VOLUME 56 NO. 5 - MAY 1997USDANEWS VOLUME 56 NO. 5 - MAY 1997
Okay, all you USDA employees who have had a TV movie made about part of your life, please raise your hands now.
Hmmm, starting to scan the USDA agricultural posts overseas, no hands up...now, looking at USDA field offices in Oregon, Utah, no hands...moving east, over Colorado, South Dakota, Wisconsin, Indiana, no hands up...moving further south to Kentucky, Alabama, Georgia, no hands up yet...moving toward New England, first through Virginia, then--WAIT! There's a hand up at a USDA office in Rosslyn, Va. And that hand belongs to Kerry Ellison, so stop the search!
Ellison, an accountant with the Forest Service at the agency's office in Rosslyn, was the subject of a TV movie, titled "Hostile Advances: The Kerry Ellison Story," which ran on the "Lifetime Channel."
"The month of May is always 'sweeps week' on TV," she recounted. "And, one year ago, before the movie aired last May, the producers asked me to do interviews with reporters to promote the show, as well as participate in a followup discussion show related to the film."
The two-hour TV movie recounts, from Ellison's perspective, her allegation of sexual harassment against a coworker when she worked for the Internal Revenue Service in San Mateo, Calif., in the late-1980s. Although the time frame depicted in the movie occurred while she was with the IRS, the movie was made during her subsequent tenure as a Forest Service employee.
In the resulting legal decision shown at the end of the movie, in 1991 the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco reversed and remanded a lower district court's earlier grant of summary judgment, and instead held that a woman employee states a case of sexual harassment when she alleges conduct which a "reasonable woman" would consider sufficiently severe to create an abusive working environment.
The Appeals Court further ruled that it adopted the perspective of a "reasonable woman" because it believed that "a sex-blind reasonable person standard tends to be male-biased and tends to systematically ignore the experiences of women."
In Ellison's case, and as stated during the credits at the end of the movie, the alleged harasser continued to deny her charges, and Ellison settled her lawsuit against the IRS and the alleged harasser out-of-court. As a result of those settlements, her allegations were never tried in a court of law.
The credits to the movie stated further that "The 'reasonable woman' standard initiated by Kerry Ellison is a benchmark in sexual harassment law enabling thousands of women's cases to be tried from a woman's perspective."
So, what's it like to have a movie made about your life?
Ellison noted that she was approached by a producer who was researching cases on sexual harassment for a possible movie. The two negotiated a contract which would pay Ellison for the exclusive option to do her story, and then pay an additional sum once a script was produced. Part of that payment was to serve as a "consultant" on the script--but it did not give her script approval rights.
The producer then hired a screenwriter who flew out to meet and interview Ellison. "In talking with the scriptwriter, she told me that her previous experience had been to write a script about a murderer who stuffed the victim in a trunk," she laughed. "So I didn't know what to expect."
When Ellison was mailed a copy of the first draft of the script, "My first reaction to it," she quipped, "was to wonder just what I had gotten myself into."
"I thought 'No way--this script is like Halloween 13'!" According to Ellison, the initial script over-dramatized a number of incidents. She said that a number of scenes needed changing for legal reasons and to prevent possible lawsuits. "But most of the scenes that I had concerns about were ultimately altered," she said. "This made them more accurate and more effective--and made me more comfortable with them."
She noted that the script contained some instances of 'literary license.' "The incidents took place in California--but the film was shot in Toronto--so there are wintry scenes with snow on the ground," she pointed out. "The character of my mother in the movie read romance novels and was played by a white female, but my mother is Japanese and doesn't read romance novels."
"At one point they told me 'We need to make you a 'softer and more sympathetic character,' so we're going to give your 'screen persona' a cat as a pet'--which, in the final version, became a dog."
"But, I figured," she concluded, "I could live with those particular examples of 'literary license'--and I know it's hard to condense, into a two-hour movie, something that took about ten years to resolve."
In fact, the movie credits did include a statement that "This picture presenting Kerry Ellison's perspective on this story contains characters, events and dialogue which have been fictionalized for dramatic effect."
Rena Sofer, an actress in the daytime drama "General Hospital," portrayed Ellison in the movie. "We didn't meet until filming had ended," Ellison said. "So all I knew about her was that she had this pronounced New York accent in 'General Hospital'."
"But then I later realized that her accent was affected for her soap opera role."
In April 1996 Ellison received an advance copy of the film--which she could watch under the proviso that she did not let anyone else see it prior to its TV debut on May 27, 1996.
"So I went into my TV room," she recounted, "inserted the tape, took a deep breath, and thought 'Now I'll finally get to see what the moviemakers did'."
Ellison observed later that, as she watched it for the first time, she cried through parts of it. She noted that the movie is repeated on occasion on the Lifetime Channel, and would be listed in the TV directory when it airs.
"Now, when I watch it, I see it as education and entertainment," she said. "I think it's a good movie." ¤
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