Producers in Los Angeles are putting the finishing touches on a movie that has all the makings of a great drama: power, money, greed, corruption, the legal system, politics, envy and, of course, fleeting feminine beauty. Starting June 16, the Lifetime cable network will begin broadcasting "Two Small Voices," which chronicles the controversy over silicone gel breast implants. Actresses Mary McDonnell and Gail O'Grady portray Sybil Goldrich and Kathleen Anneken, real-life activists who waged a nearly decade long publicity and legal war against Dow Corning and other implant makers.
Cecil B. DeMille once said that he could produce an epic motion picture from a single page of the Bible. If only he'd lived to see the breast implant saga. Approximately two million women have implants, but because of questions about the products' safety, and the host of infirmities the women and their lawyers blamed on them, the Food and Drug Administration banned them in 1992. Massive litigation followed, and in 1994 Dow Corning agreed to a $4.25 billion settlement of implant-related class-action suits.
Both sides in the implant case view the controversy in stark terms: The plaintiffs believe they're fighting against an evil corporation that failed to warn them about the risks of implants, and that will stop at nothing for a profit. The manufacturers see it as a case of plaintiffs' lawyers using junk science to enrich themselves and force the company into bankruptcy. Guess which version TV opted to portray.
The executive producer of "Two Small Voices," Freyda Rothstein, started her career working for "Search for Tomorrow" and "Love of Life"; she has since produced such made-for-TV movies as ABC's "Betrayed: A Story of Three Women." In 1985, Ms. Rothstein paid the Legion of Doom, a group of teenage Texas vigilantes accused of several dozen incidents of violence- and that had adopted the swastika as its symbol-for the TV rights to its story. In the late '80s, Ms. Goldrich showed Ms. Rothstein a book manuscript she had written about the "deeply personal process of [breast] reconstruction" following a mastectomy and asked her if it could be made into a movie. Realizing their story's dramatic potential, Ms. Rothstein paid Ms. Goldrich and Ms. Anneken for the TV rights.
Ms. Rothstein then hired Jim Macak to write the script for "Two Small Voices." Mr. Macak admits that at first he "had a lot of doubts about taking on the project," especially in the wake of polls that showed, prior to the explosion in breast-implant litigation, that more than 90% of women with implants were satisfied with them. More bothersome still were the numerous scien tific studies that failed to find any evidence that implants cause connective-tissue, autoimmune or other diseases that critics allege.
It was only after "many hours of conversation" with Ms. Goldrich and Ms. Anneken, Mr. Macak says, that he decided he was dealing with one of the great coverups of our time. "We're trying to spotlight two very determined, extraordinary women and their battle against corporate America,"he says. "In my mind, the real perpetrators of junk science were officials at Dow Corning and other implant industries."
In fact, from the inception of "Two Small Voices," the debate over whether implants are respon sible for any illnesses has never been the focus. Ms. Rothstein says the message is simple: "You can make a difference if you make a noise. There's a line in the show that says, 'If these were penile implants, maybe it would have gotten more attention.' It's the story of two women, raising your voice for a cause you care very much about, and effecting some change."
That change doesn't bear much scrutiny. Even though breast implants were never shown to cause health problems, Dow Corning was forced into bankruptcy. Ms. Anneken doesn't deny that "Two Small Voices" plays fast and loose with such facts: "Actually, a lot is left out so that it becomes fairly inaccurate, but I think the message it gets across is the right one."
In one of the most telling scenes, Ms. Goldrich's character, who has become increasingly outspoken about what she believes are the dangers of implants, suspects that someone has ransacked her Washington hotel room, and the garbage cans outside her California home. Her husband suggests these two events might be the work of a hotel maid, and a neighborhood dog. But Ms. Goldrich's character sees something more sinister at work. "You don't think it's a bit coincidental?" she says. "How do these guys at Dow Corning steep at night?"
Ms. Anneken says such scenes are largely fictitious, all part of the movie's dramatic license: "That's sort of a made up way to say, 'We thought we were being watched.' " The implication is, of course, that corporate thugs are behind it all. "We were worried that we'd be killed," she says. "I thought we would be killed. You saw the movie 'Silkwood'?"-the story of a self-styled whistle-blower at a plutonium plant whose death in a car accident activists called murder. "That sort of thing."
Critics may say these people have been spending too much time at the movies. But "that sort of thing," boosted by the power of television, shapes the national consciousness-an unfortunate but undeniable fact of our age. And just as regrettably, Hollywood shows no signs of losing interest in such tales. Casting is about to begin on "The Silicone Wars," an HBO movie about the two Houston plastic surgeons who invented silicone-gel implants. The movie's writer, John Stockwell, says it will dramatize "a good deal of shoddy negligence."
Producers like Ms. Rothstein have taught us a lot about how to keep the facts out of the way of a "true" story. Perhaps the strangest thing about "Two Small Voices" is that the breast-implants drama needed no embellishment-none, that is, if it were to be told as it happened.
Mr. Meroney is a writer in Washington.