Apocalypse <i> Not</i> : CBS MOVIE ATTEMPTS TO CREATE A BELIEVABLE CATACLYSMIC EVENT THAT NO ONE ACTUALLY WILL BELIEVE

On Oct. 30, 1938, much of America panicked as Orson Welles’ “Mercury Theater on the Air” presented H.G. Wells’ “The War of the Worlds” as an apparent live radio-news broadcast of a Martian invasion.

Now 56 years later, CBS hopes to scare the living daylights out of viewers Sunday evening with “Without Warning,” a science-fiction drama that simulates a live television news broadcast. While we’ve had warning this time around, reality and fiction continue to collide.

The premise: Three pieces of a huge asteroid suddenly plunge to Earth and land in China, France and the United States. The regularly scheduled movie-of-the-week is preempted by the “Evening World News” anchored by veteran newscaster Sander Vanocur.

Besides Vanocur, “Without Warning” features scientist and science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke (“2001: A Space Odyssey”) and TV journalists Bree Walker-Lampley, Warren Olney and Sandy Hill. Actress Jane Kaczmarek plays Vanocur’s co-anchor.

“Without Warning” isn’t the first time a network has presented a TV movie masquerading as a newscast. In 1983, NBC aired the acclaimed “Special Bulletin” about the threatened nuclear destruction of Charleston, S.C., written by Ed Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz, who later created “thirtysomething.” However, in “Special Bulletin” actors, not actual television journalists, played newscasters.

CBS plans to air disclaimers throughout “Without Warning” explaining that the film is a fictionalized newscast. The disclaimers will begin before the program starts and continue at frequent intervals throughout, says Kenneth Martin, director of program practices. “It will be at least every 15 minutes,” he says.

The first disclaimer will say: “ ‘Without Warning’ is a realistic depiction of fictional events. None of what you are about to see is actually happening.” During the program the disclaimer will change to, “None of what you are seeing is actually happening.”

As far as responding to audiences’ fears, Martin says, “Our audience services area in New York will be responding to inquiries,” he says. “We are interested in having a very compelling and dramatically intense program that is highly believable, but which no one believes.”

“Without Warning” was inspired by the events that occurred last July when fragments from the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 struck the planet Jupiter in numerous places. At the time, executive producer Mark Wolper (“Queen”), son of executive producer David Wolper, happened to be perusing old scripts from Wolper Organization files to see if any might still be viable as network fare.

“I happened to be doing one of my searches and came across this script called ‘July 13th,’ written in 1969,” Wolper says during a break in the filming at a Burbank sound stage. “I read the script and said, ‘This is perfect. This is asteroids coming and hitting the Earth.’ So the next day, which was a Friday, I gave the script to CBS and on Monday they called and ordered it.”

The original script by David Seltzer (“Punchline”) was revised by former Emmy-winning ABC News correspondent Peter Lance. The first thing Lance did was take an intensive course in astronomy from the film’s technical adviser, Donald Yeomans, senior research scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.

“I basically treated the script like a piece of journalism,” Lance says. “I took the weekend to understand the science. I wanted to do something that would be really believable. I wanted the science to be bulletproof. If you are going to do something that comes out of the headlines and appears to be a news broadcast, it has to make sense. It has to have logic to it.”

Yeomans is impressed with the technical details of the film. “It’s not a documentary, so within the limits of the story itself, we tried to keep it quite realistic,” he says. “There is always a chance of getting hit with an asteroid. We make the point in the script that it is very unlikely, but very unlikely is not the same thing as impossible. These comets smacking into Jupiter this summer show this kind of thing on a cosmic time scale happens all the time. In a human lifetime it’s quite a rare event. The Earth is not immune to these impacts.”

According to Yeomans, 250 large asteroids relatively near Earth are being tracked by scientists. Still, he adds, “that’s only 10% of the believed (asteroid) population. The large ones we can track for hundreds of years into the future and see if they get close to the Earth. We do that at JPL.”

The problem, Yeomans says, are the smaller ones. “The 200-meter-sized objects have to get very close to the Earth before they’re bright enough to be seen. What’s worse is that if they are heading straight for you on a collision course, it’s almost impossible to see until the very last minute.”

To further heighten the realism in the film, Wolper sought out real newscasters. “We thought nobody could be better news reporters than news reporters, so whenever possible we tried to hire news reporters. They were very excited and they loved it. We had to audition them for the parts, so we only selected people we thought could carry it.”

Actors are interspersed among the real news people. “We are trying to convince people this is news and fool people, but at the same time, this is drama,” Wolper explains. “I needed actors to play the more dramatic roles--the breaking down, the crying. Those kinds of scenes I have given to actors, because it’s very difficult for news reporters to do that because they don’t have acting experience.”

