By Erin Free
In this regular column, we drag forgotten made-for-TV movies out of the vault and into the light. This week: the 1980 true life drama Scared Straight! Another Story, starring Cliff De Young, Stan Shaw, William Sanderson, Tony Burton, Randy Brooks, Terri Nunn and Eric Laneauville.
On November 2, 1978, the 52-minute documentary Scared Straight! blazed its way onto American TV screens, its confrontational subject matter and foul language scandalising audiences and prompting a ratings windfall. Directed by reality TV vet Arnold Shapiro and narrated by Columbo himself, Peter Falk, Scared Straight! documented the titular social programme, which saw a group of teenage delinquents shipped into New Jersey’s Rahway State Prison for a three-hour session with a crew of hardened “lifers.” The session largely involved the lifers yelling at and berating the teens about their life choices and giving them a gruesome snapshot of what awaits them in prison, which pretty much boils down to sodomy and brutalisation.
The documentary shocked audiences with its frank language and confrontational discussion of prison rape and violence, but also received great acclaim, even winning an Oscar for Best Feature Documentary despite its 52-minute running time and the fact that it hadn’t even screened in cinemas. “I first read about the Rahway State Prison programme in Reader’s Digest Magazine in 1978,” Arnold Shapiro told Crime + Investigation. “After further research, I determined that it was a positive, effective programme to help deter at-risk teens from further criminal acts; and that it would make a powerful documentary that could influence viewers and other prisons that might consider starting similar programs. It did achieve both my goals. I created the title, Scared Straight, for the film, but now most of these programs are referred to as ‘scared straight’ programmes. The name has become iconic.”
Arnold Shapiro also created something of a cottage industry out of the Scared Straight! doco, creating two follow-up programmes in Scared Straight! 10 Years Later (1987) and Scared Straight! 20 Years Later (1999), which tracked the subsequent lives of the prisoners and teenagers who had featured in the original doco. In 2011, Shapiro created Beyond Scared Straight, a TV series with each weekly installment concentrating on a different “scared straight”-style prison programme in different parts of the US.
In 1980, Shapiro took a different tack and shaped the “scared straight” concept into a small screen drama, with telemovie vet Richard Michaels directing with impressive force from a punchy script by T.S Cook (a co-writer on the 1979 classic The China Syndrome, along with a host of TV movies, including We’re Fighting Back), which very much uses the original doco as a blueprint. The resultant telemovie Scared Straight! Another Story is an impressively gritty work, driven by rich characters, solid performances and surprisingly aggressive dialogue, with no F-bombs but plenty of N-words.
In this version of events, the teens are led to Rahway State Prison by social worker Paul (Cliff De Young in a typically energetic and full-throttle performance), who pushes hard to make a difference. His charges are a varied lot, with the main focus primed upon three African-American teens: insolent tough guy Smash (now busy voice actor Donald Fullilove, who also featured in Back To The Future), the more thoughtful Sam (Randy Brooks, later Tim Roth’s handler in Reservoir Dogs), and the vulnerable James (Eric Laneauville, who would feature in St. Elsewhere). The trio also happen to be under the thrall of flashy, Fagin-like drug pusher Doctor (Nathan Cook), which makes Paul’s job even harder.
Also on Paul’s books are lovebirds Rak (the likeable John Hammond) and Lucy (the highly engaging Terri Nunn, who nearly played Princess Leia in Star Wars and later fronted the pop group Berlin of “Take My Breath Away” fame), whose fondness for drugs has landed them in trouble with the law.
The real juice of Scared Straight! Another Story, however, comes with the group’s trips to Rahway State Prison. Here, character actors Stan Shaw, William Sanderson and Tony Burton are really let off the leash as the hardened prison lifers, hurling abuse and invective at the petrified teenagers with extraordinary levels of laser-focused rage. Their characters all draw from horribly over-stacked wells of pain, anger, guilt and grief, and the actors are all extraordinary, truly inhabiting these men, and tossing out hard-edged prison lingo like they’ve been speaking it their whole lives. The desperation of these damaged men to force a little change in a cruel and unfeeling system is both affirming and heartbreaking.
Sure, times have changed, but Scared Straight! Another Story retains its pressure-cooker power, and works as an effective cautionary tale indeed. And if you want to see a trio of gifted and supremely underrated character actors really fucking bringing it, this is exactly where you want to be.
Availability: Scared Straight! Another Story is very easy to find online, but it’s unfortunately not in very good shape.
