Taking ‘Reality’ to a Higher Level

NEW YORK —  Series like “Survivor” and “The Bachelor” have proved that a manipulated version of reality can be edited into the equivalent of television’s fictional dramas or soap operas. But can real life--as filmed by an Oscar-winning documentarian, no less--sustain the long primary and secondary plots and night-to-night cliffhangers that mark a miniseries?

ABC set out to try in “The Hamptons,” its two-part, four-hour “reality miniseries” airing Sunday and Monday. The network chose an unlikely filmmaker, however, in Barbara Kopple, best known for penetrating portraits of the U.S. labor movement and not an artist apt to play with the facts.

The Hamptons, a string of communities along a 26-mile stretch of beachfront that forms the major summer resort area for a good number of New Yorkers, is a loaded term. New Yorkers--at least those with the means to escape the city on weekends--tend to either love or hate them. The area generates strong feelings about its spectacular natural beauty, its intense social scene, excessive wealth and perpetually backed-up traffic.

Kopple said she threw out any preconceptions she might have had when she signed on to explore the area for ABC. If she had any strong opinions one way or the other before making the film, the New York City resident isn’t letting on, saying only that she fished there with her family as a child and spent a few summer weeks there with her husband and son. “I’m not what you’d call a ‘Hamptonite.’ I appreciated the beauty of it,” she said, adding that she chooses to summer in a woodsy rural community north of New York called Yorktown Heights.

“People do have certain feelings about what the Hamptons are all about,” Kopple said. “But I wanted to explore for myself who these people are.” Sometimes, she noted, “we put people in boxes.”

Still, few on the Hamptons A-list believed her claims of open-mindedness when she set out with her cameras last summer. “While she was shooting, people were tremendously nervous, afraid that she’d be critical, that it would be a hit on the Hamptons,” said Steven Gaines, author of “Philistines at the Hedgerow,” a book about the area’s upper-crust residents and one of the film’s key subjects. Rumors raced through the social set, heightened by a newspaper report suggesting she might be using hidden microphones.

Kopple, said Gaines, “spent the summer telling people she had no agenda and wasn’t going to intercut pictures of poor Indians on the Shinnecock Reservation with scenes of lavish excess. Some people believed her, some didn’t. A lot of access was denied.”

ABC chose the Hamptons for its first attempt at a “reality” miniseries because it seemed “closed-ended,” said Quinn Taylor, who oversees the network’s movies and miniseries department. Taking place between Memorial Day and Labor Day, “it had a clear beginning, middle and end.” Plus, he said, its summer setting allowed a look into the lives of seasonal residents who come from the city--celebrities, wealthy businesspeople and singles looking for love in group-share houses--as well as the year-round population of fishermen, farmers and others who run the communities. “It was not conflict, but definitely two worlds trying to co-mingle,” Taylor said.

Imposing story lines proved harder, however. In editing, Kopple insisted on sticking to the same chronology as when she was shooting. A particularly affecting scene comes on Night 2, when popular restaurateur Jeff Salaway is interviewed the very night before he is killed in an early-morning traffic accident.

“I was devastated,” said ABC’s Taylor. “This is something you never experienced in ‘Survivor.’ This was just true. You got to meet a man, who was darling, and then he was dead.”

In a perfect television world, the miniseries would have included scenes from Salaway earlier in the film to heighten the dramatic impact. “I wish we had been able to set him up earlier,” said Taylor, “[but] Barbara is a purist; she would not at all manipulate the subject, the environment, anything. She met Jeff the day he appears in the show.”

The network did successfully push for a Night 1 cliffhanger, which it got, thanks to the infamous Lizzie Grubman accident, when the celebrity publicist allegedly backed her father’s SUV at high speed into a crowd of clubgoers, injuring many and then leaving the scene. The legal fallout is still ongoing, but Kopple quickly drops the story in the second night.

In the end, the network carved out the “A story” and less important “B story” plot lines that a good miniseries needs, Taylor said, by focusing on the “upstairs-downstairs” interplay between, say, a celebrity choosing a dress for a party and the struggling caterer laying out the shrimp, as well as on the characters’ “obsessive struggle” to fulfill their summer goal, whether it is meeting a husband, getting photographed on the social circuit or making it as a singer.

Because of its focus on New York elites, “The Hamptons” has garnered a good deal of media attention, and several critics have complained that the film lacks ongoing stories as well as a strong point of view. Kopple played it so neutral that Wall Street Journal critic Tunku Varadarajan thought she “wants her viewers to despise those with money,” while the New York Daily News’ David Bianculli decided she “seems overtaken by the rarefied air of celebrity fumes.”

Kopple said the topic didn’t lend itself to opinion. “What you’re searching for is a more human point of view, it’s not a drama of good and bad or right and wrong.... It’s a human drama of living together in small-town America.”

ABC’s Taylor acknowledged that the next time he tries a reality miniseries, he would want to conduct more advance research to set up ongoing stories and identify key characters earlier on.

Despite last summer’s angst among the jet set, the filmmaker clearly didn’t alienate everyone, and they didn’t end up alienating her. A full house of nearly 500 Hamptons habitues will get to see Kopple’s work for themselves tonight at an invitation-only screening at the area’s Sag Harbor Cinema, hosted by Kopple and one of her subjects, model Christie Brink- ley. The two are also hosting a fund-raiser clambake at actor Spalding Gray’s home afterward. Kopple cites Brinkley’s work with the STAR Foundation, an antinuclear-power organization, as one of the main surprises she uncovered during her summer of filming.

Gaines, who saw the film for the first time this week, said he expects the crowd to be pleased. All the worry, he said, was “for nothing, absolutely nothing. It is an accurate, friendly, unsalted version of events last summer.”

*

“The Hamptons” premieres Sunday night at 9 on ABC. The network has rated it TV-PG (may be unsuitable for young children).