From ‘Knot’s Landing’ to Pandora’s Box

Sit down if you want a look,” says Pippa Scott. Then the 64-year-old former actress matter-of-factly presents her index of hell. Click on the computer icon, enter “prison camps,” “torture,” “ethnic cleansing” or “rape,” and Scott’s database will tell you where, amid hundreds of hours of documentary videotape, to find the relevant footage. You will learn of a European news special featuring testimony from doctors who performed abortions on Bosnian women impregnated by marauding Serbs; of a British TV report in which shellshocked survivors describe their treatment in Serbian concentration camps; of a taped interview with a Serbian soldier who graphically details raping and killing Muslim women and explains how he learned to slit people’s throats by practicing on pigs.

The immediate impulse of a lay viewer confronting the human brutality Scott has so neatly and precisely laid out here is to howl in anguish. But in 1994, members of the first international war crimes tribunal assembled since World War II had a rather different response. They were gathered at The Hague to tackle the complex task of determining whether war crimes had been committed in the Bosnian conflict, and, if so, by whom. Videotape was crucial to the investigation, but the tape was a logistical nightmare, a 600-hour mire of footage, some valuable, some irrelevant.

Then suddenly--improbably--here was Scott, a Brentwood woman with flame-colored hair, a Hollywood past, and a stunning computer tool that promised to change everything.

*

It’s 5:30 P.M., and the break between day and night schedule is the only time Scott’s free to talk. “I’m always working,” she says with both satisfaction and weariness, looking around a small conference room whose bookshelves are packed with videotape. In the four years since making such an impression at the Hague, Scott has expanded her efforts and created a permanent research library in Westwood. By its own definition, the International Monitor Institute serves as “the world’s audiovisual conscience.” Open to researchers, activists, academics, TV networks and journalists, it is probably the only such archive in existence, a meticulously indexed collection of film, photos, videos and audiotapes that document genocide and human rights abuses around the globe, exposing and preserving what some governments, political parties and ethnic factions would rather we forget.

The institute’s bland, anonymously modern offices on Wilshire are an unlikely repository of the world’s misery. Scott herself seems an even more unlikely steward. She is tall, with high, wide cheekbones and slightly slanting eyes. She dresses simply but expensively and speaks with a musical voice that hints at her past: as a college student she played a pioneer teenager slaughtered by Comanches in John Ford’s classic “The Searchers.” At 21 she won a Broadway lead and later appeared in an ongoing role in the TV series “The Virginian.” Even now, she regularly describes people as “fabulous”--a breathless, show-biz touch that probably echoes the years she spent married to Hollywood executive Lee Rich, with whom she helped found, then run, the enormously successful Lorimar Productions.

Scott still lives well, in a Richard Neutra house she renovated from a neglected wreck to what a friend calls “an island of perfection.” And she maintains a production company, Linden Productions, through which she hopes to reenter the commercial entertainment world. (Last May, the PBS series “Frontline” aired a documentary Scott produced on Serbian leader and indicted war criminal Radovan Karadzic.)

But it is the institute that consumes her now. It is still indexing footage from Bosnia, and for a second tribunal investigating the 1994 mass murders of Tutsis in Rwanda. It is also expanding its focus rapidly, creating fledgling archives devoted to conflict in Myanmar, Iraq, Ethiopia and the Congo. Recently, Scott hired the director of the Cambodian Genocide Project at Yale to open an office on the East Coast and help the institute begin covering Southeast Asia. Scott has already added a rare interview with Pol Pot (done in the mid-’70s by a Yugoslavian news team) and a collection of interviews with Cambodian survivors of his regime to the archive.

When Scott’s not in Westwood, you can find her in Kigali, Vientiane, Bangkok, London, Washington, D.C., or New York, endlessly plying connections that might bring in new footage. Collecting this material--”film-finding” in institute terms--is a profoundly labor-intensive process of sniffing out, contacting and cajoling on a global scale. The institute gets its film from a sweeping variety of sources, including armies, police, human rights workers, networks and journalists, all of whom must be persuaded to turn over copies of what they have for the greater good. “We try to get material from both sides,” says Scott. “And not just war footage--anything that can deepen people’s understanding of what the hell happened.”

