Docudrama

Meeting David Helfgott is an intriguing experience for those unaware of his need for tactile expression. Everyone he encounters is hugged and kissed, and there is much hand-holding and even attempts at cuddling. When I meet him in the office of my newspaper, the West Australian in Perth--a city of 1.2 million on the western coast of Australia, where Helfgott grew up--he immediately kisses me on both cheeks.

Attorneys for embattled fertility specialist Ricardo H. Asch on Thursday blasted a television docudrama based on the UC Irvine human egg-swapping scandal, accusing the producers of smearing Asch's reputation as a "highly regarded scientist" by portraying him as an "uncaring doctor."

Earlier this month, a group of defendants, jurors and attorneys quietly met at a private screening held at HBO to view "Indictment: The McMartin Trial," a cable-TV movie that premiered over the weekend about the longest and costliest trial in American history. Obviously pleased with the outcome, Raymond Buckey, who spent five years in jail on child-molestation charges only to be acquitted on all counts, had just one criticism. "It was too short," he told his attorney, Scott D. Bernstein.

The 1991 sexual assault of a female Navy officer by drunken naval aviators in a Las Vegas hotel hallway raised the collective eyebrows of a nation. It did not, however, shock Martha (Marty) Humphreys. The revelations of "Tailhook," the scandal that shook the Navy to its core, were nothing Humphreys had not been privy to during her nearly 30 years of marriage to a Navy flyer.

For many years now I have tried to make the case for public funding for the arts. When we finally elected a musician, a skilled saxophonist, to the White House I really thought we who work in the arts had found a possible ally. And when President Clinton was heard to say that he believes the arts should be part of the everyday life of all Americans, I became positively optimistic. So far, unfortunately this optimism does not seem to have been justified.

Thirty-five years of teaching U.S. history in major American universities has taught me that bright undergraduates, like most people in the country, don't know a lot of history. "What's this thing called the New Deal you keep referring to?" a genuinely interested student asked me a few years ago. A national survey of 17- and 18-year-olds in the late 1980s showed that my student wasn't the only historically illiterate youngster on high school and college campuses.

Professors Tom Nash and Michael Gonzales get asked the same question all the time: What's their nice evangelical Christian college doing making a movie--a sympathetic movie--about a mass murderer? And not just any mass murderer, but Charles (Tex) Watson, a participant in some of the most grisly and shocking crimes in Los Angeles history, the 1969 Tate-La Bianca murders committed by the "Manson Family."

Professors Tom Nash and Michael Gonzales get asked the same question all the time: What's their nice evangelical Christian college doing making a movie--a sympathetic movie--about a mass murderer? And not just any mass murderer, but Charles (Tex) Watson, a participant in some of the most grisly and shocking crimes in Los Angeles history, the 1969 Tate-La Bianca murders committed by the "Manson Family."

The most common fault with movies about natural disasters is their stereotypical characters. The comparative strength of "Miracle on I-880" (at 9 tonight on NBC, Channels 4, 36 and 39) is the focus on the two most agonizing personal nightmares triggered by the horrendous collapse of the I-880 freeway in the 1989 San Francisco earthquake. "Miracle on I-880" is able to balance the physical horror of the 7.

The numbers tell one story: 1,600 acres torched, 25 people killed, 3,354 houses destroyed and 456 apartments lost at a cost of more than $1.5 billion. "Firestorm: 72 Hours in Oakland" (at 9 p.m. Sunday on ABC, Channels 7, 3, 10 and 42) tells others: the dumb things people do when their homes are endangered by fire, the hunger to pin the blame for the catastrophe on firemen, the whimsical nature of uncontrolled fires, the rebuilding of new dreams from the ashes of the old.