Nukes on the Screen

 Seven Decades of Atomic Danger

Numerous films, some of them based on novels, feature nuclear war, its potential impacts, and the extreme threat these weapons pose. One of the first was Godzilla, a 1954 Japanese production re-released in the US two years later with Raymond Burr in a key role. The title monster is widely considered an analogy to the nuclear weapons dropped on Japan. But films about the danger of nuclear weapons actually began to appear years before with a fictionalized docudrama. The Beginning of the End (1947) focused on the Manhattan Project and nuclear bombing of Hiroshima — which had happened only two years earlier.

The mutant monster genre’s beginnings coincided with the McCarthy era, a time when paranoia wasn’t an unreasonable response to what was happening. Nuclear-spawned giant ants prowled the Los Angeles sewers in Them, while The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, with special effects by Ray Harryhausen, revolved around a dinosaur thawed from frozen hibernation by a atomic test in the Arctic Circle. 

        The most effective film of that genre’s early years may have been The Incredible Shrinking Man, based on a novel and featuring groundbreaking effects. The 1957 movie opens with the irradiation of Scott, an average guy vacationing with his wife when a strange mist covers him. This sets off his gradual descent into a very different and threatening world. Scott does ultimately experience an existential liberation at sub-atomic size. But the Japanese fisherman whose irradiation by a bomb test inspired the story wasn’t as lucky.

        The treatment of nuclear weapon detonation turned more serious as the decade ended with On the Beach. Based on a popular 1957 novel, the film, released in 1959, was an effective melodrama with A-list stars that followed the travails of nuclear war survivors in Australia as they confront death and the end of humanity. 

       In the 1960s, films began to seriously address how a nuclear conflict could start and how people might react. In Panic in the Year Zero (1961), starring Ray Milland, a family on a camping trip flees a nearby nuclear attack, encountering looters and other violent people as society breaks down. Released the same year, The Day the Earth Caught Fire suggests that nuclear tests could throw the Earth off course. The planet is doomed unless scientists figure out how to reverse the change. Spoiler: the outcome isn’t clear. The final sequence shows two newspaper front pages. One declares "World Saved," the other "World Doomed." 

Two of the most enduring films about the possibility of ending up in a nuclear war by accident were released in 1964. Both were based on novels. Fail-Safe takes an intellectual approach, chronicling how politicians, scientists and the military handle the accidental bombing of Moscow when command and control systems fail. To save the rest of the world, the US president, sympathetically portrayed by Henry Fonda, decides to balance the scale of tragedy by nuking New York. 

Dr. Strangelove (or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb), directed by Stanley Kubrick, opted for black comedy. Based loosely on Red Alert, a 1958 novel, it features the idea that a hypothetical Doomsday Machine would be beyond human control. It also suggests that sexual and mental problems could put the fate of humanity in the hands of one deranged general.

Around the same time, the James Bond franchise was launched, and subsequently used the threat posed by nuclear weapons falling into the “wrong” hands as the super-spy’s motivation in ten films over three decades. Some focus on theft or threatened use by criminal groups, others on a showdown between the superpowers. Bond always saves the planet, of course. But Polaris missiles are used to destroy a stolen nuclear sub in The Spy Who Loved Me. Defying both science and reason, only the bad guys are killed.

In Goldfinger (1964), the gold-obsessed villain plots the collapse of the West’s economy to enrich himself, with Chinese and North Korean accomplices, by irradiating the gold reserve at Fort Knox. In Octopussy (1977), another installment with convenient Cold War villains, a renegade Soviet general joins forces with Afghan and Indian smugglers to derail disarmament talks and invade Western Europe by detonating a nuke at a US base in Germany.  In Goldeneye (1995), the threat is a hypothetical nuclear satellite weapon that can disable electronics with an EMP attack.

Other Bond films with plots involving nuclear weapons include Thunderball (1965), You Only Live Twice (1967), Diamonds Are Forever (1971), The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), Tomorrow Never Dies (1997) and The World is Not Enough (1999). By this time, using nuclear weapons as a plot device had become so common that Mike Myers’ spy spoof Austin Powers turned it into a punchline. Assessing various criminal options, Bond-like villain Dr. Evil eventually settles on the obvious. "Let's just do what we always do,” he proposes, “steal a nuclear bomb and hold the world to ransom."

