COVER STORY : The Death of Reality : From Murphy Brown to reality TV to movies that bend history, the entertainment media have narrowed the thin line between what is real and what is fantasy, raising fears about effects on viewers

The old newsboy adage “Read all about it!” got a new twist in the world of entertainment during 1992. It became “See all about it!”

It was the year that fiction in movies and television and the reality of news became so mixed up and intertwined that it was almost impossible to tell where the storytelling ended and the fact-telling began. “The categories of fantasy and reality have never been isolated, but now the distinction has collapsed,” observed Jim Carey, a communications professor at Columbia University.

* Fictional TV anchorwoman Murphy Brown was attacked by the vice president of the United States for having a child out of wedlock. Her subsequent retort on the CBS comedy series got covered as a Page 1 news story.

* One motion picture about Christopher Columbus portrayed him as a dashing swashbuckler. Another showed him having conversations with people he never met, saying things he never said.

* The fictional blue-collar family on Fox’s “Roc” argued over whether they were going to vote for George Bush, Bill Clinton or Ross Perot for President.

* Former Miss America Carolyn Sapp played herself in a television movie, “Miss America: Behind the Crown,” depicting how she was beaten by her fiance during her beauty competitions.

* “Hoffa,” which stars Jack Nicholson as the Teamsters Union leader and is due out Christmas Day, puts forth speculation about its subject’s death as fact, even though the circumstances surrounding his disappearance are unknown and his body was never found.

* Television viewers were deluged by films depicting or “inspired” by real events. Titles such as “The Jacksons: An American Dream,” “Overkill: The Aileen Wuornos Story” and “Something to Live For: The Allison Gertz Story” swamped the airwaves. There were two TV movies about a North Carolina woman attacked by her son (“Honor Thy Mother” and “Cruel Doubt”) and two about a schoolteacher who killed the wife of a colleague with whom she was having an affair (“A Murderous Affair: The Carolyn Warmus Story” and “Danger of Love”). No fewer than four films on England’s Royal Family will be seen this season.

Scholars, producers, writers and others say these programs and films are prime examples of how the entertainment media this year narrowed the already-thin line between what is real and what is not. Experts say impressionable viewers--particularly young people--may be becoming increasingly confused about where the fantasy ends and the reality begins.

Such blending is not a new phenomenon: Homer’s “Illiad” in the 9th Century BC mixed myth and reality in its depiction of the Trojan War. Today, however, “the line between fiction and reality is being blurred at an increasingly rapid rate,” said Sandra J. Ball-Rokeach, a professor of sociology and communication at the USC Annenberg School of Communication.

Re-enactments of real events increasingly dominated “reality” shows such as “A Current Affair” and “Hard Copy,” sometimes with the real participants involved in the dramatizations. Fictional characters on prime-time series, meanwhile, got caught up in real events: A couple from “A Different World” was thrown into the middle of looting during the civil unrest in Los Angeles last spring, one of the lawyers on “L.A. Law” was beaten by rioters, the doctors on “Doogie Howser, M.D.” treated victims of the disturbance, and the family on “The Fresh Prince of Bel Air” helped in the cleanup effort.

“What’s happening is the starting of a dialogue between reality and fiction,” said Elihu Katz, a communications professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

The most infamous example of the blurring between fantasy and reality this year erupted in May when Vice President Dan Quayle criticized “Murphy Brown” for glamorizing the lead character’s decision to have a baby out of wedlock. (This was after an episode in which Murphy had been feted at a baby shower by some of her real-life peers: Paula Zahn of CBS, Joan Lunden of ABC and Katie Couric, Faith Daniels and Mary Alice Williams of NBC). In the highly anticipated season opener Sept. 21, Brown (Candice Bergen) was portrayed as watching Quayle’s remarks on television and then delivering her barbed response.

“See how confusing it gets?” asked Carey of Columbia University. “People watching ‘Murphy Brown’ on television see Murphy watching the vice president on television as he rips her about being a single mother. What’s real and what’s a representation of reality tends to collapse.”

President Bush stepped into the same morass last summer when, as the Republican National Convention was getting under way, he said his Administration would “keep on trying to strengthen the American family, to make American families a lot more like the Waltons and a lot less like the Simpsons.”

On “The Simpsons” the following week, viewers watched the animated family watching the Bush statement on their television. Bart Simpson responded, “Hey, we’re just like the Waltons: We’re praying for the end of the Depression too.”