“Acting” as himself in movies is fun for the genial Vanocur, a renowned correspondent for NBC, ABC and PBS. He recently appeared as himself in “Dave” and “TimeCop.”

“This is being filmed over a period of four days,” Vanocur explains during his lunch break. “I started out (in the film) low key and now I’m trying, though I’m not a trained actor, to convey a sense that I’m still dispassionate. But something is going on and I’m not quite sure what it is. But I can’t go beyond what the information is, so unless I start to eat the furniture and the drapes at the end, I will remain rather dispassionate.”

Vanocur doesn’t know if “Without Warning” will scare media-sophisticated audiences. “Even though there are disclaimers, there’s an awful lot of channel surfing,” he says.

And, he adds, “I think the line between reality and fiction gets increasingly blurred. For example, I was in Nashville watching the NBA playoffs and suddenly there’s O.J. Simpson (in the white Ford Bronco). I still don’t know what that was. Was it news? Was it fiction? Was it theater?”

The newscast depicted in “Without Warning,” Vanocur says, is neither tabloid nor sensationalized. “I think there’s a great attention to detail, accuracy and no attempts as far as I can see to make it more hyped up then it needs to be. The tension arises from the story itself. Some of the scenes are realistic and, I think, because of the Shoemaker-Levy earlier this year, a lot of people think that may be the way the world will end.”

“If I had still been a correspondent at ABC News, I’d have done this as a piece on ‘20/20,’ ” Lance says. “I’d have done this as a piece of journalism. It has to be done in a really responsible way. So, throughout the two hours, it’s done in ‘real time.’ At the beginning, it clearly looks like an asteroid problem. And then, little by little, all of this evidence starts surfacing and sort of semi-responsible members of the search-for-intelligent-life community begin to make charges that there may be something more. (The newscasters) keep coming back and saying this is speculation. I think (in the movie) you get what the best TV network would do today, what the most responsible TV network would do if something like this ever happened in real time.”

Wolper says “Without Warning” is meant to skewer the “tabloidy kind of people. Hopefully, what will happen with this show is that it will spark a lot of controversy after it airs. People will be scared. Is this responsible for a network to put on a show like this that could potentially scare people? When you get that controversy going, then it sparks conversations on what shows should be and the line between news and drama.”

But, Wolper adds, the movie also pokes fun at the “TV movie-of-the-week makers because we have a little fake movie-of-the week at the beginning of this with Loni Anderson. That’s kind of humorous in itself. That is what we break into it. So we are making fun of ourselves, which is interesting because our company, the Wolper Organization, is known for documenting reality with ‘Roots,’ ‘North and South’ and all the Wolper documentaries. Now we are creating reality and fictionalizing the documentation of it. We are making our own reality and covering it.”

Because Wolper and director Robert Iscove have no news experience, Wolper knew he needed the expertise of news veterans who understood the business. So he hired Lance and producer Nancy Platt Jacoby, a former CBS News producer and KCBS-TV executive producer.

“We needed someone who understood how (news) is done, understood how (newscasters) talk, so it will be as real as possible,” Wolper says. “The audience is smart. They will know if you are faking them or not.”

“Without Warning” was taped in just 17 days. Besides shooting at the Burbank studio, crews were dispatched to Washington, D.C., New York City, Los Angeles, Moscow’s Red Square, China’s Tian An Men Square, Paris and Sri Lanka.

“We are shooting simultaneously,” Wolper says. “It has been very difficult. Everything happens at night and with our time schedule and time frame, we had to get permission to shoot in all of these areas.”

But the hasty schedule, he says, actually served the picture “because in the frantic nature of trying to get the work done, it’s giving the feel of news, which is always very frantic. I think it has helped out the process that we had to rush because news people would have to do that too.”

Putting the production together was a learning experience. “How do we get all of this material together? How do we shoot it?” were some of the questions he had to ask. “Do I hire a film crew on the outside to shoot or do I hire a real news crew because they know how news is shot?”

Eventually, Wolper hired a combination of crews and brought in a supervising director of photography who is responsible for the look of the whole movie. Still, Wolper says, “I didn’t want too much continuity.”

Wolper hopes “Without Warning” terrifies audiences. “What I suspect will happen is that if you sit down and start watching this, about five minutes into it, you’ll say, ‘My God. Is this really happening?’ The first thing audiences are going to do is pick up their channel changer and switch it to CNN or another network to see if the other network is covering it. And then they will go back to our channel because they won’t want to miss anything.”

“Without Warning” premieres Sunday at 9 p.m. on CBS.