        Fact-based accounts have been more rare. But the Manhattan Project was soberly dramatized in Fat Man and Little Boy and Day One, both released in 1989, while The Missiles of October  (1974) and Thirteen Days (2000) explore the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. In 1983, The Day After, made for television, sparked a national debate by realistically showing the effects of nuclear weapons. It depicts both how a war could happen and the potentially devastating aftermath.

Nuclear films by the decade

The 1950s also included Split Second (1953), in which an escaped killer and his partners hold people hostage in a ghost town slated to be destroyed by a nuclear bomb; and The Atomic Kid (1954), focusing on a man in the danger zone of a nuclear test when the bomb is activated.

Beyond Dr. Strangelove and Fail-Safe, the 1960s featured Ladybug, Ladybug (1963), also set during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis; A Carol for Another Christmas (1964), in which the Ghost of Christmas Future provides a tour of the ruins of a once-great civilization that looks like Hiroshima; and The Bedford Incident (1965), based on a 1961 novel, depicting a stand off in the North Atlantic between a destroyer and a Soviet submarine caught violating Greenland’s territorial waters. The novel ends with the destroyer accidentally firing a missile at the submarine, and the Soviet submarine responding with four nuclear torpedoes. In the film, the final image is a mushroom cloud.

The War Game (1965), a BBC release, was a mockumentary about the effects of nuclear war on England after a conventional war escalates. And let’s not forget the Planet of the Apes franchise, which also launched in the 1960s. It is set in a future ruled by apes, who take over after a nuclear war destroys mankind. Beginning as a novel, the original film spawned four sequels, and more recent remakes that shift the cause of the ape takeover to biotechnology.

        Battle Beneath the Earth (1967) posits a discovery that Communist China, using futuristic vehicles, has tunneled under the US to place nuclear bombs in strategic locations, resulting in a struggle to foil the plan. In the black humor category there is The Bed Sitting Room (1969), an absurdist, post-apocalyptic, satire set in the ruins of London and featuring John Lennon. 

The 1970s started slowly, but eventually produced some memorable additions. Two were released in 1977. Damnation Alley, adapted from a Roger Zelazny short story, features a chilling launch and destruction sequence. After the surprise attack, it follows the efforts of some California survivors to reach another group in New York. And Twilight’s Last Gleaming follows a renegade Air Force general who escapes from a military prison and takes over an ICBM silo near Montana. Once there he threatens to launch missiles and jump-start World War III unless the president reveals a secret document about the Vietnam War. 

Two years later The China Syndrome had a significant real world impact. A gripping drama about the dangers of nuclear power, its effect was intensifed by a real-life nuclear accident at the Three Mile Island plant only weeks after the film opened. Jane Fonda plays a TV reporter who personally witnesses the risk of a meltdown (known as the "China syndrome") at a local nuclear plant. Tragedy is averted by a quick-thinking but troubled engineer. The film suggests that corporate greed and cost-cutting have led to potentially deadly faults in the plant's construction. Less serious but equally popular, the Mad Max franchise also began in 1979, leading to four more film in which a heavily-armed loner patrols a bleak post-nuclear wasteland.

        The 1980s could be called the golden age of nuclear movies, marked by dozens of popular productions. The decade began with two memorable 1982 films. The Children’s Story, based on a 1960 short story by James Clavell and originally aired on TV, is a short film depicting the indoctrination of an elementary school classroom by a new teacher when a totalitarian government takes over the country. Another is The Atomic Cafe, which effectively explores 1940s and 1950s government propaganda films that were supposed to reassure audiences that nuclear weapons weren’t a threat to their safety.

