Stopping Drugs Press Review

Cutting Free of Drugs
NEW YORK DIAL, February 1987
by Christopher Hallowell

There are no hidden faces in Stopping Drugs. There are no concealed voices. What we see in the film is what it’s like to try to kick drugs in a detoxification and rehabilitation center. “It’s not a happy story,” says producer Hector Galán. “In group therapy they make you look at yourself in a mirror and see yourself as you are. Most of them don’t make it.”

The film, the first of a two-part special on Frontline this month, focuses on a twenty-one day treatment program in a federally funded center outside of Austin, Texas, Galán’s hometown. (Part two journeys into America’s schools to find out if anti-drug efforts are working. The statistics are discouraging. Thirty-four percent of all high school seniors are regular drug users). It is a dilapidated and isolated place with broken furniture, bunk beds, and a cafeteria that serves barely palatable food. It is for drug addicts, many of them referred by the court and without the money to pay the thousands of dollars per day that some private detoxification centers charge for drying someone out.

When Galán - who has produced four other Frontline films, including Standoff in Mexico and Chasing the Basketball Dream - decided he wanted to make a film on drugs, he faced a dilemma. Such films had been done before, and he did not want to cover worn turf. He also knew that nearly all films on the subject treated addicts as aberrants and criminals. He would take another route, get involved with the addicts, win their trust, and then film them openly. “The people in the center had something in life,” he says. “The lost it to drugs. They are the kind of people you see on the subway, a cross section, people like you and me.”

There’s Debby, twenty-two years old, first pregnant at fifteen and now a mother of three. She had been on speed for ten years.

There’s Jay, twenty-six, a business entrepreneur who initially started a shrimp processing plant and then went into real estate development before blowing a million dollars on drugs in only a few months. His habit got so bad that every time he shot up, he passed out for twenty hours and woke up with the needle still sticking out of his arm.

Ron was a college football star who had been awarded a lavish football scholarship. He got involved in cocaine. His coach found out and kicked him off the team. He went downhill from there.

And there’s Mike, thirty-three, so addicted to speed that he lost his car repair business. Then he got arrested and was put into the rehabilitation program by court order. But he couldn’t take the silent pain of detoxification. The film witnesses him as he begins shooting up again.

This is what happens to most people in drug programs, no matter what the addict’s motivation for quitting or their social or economic circumstances, eighty percent return to drugs. Yet the kind of rehabilitation offered by the center where addicts are forced to face their addiction through a process of self-realization is the most effective known.

When Galán was filming during group therapy sessions, he often heard the expression, “You have to really hit bottom.” Those who had not “hit bottom” were likely to go back on drugs. It was the people who knew they were at the bottom who most wanted to free themselves of drugs. “If you don’t have the ‘want’,” Galán says, “You’re not going to be able to do it.”

Standoff in Mexico Press Review

‘Frontline’ examines democracy in Mexico
COLUMBUS DISPATCH, April 1, 1986
by David Jones

The faces tell the story. Grimacing with anger, young men pound bricks into palm-size pieces, then hurtle them against government buildings. Their lips distort into threatening curves as they scream insults at their antagonists hidden inside the state-owned monolith.

This isn’t file footage of some ’60s campus demonstration but something more serious. The rioters are Mexicans, just a few miles from the United States border, incensed by what they believe to be a one-party regime in their ostensibly democratic nation.

“Mexico claims to be a democracy,” says El Paso Herald-Post political writer Terrence Poppa. “We wait to see if that’s true.”

Tonight on PBS, Frontline examines the growing belief that regional elections are being fixed by the Revolutionary Party (PRI), the political body that has ruled Mexico for more than 50 years.

Recently, parties such as the National Action Party (PAN), running on a Republican-like “less-government” platform, have been challenging the PRI’s rule. The suspected result has been wide-spread election fraud whenever a PRI candidate is in danger of losing. Standoff in Mexico documents this volatile political situation in a country which shares more than 1,000 miles of border with the United States.

The hour-long program focuses on a series of 1985 elections (gubernatorial, congressional, and mayoral) in the northern states of Sonora and Chihuahua in which PAN candidates challenged the PRI. Because Mexican law prohibits successive terms, PRI candidates are showed preferential treatment including greater radio and television time. The PRI’s candidate for a Juarez congressional seat, Arnoldo Cabada de la O, is a television show host, seen regularly handing out free government medical care to small children. PAN candidate Hector Mejia can only walk the streets and shake hands.

When the election has passed, with unofficial tallies showing Mejia clearly the winner, the PRI-run electoral body refuses to acknowledge its party’s defeat. Even the strengthening Marxist party in the region concedes the PAN’s win. Banned from Mexican radio, Juarez mayor Fransisco Barrios Terrezas, a PAN member, steps over the border to plead his party’s case on an El Paso station.

