rounds of networks, production companies and distributors with their pilot. As one development executive wrote in a rejection letter: “We do not feel the marketplace can support a show about heroes at the current time.”

Someone else said: “We want sex and action.” Someone else: “We are looking for the next ‘People’s Court.’ ” Someone else: “It sounds boring.” Someone else: “Hero shows just don’t work.”

It’s enough to make a man scornful. Said Serling recently: “Perhaps next time I’ll produce a show called ‘Fallen American Heroes.’ ” He may be on to something.

Billings is.

Tonight’s re-airing of “Not in Our Town” on KCET, after it resurfaced earlier this month on the PBS network, suggests there is space on TV for genuine heroes, not just fallen ones. Wearing the stamp of big heart and small budget (Will Durst’s narration tends to fade, for example), this is a half-hour film from the California Working Group that documents what happened in 1993 when hate crimes and other abusive acts by white supremacists became the scourge of Billings, a normally quiet city of 84,000.

Government officials, civil leaders and citizens--thousands of them--said no.

What they rose up against as a community included Ku Klux Klan fliers, the desecration of a Jewish cemetery, skinheads intimidating African American church congregants, swastikas and death threats painted on the home of a Native American family and a concrete block thrown through a child’s window displaying a Jewish menorah for Hanukkah.

Producers Patrice O’Neill and Rhian Miller identify the creeps accused of the mayhem and their victims, then trace the anti-hate response. For example, the local painters’ union mobilized volunteers to paint over the graffiti. There were marches and candlelight vigils in support of victims. And the Billings Gazette printed full-page menorahs that ended up being displayed in nearly 10,000 homes. Too many to vandalize.

“We lit one tiny candle,” Gazette opinion editor Gary Svee says in the film.

Not so tiny, actually, for the returning “Not in Our Town” sparked a slew of anti-hate town meetings and special screenings of the film for youngsters across the United States (including Santa Monica) earlier this month. And its spirit still resonates, even among realists like Svee.

“It doesn’t mean we’ve cured the problem of racism here,” he said by phone from Billings this week. “It still exists, but it’s not the overt thing anymore. One of the things that happened was that it [the anti-hate campaign] made people somewhat more sensitive. People look for heroes in this thing. There are no heroes, just some people who did something that was good.”

It comes with the rugged territory, said Svee, who recalls tramping through the Montana outback as a kid and waving at people in cars, then seeing them wave back. “Implicit in that was a contract that if they were in trouble, you’d help them, and if you were in trouble, they’d help you.” Svee quoted the Rev. Robert Freeman, pastor of the predominantly black church targeted by skinhead bullies: “If you bite us, you bite us all.”

That’s heroic.

Of course, there are no talk-show circuits for the Billings crowd, and not even an outlet yet for the trio of quiet heroes featured in Serling’s unsold pilot set in the dangerous, prepeace pact Balkans. When it was filmed, Army Capt. Sonya Thompson of Texarkana, Ark., was in a United Nations detachment evacuating sick and wounded from Sarajevo, recent college graduate Toby Wolf of Washington, D.C., was potential sniper meat in Serb-held Croatia while helping reunite refugees with their families and friends in other countries, and Diane Paul of Baltimore was a Red Cross volunteer helping set up refugee camps in Croatia.

Paul had left behind her supportive husband and two young sons in the United States to take the six-month assignment, acknowledging that she couldn’t stop the war, then adding, “but I could do something.” This message of individual empowerment--that you can make a difference--is important and powerful, but lost, apparently, on those deciding what programs to snap up for TV.

In the madness called Hollywood.

* “Not in Our Town” airs at 9:30 tonight on KCET-TV Channel 28.