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 LA Weekly September 5 - 11, 1997 Making Waco Apocalypse Then and Now by Paul Malcolm  The chilling new documentary "Waco: The
Rules of Engagement" blows serious holes in almost everything the
mainstream media and government told us about what went down in the early
months of 1993 when federal agents laid siege to the Branch Davidian retreat
outside of Waco, Texas,and why, when it was all over, 80 people were dead. As the film methodically unfolds its evidence, including eyewitness accounts, infrared surveillance footage, Davidian home movies, and congressional testimony, an excoriating picture emerges that suggests how The Big Lie and The Big Stick worked with alarming reciprocity to grossly deny the Davidians their civil liberties. Ever since April 19, even before the specter of Oklahoma City and Timothy McVeigh, to propose that something went wrong at Waco has been to risk being labeled a militia-movement supporter or a conspiracy-addled kook or both. The people behind "The Rules of Engagement" are neither. And although left-leaning in their politics, they aren't filmmaker/activists in the crusading tradition of Barbara Kopple and Michael Moore. It's safe to say, in fact, that two and a half years and $1 million ago, the film's production team had no idea what it was getting into.  "It looked like a quick-in,
quick-out project," says Dan Gifford, who in 1995, along with his
wife, Amy Sommer-Gifford, agreed to produce the film as a one-hour television
documentary after meeting with Michael McNulty, a Colorado radio talk-show
host. McNulty showed the Giffords infrared footage taken by the Federal
Bureau of Investigation during their final raid that seemed to show not
only that the inferno was the result of FBI negligence, but that agents
had fired on Davidians who tried to escape the blaze.Both Giffords are veteran news reporters--he for ABC and CNN, she for "A Current Affair"-- who left journalism in the early '90s to produce true-life movies-of-the-week. Like most of us, they watched the events at Waco unfold from their living room never questioning the Justice Department's explanation of what happened. "On the heels of Jim Jones," says Gifford, "a mass suicide and a bunch of crazies was entirely plausible." The real turning point for the Giffords came when McNulty and William Gazecki, a sound engineer brought on to direct the documentary, came across some home movies shot by the Davidians during the siege with a camcorder provided by the FBI. (The agency had kept the videos under wraps, fearing they would create public sympathy for Koresh and his followers.) "[The Davidians] were all well-spoken and they weren't obviously demented," says Gifford. "We started going, 'Wait a minute, there's something wrong here, this is not what we were told these people were like,'" Realizing that there was more to the story than they'd originally thought, the Giffords and Gazecki decided to expand the project into a feature-length theatrical film.  But as the film's scope increased, so too did Gifford's
concern over how people would react to it. "We were very aware that
this group and Koresh had been thoroughly vilified," he says. "We
were very much aware that we were going to be very vulnerable to getting
slammed as pro-militia, pro-child abuse, pro-whatever." That McVeigh's
defense team had tried and failed to enter the completed film as evidence
during the sentencing phase of his trial did little to calm Gifford's
fears.Accordingly, Gifford re-edited the film against Gazecki's wishes after it premiered at Sundance in January. In paring the running time back from 165 minutes to a more marketable 136, the producer feels his cut is a more balanced account and less open to charges of "heating this thing too high." Gazecki, who hasn't spoken with the Giffords in months, claims there's little difference between the two versions but that he's upset about how the changes were made. "he turned into a classic executive producer," Gazecki says. Regardless, the film packs a powerful punch. Since Sundance, "The Rules of Engagement" has played in over a dozen major cities across the country, sparking renewed debate over the government's role in the tragedy. Much to the filmmakers' dismay, most of the discussion has been limited to the arts sections of daily papers, with hardly any publications approaching the film from a hard-news angle. As to whether the film plays into the hands of the militia movement, Sommer-Gifford asks, "Since when did questioning authority become the absolute purview of the lunatic right?" © 1997 LA Weekly |