Now that the institute is becoming known, sources sometimes come to Scott: Human rights workers have provided shots of villages in Myanmar being destroyed, pleading, “Do something with this!” And a steady stream of young filmmakers shows up at the office. “Would you like to see my tape?” they beg. “Can you put it on your Web site?” Others remain more wary. “There’s a photographer whose work I’d love to have, but he’s very elusive, so I’m romancing him,” Scott says. “It’s not very different from show business, you know.”

The equally painstaking task of viewing, translating and indexing new footage is done by the institute’s small, eclectic staff, who hold degrees in fields like philosophy and comparative literature, and speak (among other languages) Kurdish, Kinyarwandan, Arabic, Hungarian and Serbo-Croatian. They seem constantly at work, parked before computers, headsets on and faces absolutely impassive as they view scenes that range from neutral shots of generals exhorting troops to devastating, bloody carnage: a man mowed down by sniper fire, a woman screaming as she raises a mangled limb.

This businesslike detachment is hard won. Institute director Anne Harringer’s previous job was in the promotions department at 20th Century Fox. She walked in her first morning at the institute to face footage of naked corpses. By the third day, she had fled the office in tears and ended up pacing Wilshire, staring at passing motorists. All she could think, she remembers, was “Don’t you people know?”

The reality of what they’re documenting has gotten to all of the institute staffers at one time or another, and several years ago, Scott hired an expert on genocide and post-traumatic stress disorder to hold group therapy sessions in the office. Ultimately, Scott says, “each person finds what he or she can handle.” Still, it is understood that everyone will “lose it” from time to time. Scott herself, for instance, “absolutely can’t deal with footage in which someone is killed on camera.”

“A fascinating riddle about Pippa is how she’s been able to do what she’s done,” says New Yorker writer Lawrence Weschler, a longtime friend. “Another is how, in doing it, she hasn’t gone crazy.”

An even more intriguing question about Scott, however, is why she chose the difficult, ill-paid and emotionally wrenching world of human rights work at all. She herself doesn’t know or won’t say, offering only this clue: “One of the themes of my life--it’s there in the projects I’ve optioned, the stories I’ve wanted to tell, the people to whom I’ve been attracted--has been a fascination with refugees.”

*

Phillippa Scott is the daughter of Allan Scott, who authored scripts for most of the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers films of the 1930s, and Laura Straub, a highly cultured former actress. She came of age in a rarefied, privileged world. The enormous parcel of land her parents owned at the top of Laurel Canyon was a seemingly endless stretch of trees and brush, the perfect place for a shy, overweight little girl who felt “madly ugly” to read and roam. At night, the family home was filled with the fast, clever talk of a glittering crowd--screenwriters, actors, the editor and critic Malcolm Cowley, artists, including Rufino Tamayo, and her uncle, Adrian Scott, a writer and acclaimed producer. Then in 1947, when Scott was 13, the House Unamerican Activities Committee began hearings into alleged Communist infiltration of the motion picture industry, and her uncle became one of the Hollywood Ten for refusing to talk.

He spent a year in jail and his Hollywood career was destroyed. Scott’s father, though never a Communist Party member, was “blacklisted by association,” and the onetime Academy Award nominee was reduced to working under pseudonyms. “My parents became terribly depressed, and I didn’t know what was happening, just that I couldn’t help them. There was the sense that things were spinning out of control.” A blackness settled over the family. The money dried up. “The life I’d known died,” says Scott quietly. And she learned an unforgettable lesson. It was, she says: “Don’t speak up. Don’t join. Don’t see. Don’t stand up for people. Don’t care--it can hurt you.”

By the 1950s, Scott had bloomed into a woman of passion and clear, if restless, intelligence. She attended Radcliffe, UCLA and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, but never graduated from any of them. (In her early forties, she returned to school to study architecture--but didn’t get that degree, either.) But the “madly ugly” little girl had also blossomed into what a college friend calls “one of the most ravishingly beautiful women you’ll ever see,” and she set off on a successful New York acting career. In 1960, when she was 28, she married Lee Rich, head of programming for advertising giant Benton & Bowles. He was 15 years older, driven and ambitious, and by 1969, when Scott was pregnant with their second child, the two had moved back to California and, with Merv Adelson, founded Lorimar Productions.