Much of the impact of such dialogue between real and fictional characters was on young people, who form a majority of the moviegoing audience and a significant portion of television viewers, media watchers said.

“Everyone in my master’s class said they knew that Murphy Brown was not a real person,” said USC’s Ball-Rokeach. “But then I asked them what their thoughts were when Candice Bergen appeared on the evening news later and started talking about politics. I asked them, ‘Is that Candice Bergen speaking, or is it Murphy Brown?’ You could see the wheels turning in their heads. ‘Oh, it’s Murphy Brown,’ they said.”

Some experts fear that the same confusion could influence viewers’ decisions on how they feel about current events. But several producers and writers said that viewers are able to tell the difference between fantasy and reality on TV and film.

“People know they’re not watching the news when they turn on a comedy or a drama,” said Jeff Abugov, executive producer of the Fox comedy “Roc,” which aired an episode a few days before Election Day in which the fictional Emerson family debated the merits of Bush, Perot and Clinton.

“I would think that most people would know who they wanted to vote for,” Abugov said in an interview before the show’s airing. “Also, if there is a character supporting Ross Perot, and if an audience member identifies with the character but hates Perot, I would hope that person would just stick to their own guns rather than being swayed.”

Susan Fales, executive producer of NBC’s “A Different World,” said it was ludicrous to think that viewers would be confused by fantasy and reality. She co-wrote a two-part episode centering on newlyweds Dwayne (Kadeem Hardison) and Whitley (Jasmine Guy) having their honeymoon interrupted by the L.A. riots.

Fales acknowledged that the show was not a historically faithful treatment of an event that put a city in turmoil, resulted in 53 deaths and caused an estimated $1 billion in damage.

“We were very careful about the situation we put them in,” she said. “The touchy thing was how far did we want to go as far as putting them in danger. There are concessions that you have to make when you have an entertainment show. You don’t want to push the audience too far and horrify them too much.”

But Fales said she does not feel that young people who see the episode in syndication several years from now will think of the riots as a comic incident in Los Angeles with wisecracking looters. She said it is the responsibility of audiences not to take what they see at face value, and to do further research: “The audience has a responsibility to distinguish between history and fiction, truth and fantasy. If someone can’t tell the difference between the Civil War and ‘Glory,’ then they deserve to be ignorant. The audience has the responsibility to supplement what they see by reading.”

Many viewers, however, are too young or are not motivated enough to go beyond what they see on a screen to determine the truth, some producers and scholars said.

“Quantum Leap” executive producer Donald Bellisario said he was enraged after his 12-year-old son came home from “JFK” convinced that what he had seen was the absolute truth.

“I’ve done enough personal study to know that many of the premises that ‘JFK’ put forth are totally misleading,” Bellisario said. “Does this film become the definitive word in classrooms 20 years from now?”

Inspired by his anger, Bellisario wrote a “Quantum Lead” script that placed the time-traveling Sam Beckett, the series’ lead character, in the Texas Book Depository building on the morning of President Kennedy’s assassination. The NBC drama, which aired in September, took the extreme opposite viewpoint of “JFK” by advocating that Lee Harvey Oswald was the sole gunman.

Bellisario’s fear about how “JFK” might be regarded in the future is warranted, if Ball Rokeach’s experience at USC is any indication. “When I talk to students,” she said, “it’s clear that they feel they understand historical and current events. But they understand it as a mishmash, not so much as a documentary but as a TV-movie re-creation of events.”

Her students’ understanding of the subject of Vietnam, for example, “is the way it’s portrayed in movies like ‘Platoon’ and in ‘MASH,’ ” she said. “The story that they know is based on all the movies that told them that Vietnam was wrong. They see it as a simple historical event, rather than an issue that tore apart the country, with people who had very different views about what was right and wrong.”

What they know about Christopher Columbus at this point is anybody’s guess. If they relied on the two films about him this year, scholars say, they got some serious misinformation.

In “Christopher Columbus: The Discovery,” actor George Corraface’s Columbus was portrayed as a swashbuckler, a la Errol Flynn. “If you want to present Columbus as a swashbuckling adventurer, as the opening scene of that movie set him out to be, then it is best to make it all up and not even crack the books that would tell you the truth,” said Kirkpatrick Sale, the author of “The Conquest of Paradise: Christopher Columbus and the Columbian Legacy.”

