A ‘Bright Shining’ Dilemma

It’s dark. It’s drizzly. It’s perfect. The better to debrief you, my dear.

We’re meeting the Source, who has papers for us. But then papers are his business. Remember the Pentagon Papers? That’s the guy.

OK, so someone else already got his hands on those papers. Neil Sheehan was a reporter for That Other Times when he got the goods from the Source. Who signs his checks Daniel Ellsberg, by the way.

Maybe you know Sheehan as the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “A Bright Shining Lie” (Random House, 1988), his ambitious tome about an ambitious man--the brilliant late Vietnam War strategist and Ellsberg buddy, Lt. Col. John Paul Vann.

Which HBO has turned into an ambitious $14-million film premiering Saturday.

Which is why Ellsberg is giving us the papers.

The HBO Papers.

You may recall the Pentagon was, shall we say, miffed when Ellsberg blew the lid on its phony Vietnam victories. And HBO was certainly irked when Ellsberg handed out copies of the HBO Papers--his impassioned letters to HBO execs slamming an early script of “A Bright Shining Lie”--before a screening in Washington last week.

But casualty tolls are one thing. They’re quantifiable. A man’s soul is a little trickier to measure.

The story begins with a leak from Hollywood. The Source had a source who sent him a version of the HBO script in November. Ellsberg read about a character named Ellsberg. He read about a character named Vann and another named David Halberstam, who actually covered Vann-era Vietnam for the New York Times.

Ellsberg flipped.

He sent a copy of the script to Halberstam. Halberstam flipped. He demanded that HBO change the name of the reporter. “Halberstam” and “Vann” were nothing like Halberstam and Vann, Halberstam says.

“I was sort of the point man [for the press] in ‘63,” he says. “I had more latitude than other reporters, and the relationship I had with Vann was a very intense and complicated one of users using each other. There was no sense of that, and it’s very strong in Neil’s book.”

David Halberstam, meet Steven Burnett, the new and improved you. Burnett (Donal Logue) is pure of heart. So is Vann cohort character Doug Elders (Eric Bogosian), who started out on the page as Daniel Ellsberg. Until Ellsberg flipped.

“You are safe from a libel suit from a dead man,” Ellsberg wrote to HBO Pictures President John Matoian. “But if you persist in presenting this false and defamatory impression of John Vann, you can be sure of eliciting feelings of rage and contempt from many living people who knew him, starting with me. . . . Neither Halberstam nor I appreciate being shown, falsely, in a favorable way the better to slander Vann.”

Terry George, the writer-director on the project, says he never intended to use real names for characters that were really composites, although he acknowledged that Ellsberg’s name was dropped “when he raised a ruckus.”

“A lot of the time when I’m writing a script, I put my [relatives’] and friends’ names in there, because they approximate a character, and I fix that after,” George says. “It seems Dan Ellsberg went off half-cocked with a script no one distributed to him. I’m sure if you got the first draft of ‘The Godfather,’ in all probability Marlon Brando didn’t die.”

HBO says there’s no way to compress and dramatize an 800-page history without fiddling with some of the facts. Which is something to chew on, considering the fact that screens are where a lot of people get their facts.

Not that anyone is quibbling about a certain amount of fiddling. There is, however, a question of degree--when you’re distilling material to its essence, are you making sure you don’t let the spirit out of the bottle?

Complicating the docudrama brew is the complicated Vann himself (Bill Paxton), who may exist to some extent in the eye of the beholder.

Vann stepped on Vietnamese soil in 1962 as a military advisor to the South Vietnamese troops, and risked his career to expose the lies of casualties and corruption around him. When he died 10 years later in a helicopter crash, he was a civilian commander entrenched in the war machine--his dispatch of B-52 bombers to Kontum won a key victory that some think helped extend the war by three years.

To Ellsberg, Vann died “a hero in a bad cause,” he says, a man who never became callous to the value of human life, despite his military tactics.

To Sheehan, Vann became like the deluded generals he’d scorned at the outset, so hellbent on the idea he was winning the war that he verged on megalomania.

To George, Vann reflected the U.S. journey from the moral fervor of Kennedy America to a bankrupt policy of winning the war at any cost. “He epitomized the best and worst of America. And that’s what I tried to capture, and I could care less what Dan Ellsberg thinks at the end of the day.”

HBO did drop some scenes and shots Ellsberg complained about, including a shot of Vann responding callously to the death of a schoolteacher who’d joined the Viet Cong.

But some scenes remain virtually intact. Ellsberg was particularly livid over a scene in which Vann broods over his mother’s death, musing bitterly about her sorry life as a whore and his legacy as a bastard who was later barred from West Point because of his ignominious beginnings. Elders has to tell him to go home for the funeral.

HBO did drop a few graphic details Ellsberg branded as “loathsome.” But, Ellsberg wrote, despite Vann’s mother’s unholy past, the soldier not only never trashed her to other people, he sent her money, paid for her funeral and rushed home to arrange it.

“What is important is that the conversation inserted here didn’t take place . . . not with me and so far as I know [or Neil reports] not with anyone else.”

But is it?

George says he created the scene to give a quick sketch of Vann’s traumatic childhood, suggesting scars that helped lead him along his jagged path.

“No matter how much anyone loves their mother, if she’s a prostitute, there’s no way you couldn’t possibly have revulsion toward that.

“When you’re dealing in drama, you’re dealing with 10 years that have to be compressed into two hours. All the subtlety in the book is not available to me. I had one scene in which to tell the story.”

It’s understandable that Ellsberg should feel so strongly about this. When he was indicted for leaking the Pentagon Papers, Vann was the only U.S. official who volunteered to testify for him, and the only one Ellsberg’s team intended to call as a character witness. Vann died before he could testify.

“He was a sincere patriot and a very brave man,” he says. “In terms of conducting the war, he adhered to the classic soldier’s code, that your enemies were not women and children and civilians. It’s the constraint of civilization against barbarism. He’s presented as a barbarian at the end. Well, he wasn’t.”

It’s also understandable that George should feel so strongly about this. The British press took him to task for driving with a dramatic license in earlier films dealing with the conflict in Northern Ireland--”In the Name of the Father” and “Some Mother’s Son”--criticisms he suspects were politically motivated.

“Sir Thomas More was a Protestant-hating fanatic. You didn’t see that in ‘A Man for All Seasons.’ Richard III didn’t have a hump and probably didn’t ask for a horse. It’s drama, right?

“We dealt in good faith all along with these people and tried to make an honest approximation of what the book’s about. And there was no attempt to besmirch anyone.”

Epilogue.

HBO, which considers docudramas its stock in trade, has a lot riding on its most expensive original feature film to date. The channel is screening it for foreign relations insiders in New York and Washington.

Peter Arnett, who covered Vietnam for AP, commends it as “a pretty accurate picture of a really competent, remarkable American who . . . inherited more power than he probably should ever have been given.”

Sheehan commends HBO for its good intentions and steep investment. But he concludes it fails as a film, aiming at twinning the stories of the war and of Vann and never fully developing either.

“Vann went through this metamorphosis that’s not clear in the film. You see him using B-52s to win this battle, but you don’t quite know why.”

Imagine reality as an elephant. Then ask a bunch of blind men to touch it. Sift out the ones with Writers Guild cards and have them come up with a script.