Let me begin by writing, one would hope not to be so close to many of the deemed sensational trials of the latter part of the 20th Century, - but I was one of those folks who got to be around two - The Menendez Brothers and this one, The McMartin Preschool Trial. One happened two blocks of where I was living at the time, the other a few blocks from where I worked. And this movie drama enactment was top notch for it's time.There is no doubt about it, this was the most horrific thing I had ever heard of, and it was scary. It was scary because of the victims, the children and everything they were exposed to. I can write from first hand that this was a trying time in that area. No one was 100% in agreement with everything. Everyone had an opinion. People I was working with knew the accused and the accusers first hand. Those that lived in Manhattan Beach (and Hermosa and Redondo the adjacent beaches)absolutely had their views and you could NOT remove them from it. It was volatile. And the more the accusations came out, the more precarious it got. And this whole McMartin Preschool Trial...was almost a DECADE and 13 Million dollars of taxpayer of money (yep!) for acquittals ... and this HBO film hit the nail on the head.This was well written, made your skin crawl, and that is how many were feeling. This did a great job of showing the jockeying between the children, the McMartins, the Attorneys, the child therapist, the teachers(!), the media (ugh!), the parents of the children. What I liked so much about this film --was it did NOT take sides, it presented it as it was, and the end still leaves you to...wonder. Make no mistake, this was real...this happened. And what happened...is more questions and accusations than answers.HBO was starting to make its wonderful reputation of "HBO Films" diving into subject matter Networks were attempting to show but sugar-coated many because of Network Standards, HBO was being raw about their approaches. Actor Henry Thomas as Ray Buckey gives a standout performance. It is cold, chilling...scary. Actor Sada Thompson as the owner of the McMartin Preschool also takes you out of any comfortable place as you are wondering about the grandmother of Ray Buckey and her also as the mother of Peggy Buckey, Ray's mom portrayed by Actor Shirley Knight and it's a performance to behold). It was a family affair. James Woods gives another one of his best performances as Ray Buckey's Attorney Danny Davis against Mercedes Ruehl's spot-on performance as the Prosecuting Attorney Lael Rubin and this is something to watch --and keep in mind this is BEFORE the Menendez Trials and the OJ Simpson Trial in Los Angeles. This is how Los Angeles was...and this HBO film captures it's first case that (in my view) opens up a whole can of judicial worms to come).The film shows also shows how the McMartin Preschool trial also became a web of mass hysteria and yes, 15 minutes of fame that ruined any real judicial hope of getting to the bottom of this. There were victims and they were the children (scared, abused, manipulated), and in this movie you will see that the child victims may have been victimized -- twice. This film does not display any easy answers (there really wasn't any) and you just can't leave it thinking there was a conclusion - the film is clear in stating there was not. Still isn't.In 2017-2018 I am sure people notice that filmmakers are bringing these trials to cable/streaming/movies for this generation -- and they should because it is a not too distant past that no one has made a decent conclusion of. I know the McMartin Preschool Trial will be getting a re-do as well in the future. But before that, please watch this film first. Great performances, great writing, keeps you glued. Rent it, stream it -- as it is one of HBO's 10 best and as relevant today and it was in the 1980's. That is how good this is.

This just portrays just how lethal the mass media can become especially when people forget that an allegation remains an allegation until it's proved correct. A young man's life ruined simply by a absurd allegation with no proof. Also applies today, especially in "sex scandals".Today, when a woman simply claims that she was sexually harassed by a man, the man is locked up without the woman (so called "victim") needing to prove her allegations. I only hope everyone will learn from this and also, that the justice system will be improved.