The next year was even bigger. Special Bulletin was a made-for-TV movie about anti-nuclear activists who detonate a home-made nuke in South Carolina. It’s shot in a live breaking news style. War Games featured a young computer hacker who nearly starts World War III when he inadvertently breaks into a fictional NORAD supercomputer to play the latest video games. In The Dead Zone a teacher, played by Christopher Walken, acquires psychic powers, then learns that a political candidate, portrayed by pre-West Wing Martin Sheen, will order a nuclear strike at some point in the future. Testament, from PBS, depicts the after-effects of a nuclear war in a town near San Francisco. Silkwood, inspired by the true story of Karen Silkwood, who died in a suspicious car accident, dramatizes her struggle to investigate wrongdoing at the Kerr-McGee plutonium plant where she worked. And Barefoot Gen is an anime film depicting the terror of the Hiroshima bombing and its aftermath from the perspective of a child. 

Nuclear paranoia went big time in 1984 with the start of The Terminator  franchise, featuring a post-apocalyptic future in which artificial intelligence becomes self-aware, identifies humans as a threat, and uses the world’s nuclear arsenal to destroy mankind. All of James Cameron films from 1986 to 1994 featured nuclear explosions. Just as paranoid but more right-wing, Red Dawn revolves around an invasion and occupation of the US by Soviet, Nicaraguan and Cuban forces after a surprise limited nuclear strike. 

  The docudrama Countdown to Looking Glass dramatizes an international incident, the breakdown of diplomacy, and the escalation of international tensions leading up to a nuclear crisis. One Night Stand, an Australian film, focuses on four teenagers in the Sydney Opera House when news breaks of a US-Soviet conflict in Europe that goes nuclear — first in Europe, and soon in Australia. And Threads, a 1984-85 BBC production based on a British government exercise, shows the effects of an all-out nuclear war on the town of Sheffield. 

        In 1986, Manhattan Project wasn’t actually about the bomb’s invention, but instead about how, using stolen plutonium, a high school student builds an atomic bomb for a science class project. Two other significant productions that year were When the Wind Blows, an animated film about an elderly British couple in a post-nuclear war world, and The Sacrifice, a philosophical Swedish drama about nuclear war.

In 1987, The Fourth Protocol, Frederick Forsythe’s 1984 novel, was adapted for film. It follows a plot by extreme Soviet elements to encourage unilateral British disarmament. Meanwhile, they smuggle the components of a tactical nuclear bomb into the country for eventual detonation near a US nuclear base the week before an election. Other 1987 releases include Project X, dealing with the testing of lethal exposures to nuclear radiation on how specially-trained chimpanzees perform in computerized flight simulators — based on a real Air Force biomedical research program; Amazing Grace and Chuck, in which a 12-year-old boy becomes anxious after seeing a Minuteman missile on a school field trip and protests by refusing to play baseball; and Superman IV: The Quest for Peace, in which the Man of Steel rounds up all the nuclear weapons and hurls them into the Sun, resulting in unintended consequences.

As the decade ended, Miracle Mile (1988) followed a musician who visits the famous Los Angeles shopping zone, gets a wrong number phone call, and overhears a conversation about an imminent nuclear attack. Struggling against fear, denial and panic, he scrambles to save himself and a woman he just met. 

Despite the collapse of the Soviet Union, By Dawn’s Early Light (1990) dramatized an accidental limited nuclear exchange between the two Superpowers after a "false-flag" attack on Soviet territory. Rogue Soviet military officials frame NATO in order to spark a full-blown nuclear war. Based on Tom Clancy's 1984 bestseller, The Hunt for Red October was released the same year, and involves a Soviet naval captain who wants to defect with his crew and his country’s most advanced nuclear missile submarine.

A few years later Matinee, which is mainly a comedy, revisits the Cuban missile crisis, showing the fears of Americans who think they are about to meet their doom. As the Cold War faded, films like Crimson Tide (1995) and Broken Arrow (1996) turned back to the threats posed by human error and private greed. In the former, the problem is mutiny on a nuclear sub; in the latter, it’s the theft of two thermonuclear weapons by a rogue bomber pilot. The Peacemaker (1997) combines emerging concerns about rogue Russian officers with access to nukes and Eastern European terrorists who want the US to suffer as they have. In Deterrence (1999) the possibility of dropping of a nuclear bomb on Baghdad is dramatized.

