Word: mcmartin
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Murrow's antagonists are equally exaggerated. Coleman's Paley is a weak-willed and rather distracted chief executive, hardly the sort of man who founded and built a broadcasting empire. And Stanton, as played by John McMartin, is a cardboard corporate foil, forever jabbering about ratings, opinion polls and bottom lines. "Stanton is fascinated with numbers . . . profit statements . . . power," says Paley, trying to persuade Murrow to accept a vice-presidential position. "You know what I want? A conscience. Integrity...
Pornographic paraphernalia in the Blue Room has the ring of one of those preschooler fantasies elicited by overeager therapists in the McMartin child-sex-abuse case. Even David Brock, a fellow Clinton hater, had to cut Aldrich loose. An American Spectator writer in his early 30s who has purchased more than $1 million worth of real estate since penning poisonous attacks on Anita Hill and the First Family, Brock revealed that he was inadvertently the source for Aldrich's most sensational charge: that the President slipped out for assignations under a blanket in the back seat of a car, reminiscent...
...charge prompts police to send advisory letters to McMartin parents. The Los Angeles district attorney's office then directs several hundred preschoolers to the Children's Institute International, an agency that cares for abused and neglected children, for therapeutic questioning...
There social worker Kee MacFarlane (Lolita Davidovich) gets the kids to claim that they were repeatedly raped, sodomized and forced to witness the slaughter of rabbits and other animals. Like Lael Rubin (Mercedes Ruehl), the lead prosecutor in the McMartin case, MacFarlane is portrayed as a dangerously misguided zealot. During her videotaped interviews (portions of which are excerpted verbatim from the transcripts), children initially deny abuse until MacFarlane goads them with such remarks as "Are you gonna be stupid, or are you gonna be smart and help us out here...
...people who think they are discovering a horrid injustice for the first time. Indeed, Indictment makes its point far less subtly and effectively than such nonfiction works as The Thin Blue Line or the Frontline documentaries, which examined court cases that had been less thoroughly hashed over than the McMartin case. Still, for all its journalistic pretensions, Indictment is powerful and affecting television...