A Film or a Flogging? : ‘Morgan’ Docudrama Raises Issue of Filmmaker Responsibility

Take that , Dr. Foretich!

And that! And that! And that!

Imagine a movie made about the Mia Farrow-Woody Allen conflict with only Farrow’s side being told. It’s only a wee jump from that to ABC’s manipulative, shamelessly skewed account of the long-running Elizabeth Morgan-Eric Foretich child-custody case.

The child is their daughter, Hilary Foretich, and their dispute is as ugly as they come.

Airing at 9 p.m. Sunday on Channels 7, 3 and 10, “A Mother’s Right: The Elizabeth Morgan Story” deifies Morgan, a plastic surgeon who was interviewed extensively by director and co-executive producer Linda Otto, a specialist in TV depictions of victimized children (“Adam”). It vilifies Morgan’s former husband, oral surgeon Eric Foretich, whose pleas for an audience with Otto were rejected.

This isn’t a movie, this is a mugging. It raises anew the question of filmmaker responsibility in an era of high-visibility screen histories, from “JFK” to headline-chasing TV’s Rolodex of sensational crime stories.

Claiming that Foretich had sexually abused their daughter since she was a toddler, Morgan spent 25 months in a Washington, D.C., jail for hiding Hilary rather than heeding a judge’s order giving Foretich unsupervised visitation with the girl. Although noting in a printed statement that no court has upheld Morgan’s charge against Foretich, Otto’s movie delivers its own verdict by consistently portraying Morgan (Bonnie Bedelia) as a tragic heroine willing to make personal sacrifices on behalf of her child and by portraying Foretich (Terence Knox) as a twitchy, pop-eyed, frenzied, mindless publicity hound.

Now living with Hilary in Christchurch, New Zealand, out of reach of U.S. courts--but not U.S. tabloid TV shows that pursue her and Hilary on the streets--Morgan continues to be in defiance of the visitation order.

There are no depictions or graphic descriptions of child abuse here. Otto aggressively makes her point in other ways: for example, beginning her movie by re-enacting Morgan’s 1986 home video of Hilary clinging to her mother and becoming hysterical when Foretich arrived for a court-authorized unsupervised visitation. Featured in an earlier BBC documentary on the case, the original videotape had a staged look, with Morgan appearing almost unnaturally melodramatic when begging Foretich to leave for Hilary’s sake.

Washington Superior Court Judge Herbert Dixon Jr., whose visitation order Morgan later violated, found this videotape and others made by her “an unfortunate combination of reality and theatrics.” And whether Hilary’s hysterics were the result of coaching or genuine terror has never been resolved. Yet there this episode is on the screen, gateway to an entire movie that filmmaker Otto says is “a very balanced portrayal as far as the facts of the case itself (go).”

With selective use of court testimony, the script by Lucretia Baxter and Otto’s husband and co-executive producer, Alan Landsburg, outlines the Morgan-Foretich personal and legal war that is shown making casualties of both Hilary and her mother.

Bedelia’s thoughtful, compassionate, suffering, saintly Morgan endures the dehumanizing process of entering jail during an initial brief incarceration ordered by Dixon. “Personally, I don’t think you belong here,” says a jail official. A fellow convict lends moral support against Foretich. “So keep him away, know what I’m saying?”

And Morgan’s frustrated attorney brother tells her later: “Last week, I prosecuted a rapist. He went free. But people like you, they keep them in jail.”

Another Morgan ally is James McVay’s score. She gets all the “good” music. It builds dramatically when she sends Hilary (Caroline Dollar) into hiding (“Your mummy loves you”), and it also escorts Morgan to jail, resonating tragedy as this pathetic figure shuffles along in chains. And later, Otto chooses Elton John’s “Sacrifice” to accompany a heavy-handed montage of Morgan behind bars.

In contrast, Knox’s Foretich gets perhaps a quarter of the screen time--and none of the music--given Morgan. In a one-dimensional portrait that just zooms over the top, Foretich at times looks like someone on speed, his expression wild, his manner borderline Capt. Queeg, his eyes darting furtively, especially in response to testimony in court about alleged “sex acts” performed on Hilary.

Moreover, Foretich’s parents appear brittle in their fleeting stints on screen, in contrast to the warmth and caring of Hilary’s divorced maternal grandparents, Bill and Antonia Morgan (Rip Torn and Patricia Neal), who put aside their differences and remarry to accompany their granddaughter into hiding.

Finally, as a metaphor for a court system that Otto believes oppresses child-abuse victims, the movie impales and shish-kebabs Judge Dixon, showing him as cold, cruelly vindictive and, says Morgan, “a judge who hates me.”

Undoubtedly, Foretich will hate this movie. But he declined to comment when reached at a dental conference in Orlando, Fla. Less reticent was one of his attorneys, Elaine J. Mittleman. Saying she was a former Ford Motor Co. employee, Mittleman likened ABC’s airing of the movie to “building a car that explodes.”

In addition, a Hampton, Va.-based Foretich support group calling itself Friends of Justice has distributed to the media its own inch-thick summary of the case plus a list of 35 instances of “facts” being “distorted, misrepresented, and even omitted” by the ABC movie.

An ABC spokesman’s unresponsive response to Friends of Justice this week was that the movie is about “a mother who did what she thought was necessary, and went to jail for it.” As if the issue of fairness were that narrow.

Otto said that in making her film she was doing what she thought was necessary, too, and is going to the mat for it. She refused to back down from her pre-production vow that nothing in the movie would be “contestable.”

“I documented every word, and it was approved by ABC legal and standards and practices,” she said. “I feel like I bent over backwards to re-create how Dr. Foretich and his family portray themselves. I cast them as attractive, well-bred people who were outraged at what Dr. Morgan was doing.”

Outraged, yes. But Eric Foretich is about as attractive here as a shark.

Otto said that although she didn’t obtain Morgan’s movie rights and that Morgan “didn’t participate in any way (in the making of the movie),” she and Hilary’s mother did spend a couple of days together before Morgan joined her daughter in New Zealand, where the child had been discovered living with her grandparents.

Out of fairness, why didn’t Otto also speak to Foretich? At the very least, she could have learned he doesn’t always look deranged.

Otto: “I know Dr. Foretich’s position.” Plus, Otto’s consultant was Bob Trebilcock, who she said spoke with Foretich “at length” in researching a book on the case he has written with Morgan.

Although Otto insists whether she sides with Morgan or Foretich isn’t the issue, and that the point she wishes to make instead is that “the system let Hilary down,” her movie speaks shrilly for itself. And to understand her allegiance to Morgan as the adult protector of an alleged child victim--”My daddy says he’ll poke me,” Hilary tells her horrified mother in the movie--it’s important to know that Otto was herself sexually abused as a child.

“I did have a one-time incident with my best friend’s father, and he did violate me,” she said. But her parents didn’t believe her when she told them, Otto said, teaching her that in such instances “the chances of a child being believed are slim.”

Thus we arrive at what Otto calls her “larger advocacy” for this movie, that “what the child says has to be paid attention to, that the child has to be protected.”

But where, in “The Elizabeth Morgan Story,” is protection for a father who, his supporters claim, was victimized by a mother who may have relentlessly planted sex-abuse stories in Hilary’s head and who herself at one time was accused of being abusive to her daughter?

And where, buried beneath layer upon layer of charges and legal testimony, is the truth?