        In the last 20 years, the threats dramatized on film have ranged from terrorists to tornados. In The Sum of All Fears (2002), also based on a Tom Clancy novel, neo-Nazis attempt to spark a nuclear war between the US and Russia by detonating a nuke during a baseball game attended by the president. In Dirty War (2004) radioactive material is smuggled into England, turned into several dirty bombs, and detonated in London. Dirty bombs are also detonated in Right at Your Door (2007), a thriller set in Los Angeles after their use. On the other hand, it’s just a close call in Atomic Twister (2002) when a automated nuclear power plant is in the path of a tornado.

A few recent films have revisited actual events. K-19: The Widowmaker (2002) covers the actual Soviet submarine nuclear accident, and Chernobyl (2019), an HBO mini-series, details the 1986 disaster. Others opt to speculate. In The Divide (2011), survivors of a nuclear attack struggle to survive in the basement of their apartment building as fears and dwindling supplies undermine their behavior and relationships. In Outside the Wire (2021), a near future story, a drone pilot sent into a war zone must work with an android officer to stop a nuclear attack.

Nuclear weapons even play a role in modern superhero sagas. All of Gotham City is held hostage in The Dark Knight Rises (2012), part of the recent Batman series, when mercenaries take control of an armed neutron bomb. And in Watchmen (2009), based on a DC comic book, a super-powered Dr. Manhattan acts as America's nuclear deterrent in an alternative 1985, while a Soviet invasion of Afghanistan takes the world to the brink of nuclear conflict. 

Some things don’t easily change.

Supermen with Soiled Collars: Reporters in a Golden Age

In early April, a restored version of The Front Page was scheduled to open Global Roots 2020, a three-day festival in Burlington about reporting and film, organized by the Vermont International Film Festival. Due to the coronavirus, however, the films and panel discussions have been postponed until October, Meanwhile, the classic story is worth another look.

Today we call it breaking news, the story of the moment — before it changes again. A century ago it was what ran on the front page — the big story, the killer headline. But then as now, it is often tied up with ambitions, competition, and money.

The Front Page was also the name of a broadway play written more than 20 years before I was born. Yet I fell in love with its characters, stories and attitude by the time I was ten. Then it was called His Girl Friday, a Hollywood version often shown on early television, with Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell as Walter Burns, a manipulative Chicago editor, and Hildy Johnson, an ace reporter trying to escape the grind. 

This was the second film version of the hit play about tabloid reporters on the Chicago police beat. Written by former reporters Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, it was first produced in 1928, and quickly bought by Howard Hughes for the film adaptation by Lewis Milestone.

Adophe Menjou and Pat O’Brien
in the first film version

In early April, a restored version of the film was scheduled to open Global Roots 2020, a three-day festival about reporting and film organized by the Vermont International Film Festival. Due to the coronavirus, however, the films and panel discussions were postponed, most to be shown instead in October. Meanwhile, it’s worth another look.

After all, the basic story has been retold on film, radio and television countless times. That includes four major films. The first, released in 1931, had a young Pat O’Brien as Hildy and Adolphe Menjou as Burns. In 1940, director Howard Hawkes updated the tale with His Girl Friday, featuring the fast-talking Grant and Russell, along with a gender switch. Then came a 1974 remake with Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthew as a journalistic odd couple, and 1988’s Switching Channels, a return to the Russell-Grant model with Kathleen Turner as Hildy and Burt Reynolds as a cable TV Burns. There were also radio productions in the 1930s and 1940s, two television versions, a British musical called Windy City, and a 2016 revival of the play with Nathan Lane and John Slattery in the key roles.

In the 1950s, watching old movies on TV, I was fascinated by Grant and Russell, who seemed to both personify and hilariously exaggerate the struggle between newspaper editors and reporters, and also between men and women. The fast-talking repartee was like jousting, and the situational ethics used to get what they wanted was a revelation. 

Grant and Russell added comedy and chemistry

The society they inhabited was rough, lively and seductive; there were tough reporters barking into telephones, corrupt politicians and life-and-death cover ups, a ruthless editor racing deadlines and looking for angles, his defiant star reporter, a misunderstood outlaw on the run, and a good-hearted prostitute, plus other enduring types and tropes. But what really cemented the impressions was reading the play itself, one of the learning tools used by my junior high school English teacher to keep us interested. 

