THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, June 11, 1994 TAG: 9406080088
SECTION: TELEVISION WEEK PAGE: 01 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY LARRY BONKO, TELEVISION COLUMNIST
DATELINE: 940611 LENGTH: Long
But do anticipate a fair amount of overacting from Keaton in ``Amelia Earhart: Her Final Flight,'' which premieres at 8 p.m. and repeats at midnight. There will be other showings Wednesday night at 10 as well as on June 19, 20, 24 and 26.
{REST} In one scene, you'll see Keaton chewing up a fair amount of scenery when she tells her husband, played by Bruce Dern, ``I'm not this myth that you've created. I'm just a mediocre pilot that you picked out of a crowd nine years ago because I looked like Charles Lindbergh and could fly a little bit. I'm not this Amelia Earhart person. I'm not a heroine.''
When Keaton was cozy with Woody Allen, the producer-writer put better dialogue in her mouth than that.
The TNT movie hints that Earhart was on a spying mission for the United States when she set out on a 22,000-mile journey in 1937. The journey ended when she and her navigator, Fred Noonan, vanished over open water in the Pacific.
There's a moment in the film when Dern, who played Earhart's husband, the publisher-promoter G.P. Putnam, is visited by a representative of the Department of the Interior. The bureaucrat (Denis Arndt) doesn't come right out and ask Putnam to recruit his wife for snooping on the war-minded Japanese.
But you'll catch his drift in the scene where he says, ``If she should see anything on certain islands. . . a general observation. . . ''
Anna Sandor, who wrote the script for ``Amelia Earhart: The Final Flight,'' said in a telephone interview that she doesn't believe for one second that Earhart's flight in 1937 was a spy mission. So why hint at it?
``While there is no way to prove she had been spying; there are theories. Pick up 10 different books about her last flight and you'll read 10 different theories about it. I attempted to bring these theories together.''
The world knows as much about the fate of Earhart and her navigator today as it did just hours after she was declared lost after missing a landing site on Howland Island. And that is very little.
What Sandor's script reveals in this production, as did Public Broadcasting in an excellent documentary about Earhart that aired last year, is that she wasn't much of a pilot. And she didn't feel comfortable being world-famous.
``She was a foolhardy, incredibly courageous pilot who was ill-prepared for the final flight. She didn't know how to fly her airplane very well. She didn't have the proper knowledge of the plane's radio equipment. Her luck just ran out and she left us with a great mystery that may never be solved,'' said Sandor.
The producers dolled up a 1953 Beechcraft-18 to look like the plane that carried Earhart to her fate - a 1937 Lockheed Elkectra Model 12. Keaton bobbed her hair for the role and wore clothes patterned after Earhart's wardrobe.
Down on Earth, here is some of what else is happening on TV in the days to come:
MTV continues to evolve from a network that is more than Snoop Doggy Dogg videos. Wednesday night at 10, MTV boldly goes where it has never gone before. ``Dead at 21'' is the first drama series to air on Music Television.
The series, starring Jack Noseworthy, Lisa Dean Ryan and Whip Hubley, is about young people with micro-chips planted in their brains. The chips make them smart but, as luck would have it, the implants also bring on bad dreams and thoughts of suicide at the age of 21. The pilot episode is quite confusing, but it's worth a look just to see Ryan on the screen. She's a jewel.
``Think of the series as `Logan's Run' meets `The Fugitive,' '' said an MTV programming executive.
This weekend's gem is a documentary from TBS, ``National Geographic Explorer Presents Vietnam: The Women Who Served.'' It's on Sunday at 9 p.m.
There were 11,000 women who supported the combat troops in Southeast Asia, including a handful who died in shellings. You'll hear the young nurses say, somewhat foolhardy, that they felt invincible, that there was no bullet with a nurse's name on it. Oh, yes there was.
The nurses made a vow among themselves to never allow a soldier to die alone. Some, like Lily Adams, volunteered because they felt guilty about staying home while their male classmates fought the war. ``They had to worry about the draft, and we didn't.''
Public Broadcasting, which has given a substantial amount of air time to the subject of homosexuality lately, continues the trend on Tuesday at 10 p.m, with a new chapter in the ``P.O.V.'' series. This episode, ``One Nation Under God,'' is about a group of agencies and networks engaged in the what ``P.O.V.'' calls the ex-gay movement, the effort to change lesbians and gay men into straights.
by CNB