That scene alone is enough to answer the obvious question: do we really need another Anne Frank production? Yes, we do. “Anne Frank” is a revelation, the kind of movie that makes you wonder if we ever really knew Anne at all. It’s the first film to look at the complete young woman, from her carefree childhood before the Nazi occupation to her brutal final days. It can be tough to watch–ABC is recommending parental supervision of children under 14 for the second night–but that’s in large part because we come to know Anne so deeply. With the remarkable Hannah Taylor Gordon as Anne, she’s a more complicated heroine–brilliant but arrogant, pretty but vain, brave but petty–than some Frank-ophiles may be ready to see. In fact, the movie has already kicked up some controversy. The Anne Frank Foundation in Switzerland, which controls the copyright to the diary, was so disturbed by a warts-and-all portrait of its shiny, happy Anne that it wouldn’t allow ABC to use any of her printed words. It doesn’t matter. “Anne Frank” the miniseries has a proud voice all its own.
Still, it’s strange to do an Anne Frank movie and not use a single syllable from her, isn’t it? The foundation, which has threatened to sue ABC over copyright infringement, has called the prospect of a diary-free movie “immoral.” Its argument convinced Steven Spielberg, who quit as the film’s executive producer after the foundation sent him a letter of protest. “I asked him to retreat from the project because it is a very delicate business, and he did so honorably,” says foundation president Bernd Elias, who is also Anne’s first cousin. That didn’t stop ABC. In fact, Melissa Muller, who wrote the 1998 biography on which the miniseries is based, says the diary’s written language wouldn’t work as dialogue. Besides, the whole point of ABC’s movie is to show us the Anne we haven’t seen or heard before. “Anne Frank is not her diary,” says Kirk Ellis, who wrote the movie’s screenplay. “They are two separate entities that have become intertwined. It was time to pull them apart a little.”
Sometimes the miniseries pulls away from the diary a little too much. Wasn’t it raining the day the Franks went into hiding? Weren’t the attic’s curtains made from a patchwork of scraps, rather than lace? The biggest revision comes when the movie shows Lena van Bladeren Hartog, a cleaning woman in Otto Frank’s office, ratting on the family. No one has ever fingered a specific informant before. “I looked at the old police reports. I talked to Miep [Gies, one of the Franks’ protectors]. There is a credible chain of events to suspect Lena Hartog,” says Ellis. Still, while the movie generally sticks to the historical record, ABC concedes that facts aren’t everything. Says Ellis: “Jacqueline van Maarsen [one of Anne’s friends] said to me when she found out we would be shooting in Prague instead of Amsterdam, ‘That’s not important to me. What’s important is that the people are right’.” At last, Anne Frank has come out of the attic and into the light.
Anne FrankMay 20 and 21 ABC