Since then, I’ve been a major fan of Ben Hecht. Journalist, screenwriter, novelist, and activist, Hecht was a literary phenomenon, a defiant, complicated, unapologetic Jewish-American writer. Jean-Luc Godard once said, “He invented 80 percent of what is used in Hollywood movies today.” Pauline Kael annointed him “the Greatest American screenwriter.” And then, with the rise of Hitler and World War II, he continued to evolve, gradually  becoming a Jewish radical and dedicating much of his last decades to the cause of Israel. At his funeral, Menachem Begin summed it up, “He wrote stories and he made history.” 

In addition to The Front Page, Hecht wrote or worked on scripts for classic films like Underworld (the 1929 silent film for which he won the first-ever Academy Award for best story), Scarface, Design for Living, Viva Villa!, Topaze, Twentieth Century, Barbary Coast, Nothing Sacred, Gunga Din, It’s a Wonderful Life, Angels Over Broadway, Comrade X, Lydia, SpellBound, Notorious, Kiss of Death, Monkey Business, and A Farewell to Arms. He also had a hand in Gone with the Wind, Foreign Correspondent, Gilda, and Roman Holiday. In all, Hecht worked on at least 140 films. What range! 

And what a life! Running away to Chicago at 16, he "haunted streets, whorehouses, police stations, courtrooms, theater stages, jails, saloons, slums, madhouses, fires, murders, riots, banquet halls, and bookshops." By the 1920s Hecht was a noted journalist, foreign correspondent, and literary figure. And that was before Hollywood called.

In 1928, The Front Page became a hugely popular Broadway play, a sharp-edged valentine to the scruffy newsmen of an earlier era. At the time, though, many people thought Hecht and MacArthur had invented the characters and fabricated their stories. But Hecht later claimed that, in his youth, sometimes he and a photographer would actually stage shots at times to back up their made-up scoops — like a brave tugboat captain who fought off pirates on Lake Michigan, or digging a trench to  fake a severe earthquake photo. On the other hand, they met everyone and covered everything — floods, funerals, trials, and hangings.  

Later, Hecht described the times this way: “We were a tribe of assorted drunkards, poets, burglars, philosophers and boastful raggamuffins. Supermen with soiled collars and holes in our pants, stony broke and sneering at our betters in limousines and unmortgaged houses. Cynical of all things on earth including the tyrannical journal that underpaid and overworked us and for which, after a round of cursing, we were ready to die.”

The actress Helen Hayes said of their work on The Front Page, “They took the corset off American theater.” Tennessee Williams once acknowledged that the play made it possible for him to conceive his own work. British Critic Kenneth Tynan described it as “the best American comedy ever written.” And playwright Tom Stoppard called it “the only American comedy of the 1920s in the way that The Importance of Being Earnest is the only English comedy of the 1890s....I don’t know any play which sustains its verve so well.” 

John Slattery and Nathan Lane as
the cynical editor and his star reporter.

Nevertheless, the source material of this classic story describes a very different time, one in which objectivity and facts were the last thing on most reporters’ minds. 

Almost century ago, The Front Page revealed a hidden world, one based loosely on reality and filled with slippery politicians and hungry reporters, where getting the story first and boldest was considered more important than getting it right.

But their already-nostalgic vision also placed a high value on courage, community, and having a heart. In today’s white-hot media environment that unfortunately begins to sound like a romantic, and possibly obsolete notion.

Dissent on Film: de Antonio's Art and the FBI

The FBI tracked the activities of Emile de Antonio for 50 years. They watched, assembled files and sometimes even intervened directly in his life as he evolved from radical student into even more radical filmmaker. He wasn't the only person they followed, by a mile. But for many of those years, de Antonio also watched -- and spoke out effectively against J. Edgar Hoover and his Bureau.

In 1963 his first film, Point of Order, exposed the hypocrisy of the McCarthy era and launched a new media form, political documentary filmmaking without a narrative track. From then on, de Antonio, known simply as de to his friends, was an articulate opponent of repression and the establishment. Holding his camera eye up to reality, he translated some of the more disquieting political events of the late 20th Century into powerful indictments.