“The fact is, (filmmakers) have contributed to creating an American myth that is entirely false and largely harmful,” he added, “because it disguises the truth. We’ll never get to understand how to live a future unless we discover how we actually lived the past.”

The year’s second Columbus movie--”1492: Conquest of Paradise,” with Gerard Depardieu--made a more valiant attempt to stay within the bounds of truth, but even its creators had difficulty filling in history’s gaps.

Roselyne Bosch, a former French journalist who wrote the screenplay, spent two years researching Columbus, including trips to the explorer’s archives in Seville, Spain, where she reviewed thousands of documents. Still, she said, there was enough missing that she was forced to invent dialogue and make suppositions about certain characters encountered by Columbus.

“I am following history but not right on the button because I can’t,” Bosch said.

For example, she said, one Spanish nobleman who came to the Indies with Columbus was named Adrian de Moxica. His body was found at the bottom of a cliff, but his death remains a mystery. Did he jump or was he pushed? In the movie, Bosch decided that he should commit suicide, even though no one knows the truth.

Similarly, the film’s conversations between Columbus and Queen Isabella were fabricated.

“Most of the time, all I had were very dry facts,” Bosch said. “He went to see the queen at the end of the siege of Granada. That’s all we know. Of course, the confrontation between them is a complete work of imagination, but there is nothing else we can do. That is where I had to fill in the gaps.”

Bosch said she was surprised and somewhat amused when Paramount Pictures took out ads for the movie and included a quotation from Columbus in the text. It was something that Columbus never said. Bosch made it up.

“I think historians are going to dive into their documents to find out where the hell he said that,” she said.

Some show-business insiders maintain that no harm is being done by the twisting of the truth. One producer of a recent fact-based television movie says audiences don’t expect total historical accuracy in their entertainment.

“The audience understands that in putting a story into a two-hour framework, there are facts that will be left out, and there will be conflicts shown that did not exist,” said Gail Berman, one of the executive producers of “A Child Lost Forever,” which NBC broadcast last month. The film dealt with a woman whose baby was taken from her when she was 17 and later died at the hands of its adoptive mother.

John Terenzio, executive producer of the syndicated “A Current Affair,” said audiences can tell what is real and what is fake--even in “reality” series in which news events or stories are acted out and given a dramatic spin with special effects, lighting and music.

“It seems to us that the American viewer is pretty sophisticated,” Terenzio said. “This is a viewer that has a tremendous amount of media at their disposal. I think the viewer is smart.”

On “A Current Affair,” dramatizations are distinguished by production values to separate them from the studio portions of the show. Some are filmed in black and white. The re-enactments are based on court transcripts, testimony or eyewitness accounts, he said: “We really try to be as editorially accurate as possible.”

One re-enactment on the show this year came eerily close to its real-life source.

Terenzio said “A Current Affair” was interested in doing a story about a member of the Raw Poets rock group named Fish, who was accidentally struck as he was walking in New York by a limousine carrying singer Roger Daltrey of the Who. When an apologetic Daltrey picked up Fish and saw that he was fine, he offered to listen to the group’s demo tape, which Fish had in his pocket. Daltrey loved it and helped the band land a record deal.

“We had the testimony of the guy in the band, and then we contacted Daltrey to get his side of what happened,” Terenzio recalled. Daltrey not only told the producers about the accident, but also agreed when they asked him if he would star as himself in the re-enactment. So did Fish. The program then produced the re-enactment featuring the two principal participants.

“Editorially, I was very comfortable with it, pretty darn comfortable,” Terenzio said.

But John Tomlin, executive producer of another syndicated reality show, “Inside Edition”--which does not do re-enactments of news events--disagreed with Terenzio’s assessment: “If a program presents itself as reality-based and they re-create real events, there’s always a danger that they will blur the line between what is real and what they are presenting. I don’t know if all viewers can understand the subtleties in the presentation.”

Experts say they have no idea where this trend will lead next year, or how long it will last. But some say there are indications that the blurring of fantasy and reality is likely to become even more pronounced.

“Soon, storytelling in movies and television may replace textbooks in providing the major memories of our time,” Ball-Rokeach said. “It will help to tell us what our common histories are. But I hope that people don’t get too confused about what is real and what is made up.”