good evening. i'm anderson cooper. tonight cnn is bringing you a special presentation, a series of all-new cnn film shorts, documentary short films that spotlight people striving to build different kind of communities across america. first we visit a small town trying to rescue a baby girl. next, a group of strangers sharing product reviews on line.

"58 hours: the baby jessica story" begins right now only on cnn. we're following one of the most compelling stories of this year. we're following it from midland, texas -- >> we thought that there had been national events before, but we hadn't seen anything like this. >> desperate rescue effort near mid lapd, texas, to save a little girl who fell into a well. >> this was life as it happened in real time and the entire world watched. >> 18-month-old baby. >> eighth hour. >> 12th hour. >> more than 52 hours now.

>> this effect of everybody together having the same image at the same time -- >> jessica. >> jessica. >> but it started back then. it started with this. >> a little kid fell down a well. everybody thought four r o five feet, six feet, we can reach down and get her out of there. but, you know, it turned out to be very different. but that hole's not that big around. i don't even think it's 12 inches. would a dog fall down there, you know, a chihuahua or a small terrier, yeah. but a baby? last thing that come to your mind. we realized we couldn't just reach down there and get her.

well, then it became we don't know what to do. >> there wasn't a lot of people. there was a handful of policemen and fire paramedic and a smattering of reporters like myself. baby jessica was the biggest story going on at that time. live, from midland odessa, 2 news. >> as we begin our news, a child is in a nightmare trapped inside a water well. we go to rob any wunsch. she's about 24 feet below ground. they were 18, dropped out of high school, got married. >> she got a phone calm. the next thing she knew, the children were gathered around

and abandoned well. >> they cooperate really see her, and they wanted to make sure she was still alive. >> we had a cameraman who had gotten there very quickly and they saw that he had a shotgun mic on his camera. they were like can you pick up sound with that? they're like yeah. >> it's ok, it's ok. >> everybody was what do we do? we had some people worked in the oil well there and said we're going to have to dig down to get

her out. midland, the opening's only eight inches wide, far too small for rescuers to enter. the plan, drilling a wider shaft next to the well and drilling a tunnel to link the two wells. it will be a lengthy process because of the hard rock . >> i went over and told them that one of my hobbies was caving and in kaig sometimes we have to dig. police officers, officer will you take this young man to his house and get his equipment. hooked up my harness. they lowered me all the way to

the bottom. then the radio told me i need to come out. i said i can't. i just got started. they said you have been in there almost three hours. you need to come out and rest. >> they dug the parallel shaft and as they dug the horizontal. it was blunting their jackh jackhammers. >> it's frustrating. the drill bits can't do anything with that rock. >> hour after hour after hour and only getting inches at a time. >> as the sun's rays began to disappear rescue workers continued to use all their strength to reach here. >> good evening, the nightmare is now in its 12th hour. >> jessica mcclure appears to be sleeping right now. >> as we went into the first

night, there's still no major media there. they've got a work light up and they're pumping warm air so that she doesn't get cold and maybe slip further down. >> we will break in on the hour with updates and we will break in just as soon as they pull jessica from that 22-foot hole. >> she fell into the well on a wednesday. thursday morning, we got a call very early. get to midland. you can visualize it, this is a neighborhood with fenced backyards and in one backyard is where all of this drilling equipment, all the activity you're seeing is located. in the next backyard there is a whole row of ladders because everyone has got their

television cameras to shoot over the fence and everybody's trying to get a bigger ladder to get a better view down into the hole. >> i walk out into the alley and there's hundreds of people around. >> and at that point i realized that things has gone from local news to national and worldwide. [ speaking foreign language ] >> jessica mcclure. >> entering the 36th hours. >> [ speaking foreign language ]. >> it became more an event. it was like reality tv times ten. >> she's a young mom and her kid's down in a well. she feels all of the pressure, all of the stress, all of the eyes on her. it's just not a scene you see in midland, texas, ever, you know, ever.

>> midland had suffered in the years before jessica fell down that well. it was the oil bust, the economy was completely trashed. people had lost everything. and this little girl fell down this well and all of a sudden, it gave an entire town something to rally around. >> they are west texans, short on money but long on heart. >> robert o'donnell was a firefighter. >> o'donnell, o apost fee -- >> he was tall and thin and he could physically get down there in the tunnel. >> they didn't know what position she was in for quite

some time. i believe it was robert o'donnell. he felt inside the shaft and he could tell there's only one leg dangling. so she's in the shaft with her foot next to her head kind of in a scissor position. he needed more room to articulate and get in there. >> one of the things they would do is drop a microphone down into the well to make sure that she was ok and at times like that, everybody had to be very, very quiet. >> they could hear she was in there sipping "winnie the poo." ♪ winnie the pooh ♪ >> i cried a lot, especially when she was singing. there was a point i kept thinking, i don't know that she's going to make it.

it's been so long. >> went to the lord's house, to prayer, and hope that little girl's going to make it. >> since the ordeal began wednesday morning, there is no talk, we are told, of trying to get any kind of liquids to this girl. experts with afraid she may have an injury. unless she's seriously injured she could survive up to four days without any food or water. >> time, section, and -- >> ok. tony, we're going to follow this story an get right back as soon as there's some movement. we've also got other major stories. on wall street -- >> reporter: it used to be we

got home at 6:00, 6:30 and turned on the news. then 24-hour news stations erupted. the first event in the 24-hour news world was baby jessica falling down a well. could have been anything but it was this little girl. >> this was beginning of kind of the tear any of the eyeball, the media environment in which it was all about hadrias. you weren't over there. it was on the tv. you didn't turn it off. >> in the past, the reporter in the field, particularly a national reporter for the new york times, you thought yourself as the eyes and ears of the paper. it's getting late, nearing my deadline and you couldn't really see inside the hole. it became clear that the only

way to see the story was to see the story on television, and i'm watching the news, and i'm talking to my editor and of course, they're watching the same thing on cnn. just felt like a moment when the journalistic world hadding changed. i'd never reported a story before by watching it on television, and you know, in the future, there would be many, many times when i would. >> everybody listen up. we're going from a-1 to a-8. stand by. and go. [relaxed summer themed music playing] ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪

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neighbors watch as the minutes turn to hours, that turn to days. as time and fatigue take their toll on health and hope for the life of the little girl. >> what's taking so long? you just want -- you want to get her out. >> i was working for a company

that manufactured a high-pressure tool. it's a single stream of water, but when focused, it's a very powerful tool. >> this water drill cuts rock with water at 30,000 pounds of pressure. >> when they came to us, to be very honest with you, they made it very, very clear that conventional chipping methods, mem methods were not going to work and if we could not remove the rock enough to get her out, she probably would not live. >> the president's back in the white house and he, no doubt, is tuning in to watch this drama unfold. >> nancy reagan was in the hospital about to have a biopsy for what would turn out to be

b breast cancer and she refused to leave until they brought jessica out. i mean, this was huge. >> robert o'donnell was having a hard time getting in there and maneuvering and having any strength. that's a lot of what that drill did was to make the horizontal. >> he was claustrophobic. >> it was real small. >> he did something that gave him nightmares for years afterwards. >> he was very, very concerned about getting her out. >> there was a lot of excitement. she leapt out of her seat. you would almost expect that the child was coming out at any moment.

>> he could not get her out. >> the hole to get her through was not big enough, so it would appear that the excavation effort will have to continue. >> the doctors felt that she had exhausted her time without food and water, and i can remember the doctor telling the two paramedics that they had to get her out and the doctor said break her bones. she said -- break her back if you have to. we can fix that, but get her out. >> the paramedic will be lowered down. >> he's armed with ky jelly and

smearing ky around her so he can get her out. >> you can see the cable coming up. everyone's eyes are looking down. it's been -- >> 58 hours. >> here comes the table, tony. -- cable, tony. [ cheers and applause ] >> you can see the enthusiasm. you could hear the applause as jessica is brought out. the smiles. it has taken a long time. >> bless her heart. >> she's blinking. >> bless her heart. >> she's blinking.

>> exactly. thank god. >> 58 hours. >> i know all of you feel the same way we do. this has been one of the longest 58 hours in our lives. >> there were bandages on her head and a brace on her leg but this baby looked great. >> these hard rock drillers that had been in that hole, were filthy and cut up on their heads, were sitting there crying. >> she had cried and sung her way into the lives of the world. >> the applause for the paramedic who just brought her up. >> we'd had heroes before, but usually it was a report about something they did yesterday, an

hour ago, earlier. it was not something that everybody watched live, and so they all felt they were there. people wanted at him, wanted at all of them. >> the hours it took to get her out, we got her out alive. it was all worth it. >> all around midland there are bumper stickers and scenes of support for jessica and those who worked to save her. it was some of the best news coming out of mid lapd memorial hospital since the 18-month-old toddler was brought here a week ago. she may lose the tips of her big toe and may need grafts on the foot but the foot is doing well so will not have to be

amputated. letters came addressed to jessica, mid lapd, texas. >> vice president george bush dropped in to check on the progress of jessica mcclure. >> sitting on her mother's shoulders, she watched as the folks of mid lapd came out to celebrate her rescue, and celebrate, they did. >> people stopped robert o'donnell on the street. they bought him meals. they wanted to fly him to hollywood. he was on oprah. >> after a short wagon ride out, 19-month-old jessica mcclure did just what folks in mid lapd have been praying for. she walked. [ cheers and applause ] >> and the well she fell in is now capped with the words "for jessica with love from all of

us." tone marks, cnn, midland, texas. >> we constantly create heroes and then we destroy them. we take celebrities and adore them until we don't anymore and then they tear them apart. >> these days there is no joy in mid lapd. >> i have no rites. that's the feeling i have. >> the rights to this case is in a documentary drama version of the rescue. >> robert o'donnell was a legitimate bona fide hero and everybody loved him. and then all those cameras went away. these people were heroes until they proved themselves to be human and then people felt they were greedy and fame seeking.

it was coming apart at the seams. >> i think the cameras going away created a cascade of things in robert o'donnell's life. the precipitating event, according to his mother, was the oklahoma city bombing, the bombing of the federal building. he'd been having flashbacks of going down the well. and he's sitting there watching 24-hour coverage of the rescuers doing what he did.

and as he's sitting there watching this he says to his mother "those people are going to need a lot of help for a very long time." and that was the night that he took a shotgun and shot himself. >> i wondered if i had succumbed to the limelight, if the same thing might have happened to me. >> you know, a camera focused on

you in the late '80s is vastly different than now. in those days, if you brought a camera to something, it typically wasn't trivial. >> we were certainly not perfect gatekeepers way back when, but now there's no gatekeeper. there's just the cacophony of a modern media world. and that's very different than back in 1987 where there was v there was something magical in a story being captured by cable news and transfixing people. >> on the one hand, it was revolutionary and it was an education in, wow, look at how culture has changed. what we didn't realize was this was just the beginning. >> breaking news. >> god speed. >> i've never seen anything like this. >> simpson has a gun at his head. >> you'll see them and hear about them in the media.

>> all of us have a camera in our face all the time. there's no privacy anymore. there's no anonymity, and this kind of was the first hint. this yearning that robert had is now everyone's .