Mission unstoppable. In the age of ever-softening broadcast news, HBO’s hard-core documentary series America Undercover is a dose of reality raw. Its graphic chronicles of prostitution, our festering penal system, the death penalty and more have served up what’s ugly but true _ the social foul-ups we’d rather forget. There’s also the voyeuristic thrill of walking the bad side for a night.
Tonight, America Undercover brings us yet another painful conundrum with “Calling Dr. Kevorkian: A Date With Dr. Death,” about suicide, suffering and the right to die. More understated than most Undercovers, the one-hour program discusses Michigan physician Jack Kevorkian’s controversial crusade to help terminally ill and suffering patients kill themselves with his “self-execution” machine. It includes an interview with Kevorkian, who typically shuns the media _ although his much-publicized trials for murder and assisted suicide, now a crime in Michigan, have made his name synonymous with death.
“It’s very difficult to guess his state of mind,” Gianfranco Norelli said of Kevorkian from New York.
Norelli served as producer on “A Date With Dr. Death,” a co-production with Britain’s Channel Four, with Joanna Head as producer-director. In 1995, Norelli produced a separate documentary, “Dr. Death,” for German television. He also produced documentaries on the former Soviet Union for long-running BBC series Panorama.
“By nature Kevorkian likes to surprise and shock people,” Norelli said. “That’s a trait of people who are ahead of their time on certain problems _ although I’m not at all saying he has the right answers. But he is a very passionate, articulate, intelligent man.”
It took “months and months” to coax Kevorkian into an interview for “A Date With Dr. Death.” And there were no payments or pre-conditions.
“I can’t think of anyone less interested in money,” Norelli said. In fact, Kevorkian lives rent-free in a house owned by his lawyer, Geoffrey Fieger, on $600 a month from Social Security.
“This is the most important thing in his life, and he believes in it 100 percent,” Norelli said of the controversial right to die. “I think we got the interview because he thought my German television documentary was more fair and balanced than some American programs that were done before. He felt the American media didn’t look at the issue [of suicide) with enough depth _ although eventually our HBO documentary [which aired in England in April) was also criticized by Kevorkian. He said we only focused on his most critical cases.”
Those cases play out agonizingly in “A Date With Dr. Death.” Often the documentary looks like a personal diary from hell. It includes anguished videos of the patients’ last days, made by their families. There is also footage from videos made by Kevorkian of his patients’ last wishes _ to prove their deaths were suicides. And there are soul-tugging talks with patients’ relatives.
You will see the last days of Linda Henslee, who killed herself in January 1996. Henslee suffered terribly from multiple sclerosis and was unable to live independently. She died in what her daughters call “a stranger’s house” in Michigan.
On the way into the house, Kevorkian insisted on carrying Henslee _ and dropped her. Henslee’s collapsed veins stymied Kevorkian’s suicide machine _ a contraption turned on when the patient flicks a switch, activating the injection of three fluids that cause coma, heart muscle paralysis and death. It took Henslee eight minutes to die instead of the 30 seconds Kevorkian had told her.
Still, who decides who must live _ to suffer _ and who may die?
“You can clearly see in the tapes that these people articulate their wish to die in a very clear manner,” Norelli said. “One was paralyzed for over 15 years but she was obviously mentally competent. Her daughter didn’t want her mother to commit suicide, but she felt it would have been selfish to influence her.
“Death is an issue everyone has to face in life. Kevorkian is only a catalyst.”