By 1980, hits like “The Waltons,” “Dallas” and “Knot’s Landing” were generating grosses of more than $150 million, and the now aptly named Rich family had moved from Westwood to ever grander mansions in Beverly Hills and Malibu. And to some extent, Pippa Scott began to disappear.

As she aged, her market value as an actress declined. Old friends fell away as her social life came to revolve around those with whom her husband was working--moneymen, show business power brokers and their wives, people for whom she held a certain contempt. “They were not real friends,” she says. “I wasn’t interested in going out to lunch and looking chic and buying clothes.”

What did interest her was the business of making movies and TV shows. Scott says she introduced her husband to the novel that became “The Waltons,” and that she continued to scout for other properties and to make notes used in casting sessions and story conferences. Hundreds of dinner table conversations with her father had taught her what made a script work, she says, but she was both uncredited and unpaid. “It was known that she was working behind the scenes,” says actress Michael Learned, who starred in “The Waltons” and became a friend. “But her role was being the one who gave the parties, who entertained and made people feel comfortable.”

“That was part of being a dutiful wife,” Scott says now. “You do it for your husband, so you don’t want credit. You want it all to accrue to him.” Then, in 1981, she was abruptly forced into another exile. For reasons Scott refuses to discuss, Lee Rich filed for divorce. Lorimar was sold, leaving Scott extremely wealthy but adrift. She was, she says, aimless, confused and snubbed by the Hollywood elite she’d made no effort to please. In 1982 she fled with her younger daughter to New York. “I was terrified. Absolutely lost. It was three or four years before I could stop bleeding,” she says quietly. “There was a great clot of pain in the middle of my stomach, and it was pure grief: Grief over the marriage, grief over the fact that we weren’t a family anymore, grief that I wasn’t sure I could be strong enough for my daughters so that they wouldn’t feel the pain, too. It was a cruel time.”

When the emotional hemorrhaging finally stopped, Scott tried to get into film and TV production on her own, but since everything she’d done for Lorimar had been off the record, she lacked credibility. The Los Angeles office she opened ended up making infomercials for products such as Thigh Master.

Then, in 1991, Mary Anne Schwalbe, an old college friend who had become director of the international Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children, persuaded Scott to make a series of short documentaries showing conditions in refugee camps. Schwalbe says that the films, used by the commission to lobby for policy change, helped Scott “believe again in her own intelligence and ability.” But she also saw them as “just something to do”--until late 1993, when she made her first fact-finding trip to the Balkans.

It was a brutal historical moment. Serbian nationalists, in their campaign of “ethnic cleansing,” had wounded, raped or killed tens of thousands of Bosnian Muslims and driven hundreds of thousands more from their homes. Scott, whose post-divorce home was an Upper East Side penthouse, now found herself touring Croatian refugee camps, where families lived in tents a foot deep in water that the winter air sometimes turned to ice. Women wept as they told of being separated from children or husbands now surely dead. Scott explored besieged Sarajevo in a flak jacket, filming bombed-out hospitals and interviewing survivors with a video camera, a risky act in a place where anything small and black might be taken for a gun. “The place was a meltdown,” she says. “All night long there were snipers at work.”

The flood of war-zone adrenaline and accumulation of terrible stories produced a seismic inner shift. “The trip was heartbreaking, life changing,” she says. “It was . . . .”

Scott stops abruptly. The affluence of West L.A. makes the frozen tent cities of the Balkans seem almost unimaginable. But they remain clear to Scott. Her eyes fill.

“That people could live that badly, be treated that badly and other people didn’t see it, or know about it . . . . For days, I couldn’t stop sobbing,” she says. “And these were a very different kind of tears than those I’d cried over my divorce.”

