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By Gerard Wright in Los Angeles
April 5 2003





As surely as an echo follows a gunshot, the phone calls have started.

"There's been some talk with the networks about their interest in doing this story," Larry Sanitsky, an independent television producer said yesterday.

"This story" is the dramatic rescue by commandos of Private Jessica Lynch from an Iraqi hospital, this week.

Within the larger, unfinished panorama of the invasion of Iraq, Jessica Lynch's experience is a small, vividly-coloured, all-American highlight. The daughter of a self-employed truck driver, Lynch joined the army to pay for the university education she could not otherwise have afforded.

That she is a blonde, attractive 19-year-old from a tiny hill town in West Virginia only enhances the story.

"It's the story about this ordinary woman who gets into extraordinary circumstances," Mr Sanitsky said. "There's an heroic, happy outcome. It's the best of the American spirit: ingenuity and heroism that results in a happy ending."

It's a pitch that Mr Sanitsky is familiar with: he made one very similar himself, as the producer of a made-for-TV movie of the rescue of nine Pennsylvania coal miners from a submerged cavern in July last year.

The miners, trapped for 77 hours, sold the television and publishing rights to their story for $US1.5 million ($2.49 million). Mr Sanitsky's was the successful bid.

The same process was played out in Salt Lake City, Utah, three weeks ago, when 15-year-old Elizabeth Smart, missing for nine months after being kidnapped and "married" to a self-proclaimed fundamentalist Mormon, was found. The problem for Smart, her family and their many eager Hollywood suitors, is that as the more sordid details of her kidnapping emerged, the less attractive the story became to mainstream America.

"With Elizabeth Smart, there's a very difficult and unseemly part of the story that they don't want told in order for her to heal," Mr Sanitsky said. "The miners' rescue story was one of tremendous bonding and heroism and a community coming together against all odds. The Jessica Lynch story is probably closer to that than the Elizabeth Smart story."

Mr Sanitsky believes that the Jessica Lynch story is worth about $US300,000 ($500,000) to $US400,000.

"If only one network wants it, it's worth less than if three networks want it. It's a function of the market place - how big a movie they think it is."

Jessica Lynch had been a very dedicated soldier, Mr Sanitsky said. "Ultimately, when this experience is over, and if there is an economic benefit to her, I don't see that as problematic."

Mr Sanitsky believes if there is any hesitation on the part of the networks, it is to see how the Iraq war is resolved.

"If the war were to drag on for a long time, I don't think that it would be done as a TV movie or feature film."

But if a network was wavering, there might be one other factor that could see Jessica Lynch's rescue transformed into entertainment.

"If someone that they normally couldn't get wanted to do it, like Jennifer Aniston," Mr Sanitsky suggested, "that would make it different."