Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, September 3, 1995 TAG: 9509010043
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: TOM SHALES
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
The camera loved her. The audience loved her. And many of her colleagues and co-workers hated her guts.
Her spectacular career and tragedy-filled life flies by in ``Almost Golden: The Jessica Savitch Story,'' a movie made for the Lifetime cable network and premiering Monday (at 8 p.m., with a repeat at 11 p.m.). Sela Ward, of NBC's ``Sisters,'' gives a stunningly powerful performance as the bright young star who vowed to be a network anchor by the age of 30 and who died at 35.
She had, however, made good on her vow.
The film suffers from some confused storytelling and the miscasting of a fat and drowsy Ron Silver as Ron Kershaw, a reporter with whom Savitch had a long, love-hate relationship. Kershaw was both guru and nemesis; he advised and shepherded Savitch over the years, but also physically abused her - though this is reduced in the film to one punch and a black eye.
As the movie opens, Jessica and Ron are looking at home movies and other visual souvenirs of her life. The story flashes back to Houston in 1971, when Savitch got a job as a reporter at KHOU-TV. Even at the outset she is demanding, temperamental, tightly wound and high-strung. She screams at colleagues, tells a tired film editor that her piece has ``got to be perfect,'' and is accused by the news director of ``stepping on toes.''
But she knows what she wants and works hard to get it, studying tapes of herself on the air to perfect her delivery.
About 20 minutes into the film, Savitch moves on to the larger and much more important TV market of Philadelphia, where she is told by a station executive, ``You have to look and talk like a movie star'' in order to succeed as a broadcast journalist. She is transformed into a more glamorous presence and soon becomes a local smash, even inspiring a popular song, ``Jessica, Oh Jessica.''
But it's also at this period of her life that, according to the film, she began using cocaine, a bad habit that haunted her almost to the very end. One night during a commercial break in a newscast, Savitch, then an anchor, threw a temper tantrum that was preserved on videotape and passed around all over the industry.
It was only a matter of time before a network came calling. Savitch had tremendous charisma and class on the air. But when NBC hired her, she was sent to the Washington bureau and assigned to Congress, a beat for which she was hopelessly ill-prepared. She was, an executive notes, not a competent reporter, and yet a huge success. Such is television.
Her two marriages both ended badly. The first, to a worshipful businessman, ended in divorce. The second, to a celebrity doctor in Washington, ended in his suicide. She aborted the child conceived during that marriage, but the public was told she miscarried. Finally, assigned to a nightly 43-second ``NBC News Digest'' report that aired during prime time, she showed up one night strung out and glassy-eyed, and badly fumbled on the air.
``My life's never been more of a mess and I've never been more popular,'' she muses while at NBC. As the flashbacks end, she tells her friend Ron, ``I'm really just a scared fake'' and says the Jessica Savitch on TV is ``someone I dreamed up to sell tickets.'' And then, on a rainy night in bucolic New Hope, Pa., in 1983, a car in which Savitch was riding with a male friend plunged into a canal.
The last few minutes of her life were spent drowning in mud.
Immediately after the film, Lifetime will show a 45-minute documentary about Savitch which contains a few seconds of that infamous ``News Digest'' performance (although all tapes of it were ordered erased at the time by NBC executives). The documentary helps clear up parts of the film that are muddled. Together, the two films tell a sad but gripping story of a young woman who doted on her father, lost him when she was only 12, and once said to a friend, ``Every man in my life has let me down.''
``Almost Golden'' is almost great, one of the best films yet made for cable, and a harrowing yet rewarding experience.
by CNB