For artists and activists, de Antonio films like Rush to Judgement, In the Year of the Pig, Millhouse, Underground, and In the King of Prussia, are models of visual art as social critique and protest. His last film, Mr. Hoover and I, took his critical awareness yet another step, combining the story of his own "relationship" with the FBI and his critique of the film industry. 

Basically, he ended up being a filmmaker who didn't particularly like movies. "I go about once a year," he admitted with some pride.

During a visit with him in September 1989, only a few months before his death at age 70, de Antonio dismissed most movies as "industrial products. They're not art, because they lack the ideas of one person or one small group of people that you usually find when art is made."

Turning movies into a money-making business had debased the form, he felt. "Some people make art, but most of them make films as business products just like shoes." Disdaining the rationalization of the market and dominance of movie chains, he had concluded that "the logical thing is to make a film as cheaply as possible, a film that is hostile to every assumption about filmmaking."

Thus, Mr. Hoover and I had no written script. Instead the filmmaker, who was also the main actor and one of the primary subjects, made a list of topics, things like his personal knowledge of Harvard, the military, suppression of films and the life of Hoover. He would paste a word or phrase to his light stand, turn on the camera, and just talk. "It wasn't as if I was reading off a teleprompter. I'd just look and see the word and that would get me going," he recalled. "I'm not sure that I have much camera presence, but by hearing myself do a take, I'd do it over again and eventually manage to get it OK."

Aside from the director, the only cast is his wife Nancy, who gives him a haircut as he recalls the past, and John Cage, who talks about chance and indeterminacy while baking bread. The sequences are intercut with monologues and old Nixon and Hoover footage.

Stripped of technical effects, the film provides no distractions from the matter at hand -- how de Antonio's life, the FBI and Hoover intersected over the years. The project began with the idea of basing a film on FBI files obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. Once he had thousands of pages, however, he was overwhelmed. The files went back to 1936, when he was only 16 years old. 

"And I've never regarded myself as a dangerous person," he joked, "except when I worked for the United States government."

Dangerous or not, de Antonio was marked early for special FBI attention, possibly due to his membership in the Young Communist League, John Reed Society, and American Student Union, a less radical version of SDS. More shocking, in his last year at Harvard, the files revealed, he was slated for "custodial detention," archaic code for a World War II internment camp.

"No one ever explored what that really meant," he said, "how many people were involved, and who was involved. I have to think it was a very big number, because I was a college boy when this was going on. My crimes were not very substantial."

Even after de Antonio enlisted for combat duty in the Air Force, the Bureau tracked him during  the war. And they "got really serious" afterward when he started making films. His documentary on the Weather Underground attracted special ire. "For five year, they had been searching out the Weather Underground people and were unable to find them," he said. "So, it was kind of weird that two middle-aged guys, Haskell Wexler and I, could go underground and spend a few days with the Weather people. That obviously made the FBI look ridiculous."

In response, the Bureau tailed him, broke into his house, and took him to court, all apparently in hopes of tracking down the urban guerrillas. In previous cases where the government targeted someone in the film industry, it eventually won. From blacklisting to jail, the chill was invariably effective. But this time stars like Warren Beatty, Shirley MacLaine and Martin Sheen supported his right to freedom of expression and signed a widely circulated statement. De Antonio also had a strong legal case. But in the end, he thought, "the thing that won it was publicity. That's what this country is about."

However it happened, the government lost that time.

But it wasn't the only time the FBI and Hoover took aim at him. Bookings for his film on President Nixon, Millhouse: A White Comedy, were allegedly cancelled after FBI agents told theater owners that Nixon would have to be given equal time. "Equal time was never applied to film," he explained, "but more importantly, Nixon was the president of the United States. He was on the tube every day!"

The only film of his that they didn't try to suppress, he believed, was a documentary on painters, which grew out of his early work as an art teacher and his friendships with leading contemporary artists. Among them was Andy Warhol, who called de Antonio "the only art teacher I ever had."

