n006  0612  08 Oct 83
BC-SOV-FILM
By WALLACE TURNER
c. 1983 N.Y. Times News Service
    KANSAS CITY, Mo. - A year ago some Kansas City residents volunteered
to help a Soviet television crew to film a documentary about American
life. But when they saw the product three weeks ago, they were sorry.
    ''As well as I know this town, having been born here, as was my
father, I could not have put together a show that would demolish
Kansas City with the meanness of spirit they did,'' said Morton
Sosland, editor of Miller and Baking News, a trade publication.
    According to Sosland and others who have seen it, the film unfairly
depicts economic destitution, mistreatment of blacks and exploitation
by bankers and ''greedy capitalist beetles.'' It also asserts that
Harry S. Truman got votes by taking names from tombstones.
    The Soviet documentary is titled ''In the Middle of America.''
Sosland said he understood its potential audience in the Soviet bloc
and elsewhere was 250 million people.
    The film is not expected to be shown publicly in this country,
though parts of it will be broadcast on the ABC News television
program ''2020'' later this month. An ABC News production unit
brought an English-dubbed copy of the finished documentary here to
show to people who had been interviewed for it and to film their
reactions for use on the program.
    ''It is devastating,'' Sosland said. ''I have used the expression
that it is very sad for that many people to see something so twisted
and distorted.''
    He said that after an opening aerial view of Kansas City, the film
showed Fort Osage, a display recreating the pioneer era, while the
announcer said, in effect, ''This was a fort from which these people
stole the land from those noble Indians.''
    ''It was all downhill from there,'' Sosland said. In his judgment,
the treatment of Kansas City showed that Soviet leaders ''obviously
are stung by Mr. Reagan's attack that they are not moral, not
trustworthy and have no regard for human dignity.''
    ''They said over and over, 'This is a country that accuses us of
immorality,' '' he said.
    He said he had consented to take part in the interviews because he
wanted to promote his view that it was unwise of President Carter to
embargo grain sales to the Soviet Union and wise of President Reagan
to remove the embargo.
    He was interviewed on the steps leading into the trading pit at the
Kansas City Board of Trade. Sosland, who is 5 feet 10 inches tall,
said, ''I was amused that they asked me to stand a step lower so it
would appear that Valentin Zorin and I are about the same height.''
Zorin, an interviewer in the film, is a major figure in Soviet
television.
    Sosland said the finished documentary described the trading scene
behind them as full of ''greedy capitalist beetles.''
    He said that while almost all of what he said in the interview
concerned the grain embargo, the documentary never mentions that the
Soviet Union purchases grain from the United States.
    He said he was quoted as saying that American farmers were
destitute, which he called an overstatement of farming's economic
problems, and that farm prices were at their lowest in history, which
he said was untrue.
    He said the film emphasized mistreatment of black people, economic
hardship of the underprivileged and a system dominated by banks. Bank
signs flashed repeatedly on the screen, including one sign of
Coldwell Banker, the real estate company, which he took to be the
result of misunderstanding.
    Some of the scenes described as being in Kansas City were actually
in other cities, he said, such as one of a man pawing through a trash
barrel in Lafayette Park in Washington, with the White House visible
in the distance.
    The city's mayor, Richard Berkley, said he was ''very positive and
enthusiastic about Kansas City'' when he was questioned on camera. He
said this might explain why he did not appear in the film.
    Charles Colborne, a student at the Kansas City campus of the
University of Missouri, said he was one of eight students questioned
on camera. He did not appear in the documentary. No one said he was
misquoted, he said, ''but we were misrepresented.''
    Anne Canfield manages Prime Time, an agency of the Chamber of
Commerce, which helped the Soviet reporters and camera crew last
year. She said the crew interviewed workers at Armco Steel Co. on a
work day and then returned on Sunday to get film that made the plant
look closed and abandoned. This was used to support the theme that
Kansas City workers spend most waking hours worrying about losing
their jobs.
    Miss Canfield said she was asked to suggest a cemetery where wealthy
people were buried. This turned out to be a part of the attack on the
late President Truman, who was a county official here and then a
United States senator from Missouri.
    Sosland said the film said that Truman was elected because of votes
from the names on tombstones and that he was in his home in
Independence, a suburb, when he decided to use nuclear bombs against
Japan in 1945.
    ''They showed his house and said, ''This is where this terrible man
lived,' '' Sosland said. ''Then they showed his tombstone and pointed
out that it only carries the dates of service in offices he held, and
then they said, 'See, no one had anything good to say about him.' ''
    
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