“My dear citizens, the change continues,” Terrezas says later before a crowd of reporters. “Because it is the will of the people.” The throng cheers wildly.

The PRI could be overthrown by Mexicans should it attempt to smother its opposition with deceit. That’s what happened in similar situations in Iran and the Philippines. Just what type of political climate such a wind could blow in is a fuzzy, long-range forecast. Still it is apparent that Americans would do well to watch the southern skies.

“If trends continue as they are now, and the government wants to at least maintain stability, it’s going to have to open itself up more,” says Poppa. “Because if it closes the avenues of the opposition, the opposition will get radicalized. When you close all the other political doors, people are going to pick up their guns.”

“I disagree,” says Peter Copeland, reporter for the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain. “Things are going to have to get a lot worse before people ever take up arms in Mexico. They would like to have more say and less corruption in their government but they’re not going to take up arms right now.”

“That’s the key phrase,” replied Poppa. “Right now.”

Cuba: A Personal Journey Press Review

Exile Returns to Cuba in ‘A Personal Journey’
LOS ANGELES TIMES, August 4, 1984
by Lee Margulies

The most interesting thing about “Cuba - A Personal Journey,” a documentary airing at 10 tonight on KCET Channel 28, is that it’s not more interesting.

In other words, the way this film got made says much about Cuba today as anything in the film. That it’s somewhat dry and features a decidedly pro-Castro cast of interview subjects is a reflection of the controls the government placed on producer-director Hector Galán.

The program is a chronicle of a 15-day trip to Cuba last year by exile Antonio Guernica, who had not been back since he and his parents fled the Castro regime for the United States in 1961. Now 32 and a writer and broadcaster, he narrates the film and is seen visiting his hometown, Santiago de Cuba, where he encounters a cousin and looks in on his old school. Later he interviews government officials in Havana.

As part of the broadcast, Guernica reports that it took nearly a year to get approval for a film crew to accompany him on his trip, and then only with the provision that he be accompanied at every step by government representatives to monitor what was being filmed and select who could be interviewed.

Only once, Guernica says, did they venture out without their Cuban hosts - to pay a call on an old friend of his father’s. And then a “neighborhood watch” group called the police to report their “suspicious” activity. Guernica said he was told there is such a group on every block.

“Cuba - A Personal Journey” is neither overly dramatic nor compellingly eloquent, but in its own quiet way it makes very clear why Guernica says he came away with “a new understanding of what it means to be free.”

The documentary was produced for public television by La Raza Production Center Inc., a Washington-based subsidiary of the National Council of La Raza. It is the first of a series of programs about Latinos that the organization plans to produce under the umbrella title “Hispanus.”

Chasing the Basketball Dream Press Review

‘Chasing the Basketball Dream’
COLUMBUS CITIZEN-JOURNAL, April 20, 1984
by Sandy Schwartz

College basketball players who have the good fortune to play for a powerhouse are showered with national television exposure.

The American public knows all about these players’ shooting percentages, rebounding statistics and defensive abilities.

What we don’t know about these basketball stars are the trials and tribulations they have faced in the classroom or how hard it was to get some of these student-athletes into school. Probably even more important, we rarely are informed how hard it is to keep some of these players eligible and of the struggles involved to ensure these players receive education while they are in college.

“Frontline,” the Public Broadcasting System’s investigative series, will answer some of those gnawing questions at 8 p.m., Monday (Channel 34) when it airs “Chasing the Basketball Dream.”

The 60-minute program isn’t a typical sports-on-television show. It is a look at two types of college players who make sports on television exciting enough so colleges can reap millions of dollars in television rights.

The program revolves around two Washington, D.C. area basketball players who played pickup games together in an area gymnasium. One, Derek Lewis, who will be a college freshman in the fall, has had enormous success on the basketball court and in the classroom. The other, Ken Simiral, is a hit on the court but a flop with the books.

The program illustrates the procedures Lewis followed in choosing the University of Maryland as his next stop on the basketball ladder. With his talents, on and off the court, the young man should have no problems and in four years - if not sooner - should be a million-dollar-a-year player in professional basketball.

Simiral is at the opposite end of the spectrum. His talents on the court are enough to write him a ticket to any college. His grades and apparent lack of direction in school have prevented him from going to a major college.

Charlie Cobb, a “Frontline” correspondent, follows Simiral from his troubled days in high school to a junior college in Texas.

There Simiral found quick success as well as quick trouble. Soon he was back on the streets of Washington. Now he’s making another go of it at a California junior college.