"A characteristic Warhol statement," he laughed. "Some of it wasn't true, of course. He had a perfectly respectable art education at Carnegie Tech, but I did teach him something about painting."

"Incidentally," he added, shifting back to his main topic, "Warhol had an extraordinary FBI file. He made this film, Lonesome Cowboys, which was about these gay cowboys that were patting each other's asses and kissing each other. The FBI went crazy. They thought this was a denigration of a major American art form, the macho cowboy." 

Despite his own harassment, de Antonio could see the bigger picture. He understood that control of culture and information is more subtle and thorough than agents disrupting films they consider subversive. "Television has already done it to America," he said grimly, "and in a much wider area than politics. It has totally brainwashed people."

Yet he could also see some hopeful signs, even before the birth of the digital age. For example, upper middle class people, who could afford to buy access to premium channels, were already beginning to turn off the old TV channels. "The networks are biting their nails because the people who really buy things, the larger ticket items of capitalism, don't really look at TV anymore. They look at presidential debates, they look at the news. They look at the tube. But not the networks."

Another positive sign was the interest in televised government proceedings on CSPAN. Due to his own special interest in President George H.W. Bush, he had recently been binge-watching hearings chaired by Senator John Kerry that examined drug links to the Iran-Contra scandal. "Everything you need to know to blow away Bush is in those hearings," he had concluded. But at the same time he doubted that anything would come of the evidence. The major news media were already backing off the story. 

Yet that didn't stop him. In a book on Bush that remained unpublished, he delved into the significance of the president's college membership in Skull and Bones. Both Bush and his father, Prescott, were in the private society. Among other credentials he found significant, Prescott Bush chaired Brown Brothers Harriman, then the most influential private banking company in the world.

"Private banks are like Skull and Bones, very secretive," he said. "The very essence of a private bank is secrecy." Following social and historical threads, his research also led to the face of another Skull and Bones member -- also name Brown, and from the same private firm -- a face that appeared in 1905 on the currency of Nicaragua. Putting an American's picture on Nicaragua's money was part of a loan deal between Brown Brothers and the government. Delayed by a lawsuit and still unpublished when he died, de Antonio described the book as "a view of Bush that most people haven't seen."  

  

One of his conclusions about the former president: "He was in the CIA long before he became director of it. The most important thing Bush did, prior to becoming vice president, was in the Ford years. The CIA was crumbling and he spent one year there, and the idea was to clean it up, make it fly straight and get rid of certain elements that were a threat to it. He was very effective."

He was less impressed, and even more suspicious, about Bush's handling of drug problems. "In 1982, Reagan appointed Bush head of the south of the border drug task force. His assistant was Admiral Murphy, who had been his assistant in the CIA. Bush did nothing, he said nothing. In fact, the importation of drugs grew by over 300 percent in the few years he was head of the task force. And he was close to Noriega at this time. Bush was in intelligence, and Noriega was an asset for the CIA before Bush ran for president."

Swinging between pessimism and optimism, he worried that the future of free expression was in serious jeopardy. Yet he was hopeful that developments like CSPAN, cable and the home video market would give people access to the ideas and information they need to make more informed choices.

"Is television improvable?" I wondered.

"Not the networks," he said.

But cable companies are owned by the same interests, I pressed. "Why should they be any different?"

"There is only the hope, the possibility," he replied. "Take CSPAN, which doesn't take a position. Its position is to report the whole thing. It's as objective as you can be. Anything it does is as it plays. The analogy in science is the best: there is no objectivity anywhere. Heisenberg's conclusion was that when you measure the atom you change it. Looking at it changes it."

At first intuitively, De Antonio seemed to have applied Heisenberg's principle to film, producing, directing and, in the end, starring in documentaries that both observed America's political underbelly and contributed to the process of change. 

Point of Order brilliantly encapsulated the hysteria of anti-Communisim. Two decades later, In the King of Prussia illuminated the conflict between religious witness against nuclear weapons and an inflexible legal system. In both cases his observations -- without comment -- were powerful enough to change hearts and minds. And, in the end, his own surveillance of government misdeeds proved more effective than anything the FBI ever did to him.