In Bosnia, Scott confronted “careerists filled with doublespeak, who didn’t give a damn about anything as long as they stayed in power.” The juxtaposition of such callousness with such suffering filled her with something else: political rage. This newfound driving force in her life gained focus soon after she returned to the United States and was put in touch with Cherif Bassiouni, an eminent professor of international law at DePaul University in Chicago. Bassiouni chaired a U.N. Security Council commission that was gathering information about events in the former Yugoslavia--a necessary first step to a war crimes tribunal. He promptly escorted Scott into a huge room filled with videotaped film and news reports in half a dozen languages, all of which somehow had to be systematically organized to be usable.

“Because of my show business background, I knew immediately I could help,” says Scott. “I said, ‘We edit movies on computers now. We can use computers to take them apart.’ ” Within nine months, she and her production manager had cobbled existing software into a program that arranged the films in searchable databases. She hired a staff to begin using the new tool, and with Bassiouni, made two more data-collecting trips to Central Europe, where their discoveries included stunning footage of the Bosnian Serb military rounding up Muslim men just before the 1995 massacre of more than 7,000 at Srebrenica.

About the time the footage was being turned over to the tribunal, Scott had an idea. Since most of the film was publicly broadcast material, why not keep copies, and form a permanent research library? “It outraged me--outraged me--that there were rewriters of the Holocaust,” she says. “I thought well, it’s jolly hard to rewrite this history when you have thousands of hours of it on film.”

“Using pictures, via computer, to help identify victims, witnesses and perpetrators is an important move forward,” says Bassiouni. Also key--especially as the world struggles toward the creation of a permanent international criminal court--is the fact that the indexes often address a central problem facing war crimes prosecutors: how to pin down culpability. If, for instance, a military unit sends a mortar round into a completely civilian area, who should be held responsible for the resulting deaths? That nation’s president? The head of its army? The man who fired the fatal shots? If, however, there is TV footage of a local political leader saying proudly that he gave the orders to shoot, you may well have a case. “It certainly speeded up our work,” says Richard Goldstone, former chief prosecutor for the Yugoslavia tribunal. “I’ve no doubt that any future prosecutor working along these lines would consider it an essential tool.”

By the time Scott demonstrated the new system for prosecutors at The Hague, the work had changed from job to calling. Delighted prosecutors asked Scott to continue her efforts. Soon additional tapes collected by the court began arriving in her Los Angeles office to be broken down. Word of the system got out, and within a year, Scott and her associates were working for the tribunal investigating the Rwanda killings as well.

Neither of the tribunals was able to pay her. And although various foundations fund her work, Scott has had to dip into her private fortune--she won’t say how much.

“She has been utterly selfless in the way she’s gone about this work,” says Aryeh Neier, president of financier George Soros’ Open Society, a foundation that has supported the institute. “It has been the antithesis of glory-seeking.”

It seems impossible to find anyone in the human rights field who speaks of Scott in less than glowing terms. Graham Blewitt, deputy chief prosecutor at the Yugoslavia tribunal, praises her as “remarkable.” Richard Trank, director of media projects for the Museum of Tolerance, goes for “amazing.” To independent photographer Martin Sugarman, who has documented conflict in Kashmir, the Balkans, Pakistan and Palestine, her gift of a no-strings-attached check to finance trips to Tibet and East Timor “told me there is a God after all. In over eight years of working in the human rights field, this was the first time anyone offered to assist with hard cash.”

Scott shrugs off the compliments. She takes great pride in what she’s done. But she is without illusions. The last hundred years, after all, have witnessed the mass murders of Armenians, Jews, Muslims, Russians, Cambodians and Tutsis. The institute’s Balkan archives are starting to grow again, with footage from Kosovo. No mere piece of film, however great its power, seems strong enough to stop the butchery. But that, emphasizes Scott, isn’t the point.

“It took 50 years before the Holocaust came home to lots of people. Meanwhile, it seems that my job is to get the material in so it isn’t lost. So it isn’t destroyed. And so it can’t be denied.

“Do you remember what I said about my first trips to the refugee camps? That I was stunned that so many terrible things were going on and people weren’t able to see?

“Well,” she says, “Now they can.”