I don't know why this docudrama isn't more successful than it is. The issue it deals with is important enough. Maybe that's part of the problem. When you treat a tragedy with substandard techniques it cheapens the subject matter.The difficult, I think, lies mainly in the script. It gives us all the clichés of victimization stories. Innocent people are herded up by the police without warning, shuffled off to the slams to be humiliated, accused by lunatics of nefarious actions, and suffer immensely. The survivors in the end forgive God but not people.Well, basically, that's what happened. But the performances amount to no more than professionalism. And who could make believable such lines as, "This trial is about justice." And, "This is a system of laws and I happen to believe in it." The DA isn't given more than one dimension. James Woods is his usual manic and cocky self, and changes from cynical to committed halfway through the trial without any noticeable motivation, but at least that mania fits the role. Shirley Knight gives a first-rate impersonation of Shirley Schrift.Lolita Davidovich's character is at least treated with some respect, although she's clearly one of the engines behind this terrible miscarriage of justice. As Woods points out, he doesn't believe she lied. He believes her motives are good but she is mistaken. She used dolls as surrogate people to draw the stories out of the kids she interviewed. In one instance she used a black doll to represent the guy they were trying to hang the molestation charges on. When asked if this was racism, Davidovich says she doesn't associate a doll's skin color with racism. SHE may not, but kids did, at least in the 1950s when the distinguished educator Kenneth Clark and his wife carried out their experiments linking the skin color of dolls to self valuation. (The studies influenced the decision in Brown vs. Board of Education.)Yet the subject is so important that it should be seen if only for its educational content. The movie itself is an "indictment" of television, which is held responsible for the mass hysteria that swept the country at the time. (A very good TV documentary was done on a similar case in Eden, North Carolina.) Well, TV is an easy target. "World's Wildest Police Chases" and all that.But -- to face one or two unpleasant facts -- the witch hunt of 1693 in Salem, Massachussetts, resulted in the deaths of more than 20 people, and this was considerably BEFORE radio talk shows and Geraldo Rivera. There is something in the reptilian part of the human brain that seems to enjoy the suffering of others, no matter how innocent they are. And in this instance the children only provided a conduit for that Schadenfreude. The kids were a "delivery system", as it were, for the willing hatred felt towards those in no position to hit back. It's a dark prospect that the film doesn't dream of addressing.These waves of mass hysteria seem to come and go. Not just witches and preschool pedophiles but Paul McCartney is dead, there are worms in the McDonald's hamburgers, Satanists behind closed doors, conspiracies between internet predators, Satanic symbols in the Proctor & Gamble logo, figures in kid's TV cartoons who wear lavender clothes as a signal to the gay audience, speckled windshields in Seattle, phantom gassers in Matoon, Illinois. Some are damaging but silly. Others are far more dangerous: a horde of unaccounted for MIAs held captive in North Vietnam, and international conspiracy of Jews, a country taken over by a Kenyan-born communist president. And for too many of us, nothing seems able to shake our confidence in these mass delusions. If we haven't GOT any enemies we'll invent them. Maybe because we need bad examples in order to perceive ourselves as virtuous.Anyway, for all its weaknesses, the movie is definitely worth catching. The next epidemic of hysteria is right around the corner.

Because this is a TeeVee show (and produced by Oliver Stone) it is blunt. We are meant to get riled about the injustice of the thing. I did of course. Since the McMartin debacle, we had a similar trial near me, the Little Rascals scandal. Religious nuts came and briefed the local police on a global satanic society that performed ritual sacrifice and predictably shortly thereafter there were 429 charges of satanic abuse involving 20 adults and 90 kids.These included (seriously) infanticide, kidnapping by spaceship, torture by trained sharks and the accused included the local sheriff and mayor (who of course weren't charged). This movie glosses over the energy for the whole phenomenon that came from religious nuts who believe in devilworship.And inexplicably, it omits one of the funniest parts. Outraged parents were convinced of the secret devil-tunnels under the McMartin school so descended on it illegally to dig for them, so as to "expose" the conspiracy (which they thought the police were covering up!) and the satanic warren.Anyway, under that is a conventional trial movie. We like these because its a natural setup for storytelling and the untrusted narrator. We can, in these, easily see two realities: the real reality and the fabricated one (or maybe two) created as the truth in the courtroom. Usually the difference between the two is interesting in some way.As with the ordinary type, our lawyer is a scumbag who does something noble,This goes further, and I appreciated it. The conventional trial form has only one spinner of an alternate reality. This one had several: the evil cops, actually reduced to evil women. The "media" who spun the thing into hysteria. And the parents who unwittingly victimized their kids in making their own fears real.And finally we have the creator of false memories, played here by the underrated Lolita. That's a lot of fictionspinners in a story, so to keep it simple for TeeVee, they all reinforce each other in ever-expanding heights of the same fiction.James Woods is a master of timing but oddly that isn't used here except in one scene where in court he shows a video of a child being interviewed by the false memory implanter. The child squeaks a toy indicating no when asked about the abuse. She squeaks, he indicates "no." Its a great scene in an otherwise forgettable movie. Too bad.Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.