“Should he even be in college?” Cobb asks. “That is a question that needs to be answered…But he has to go to college if he is going to play pro basketball.”

Among people interviewed are Dr. Harry Edwards, professor of sociology at the University of California at Berkeley and Julius Erving, the professional basketball star better known as “Dr. J.”

The program illustrates that there are 1,000 would-be Dr. Js out there who never even make it to college and millions more who think they are the next Dr. J but never will make it to the pros.

Many good points are made during the program. For instance:

* Basketball interferes with every aspect of players’ lives in high school and college.
* Some players are allowed to play basketball in high school and college even though their grades aren’t good enough.
* Many college athletes are in school so they can play sports, and studies are secondary.
* For many athletes, the first step in college is to teach them how to learn because they haven’t attained those skills in high school. Many athletes must struggle to make up years of lost academics.
* If a player is good enough, there always will be someone out there willing to take a chance on him and somehow make him academically eligible.

“Frontline,” produced by a consortium of five television stations, does an excellent job of enlightening us on an important aspect of athletics that we rarely see.

Many universities have instituted programs to clean up the academics in their athletics. Television programs like this might well aid in the cleanup process.

The Hunt for Pancho Villa Press Review

‘Hunt for Pancho Villa’ to air on PBS
SAN ANTONIO EXPRESS-NEWS, November 3, 1983
by Jon Burlingame

“The American Experience” (9 p.m., PBS) offers another fascinating historical documentary: “The Hunt for Pancho Villa,” a chronicle of the so-called Punitive Expedition of Gen. John “Black Jack” Pershing into Mexico in 1916, to capture or kill the legendary outlaw.

The core of the hour is great archival footage of the time, including rare film of Villa and Pershing, each with his troops; many period photographs; and interviews with several survivors of the time, including two of Villa’s soldiers and a number of observers who recall the incidents. Linda Hunt is the narrator.

“The Hunt for Pancho Villa” carefully details the complex history of United States-Mexican relations and the changing political climate that caused the United States to first support the revolutionary, then oppose him and finally hunt him down in a long and ultimately unsuccessful expedition

In The Shadow of the Capitol Press Review

Tough PBS show on local D.C. government
THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR, January 28, 1983
by Arthur Unger

Can you expect a political Utopia when social activists actually gain control of the government they have been criticizing?

That’s the question probed with unrelenting incisiveness in the third episode of the memorable (so far) 26-part “Frontline” documentary series, In the Shadow of the Capitol (PBS, Monday, 8-9 p.m.). The executive producer of this consortium-produced series is David Fanning, best known for his superb work in the “World” series. The five-station consortium consists of WGBH, Boston; KCTS, Seattle; WNET, New York; WPBT, Miami; WTVS, Detroit.

The ratings for the premiere of this series were the highest of any public-affairs program on PBS since “Death of a Princess” in 1980 - 16 percent of the TV audience in Boston, 15 percent in Chicago, 13 percent in Los Angeles, and 7 percent in New York. Fine figures for PBS, although low for commercial TV.

So unrelenting is this new show that it may make viewers feel as uncomfortable as it apparently makes its participants feel.

Reporter Charles Cobb, a SNCC (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee) activist in the 1960s, traces the performance of other SNCC executives who now hold top leadership positions in Washington, D.C., including the mayoralty in the person of Marion Barry, SNCC’s first chairman.

The poverty and urban blight which have been afflicting more than 70 percent of the black population of Washington has apparently not been dissipated by SNCC leadership.

In fact, contemporary poverty fighters insist that when activists come into power, they are so co-opted by the establishment that it becomes impossible for them to do anything but maintain the bureaucracy. Over and over again, various black leaders make that point - a point that even the mayor has trouble rebutting.

One scene in this documentary seems disturbingly reminiscent of the recent “underground” film “The Return of the Secaucus 7.” It concerns a get-together in which 1960s activists yearn nostalgically for a return to the commitment of the early days.

Hosted by NBC’s ubiquitous Jessica Savitch, who always seem to manage to pull things together and put them in proper perspective, “In the Shadow of the Capitol” seems to prove that, as one black activist puts it, in the long run “politicians don’t have any color.” They idea also seems to evolve that poverty, too, has no color.

Perhaps the most disturbing conclusion is the belief of reporter Cobb that there seems to be no new generation of black activists arising in American society. In the area of social change, he believes that “the old pressure is missing.”

The all-important question posed by this penetratingly introspective show: Will the 1960s activists be able to live up to their 1960s promises in the 1980s? And, in any case, will the 1960s answers fit the 1980s problems?