BEFORE: Well, I lost a day, it couldn't be helped - I thought I'd like to finish the Doc Block within July and not let it spill over into August, but now that's more unlikely. What happened was, I worked a night at the New York Asian Film Festival, and I didn't realize the shift was going to go until midnight or later. I'm OK with this, because time is money and if the event goes late, that means a bigger paycheck (eventually). But going past midnight on a weeknight means that it's tougher to get home, part of my subway line was shut down so that meant at 1 am, after locking up the theater, I found out that I had to take a bus across 14th St. to catch my train, it wasn't going to where I usually catch it. My phone said the bus was due in a mere 52 minutes, so I figured walking would be faster, but then I just KNEW that a bus was going to pass me along the walk, right? Anyway I got to Union Square only to find the train would not be leaving for another 15-20 minutes, so I didn't get home until 2 am.
Well, I'm not going to watch a movie at 2 am if I need to be at work the next day at 10 am (or more likely, 11 am) so I just took a skip night - but somehow I got a cold in the middle of all that, so I called in sick on Wednesday anyway, and just worked a bit on e-mails from home. I slept most of Wednesday to deal with the cold, and I was able to start this film on Wednesday night, but now it's Thursday and I'm still feeling sick so I hope another day on the sidelines will take care of it. Soup and coffee and DayQuil, that's the best way to deal with a cold, maybe some Advils to deal with the achiness, but my sleeping schedule is now completely backwards, and it was bad to begin with. I'm hoping I can restore normalcy in time to work on Friday and Saturday, but now if I don't watch a documentary every day, that's OK, I'll look for a way to line them up again with celebrity birthdays, but the order of the remaining docs is set in stone now, it's not a question of how I end the Doc Block, just when. There are enough extra days in the year (159) to watch the remaining movies (104) and not have to worry about this.
Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew (among others) carry over from "Stan Lee". All docs set in the 1960's need to at least name-check Watergate.
THE PLOT: A look at the career of "60 Minutes" newsman, Mike Wallace.
AFTER: Mike Wallace was a bit before my time, but I figured I'd give this one a whirl anyway - like my grandmother used to watch "60 Minutes", as a kid I would just watch the end bit to see if Andy Rooney had anything funny to say. This was before I glommed on to Letterman and Weird Al Yankovic, I think - like why as a kid did I think that some old man complaining about everything was funny? Now I have no idea, but times change and people change.
Mike Wallace spearheaded "60 Minutes" at its inception, and became famous for his hard-hitting "gotcha" questions and his ability to land interviews with some of the most brutal dictators in the world - Manuel Noriega, Vladimir Putin, Ayatollah Khomeini, and - Barbra Streisand? No, wait, I'll stand by that one, it tracks. So to put together clips from some of his most famous (and infamous) interviews, AND to give us the back-story of his career that most people didn't know about, well it should be a slam-dunk. And it is, more or less.
Mike Wallace started out in broadcasting in much the same way Stan Lee started out in comic books - get your foot in the door, volunteer for everything, try to move up in the ranks when you can, and if you hang around long enough, you could end up running the place. Wallace worked as a radio announcer, a commercial pitchman, and maybe also swept up the office after hours. The more you take on, the harder you are to fire, I get that. I've lived that myself - except for when I was working at the AMC in the summer of 2021, I was willing to sweep all 7 theaters and empty all 28 trash cans in the building, but when they wanted me to come in early and clean all 8 bathrooms, that's where I drew the line. I did NOT go to film school to clean bathrooms, sorry, that's when I started planning my escape.
Mike Wallace's entry into news came through a program called "Night Beat", one guest, one interviewer in a darkened room, under a spotlight, which looked a bit like a police interrogation - and sponsored by Parliament cigarettes, which back then, everybody was encouraged to smoke, on camera, guests and hosts. This all seemed quite ironic if you've seen the movie "The Insider", which came out in 1999 and detailed the "60 Minutes" investigation into the tobacco industry, and their decades-long cover-up on the dangers of smoking. This doc eventually gets there, but it could have drawn a more direct ironic correlation between Wallace working on one show that was sponsored by cigarettes, and later on another show that broke the story on how corrupt that industry was. Karma's involved somehow, like Wallace maybe made up for being part of the corporate machine by breaking the story, and now you can't smoke in restaurants or on planes or even walking down the street, really you're limited to your own home now. But there's footage here of a tobacco industry spokesman suggesting that lung cancer is caused by "a virus" rather than from exposure to the toxins in ciggies. Umm, sure, if that helps you sleep at night.
Anyway, the film kind of arrives a bit too late, because Mike Wallace is deceased now, as are the majority of the interviewed subjects seen here, but they live on through archive footage - Bette Davis, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Leona Helmsley, Salvador Dali, Johnny Carson, etc. Sure, a few are still around, like Oprah Winfrey, Shirley MacLaine, Bill O'Reilly - and some of the other people who interviewed Wallace, like Dick Cavett and Letterman - but mostly this is a tribute to the fallen, like the "In Memoriam" segment at the Oscars each year. These were the newsmakers of the 1960's and 1970's, and most of them we won't see again. I'd love to see the whole "Night Beat" interview with Rod Serling, I was a big "Twilight Zone" fan as a kid and that may be where the OCD kicked in, I bought a book that listed all the episodes and I kept watching the reruns until I'd seen every last one.
We also see the tables get turned on Mike Wallace a few times here, but when he went on a talk show as an interview subject, he seemed reluctant to answer questions about his own personal life - in a later interview with Morley Safer he opened up a bit more. Like I guess everyone knew, or soon figured out, not to ask him on camera how many times he'd been married. What's the big deal? (It was four, by the way.). If you live long enough and love like a normal person does, then it's bound to happen once or twice, I figure. But clearly there was a pattern with him of putting work first and family second, thus the three divorces. And sure, there was other tragedy in his life, like when he flew to Greece to look for his 19-year old son, Peter, only to find that he'd fallen off a mountain, and that's why he hadn't called home in a while.
There really isn't enough time in a 90-minute documentary (really, it should have been called "90 Minutes with Mike Wallace" but I guess CBS might have had a problem with that) so they really had to focus on the most important interviews - a couple seconds with JFK, a brief glimpse of Reagan and only a couple questions with younger Trump, but a deep-dive on Watergate, a lot of tense moments interviewing Khomeini during the Iran hostage crisis and another focus on the libel suit filed by Gen. Westmoreland concerning his reporting of manipulated intelligence estimates over the number of communists in Vietnam to make the false impression that the U.S. was winning the war there. (We weren't.)
I think I learned a lot about the news business tonight, which was kind of the point. I learned it's not a very happy business, especially if you focus on things like wars and Communism and dead Civil Rights leaders. Also, Mike Wallace may have been indirectly responsible for the assassination of Anwar Sadat, because he pushed the point in his interview with Khomeini, which led to the Iranian leader calling Sadat "not a true Muslim" and he was shot a few weeks later. Oopsie?
With archive footage of Mike Wallace (last seen in "Little Richard: King and Queen of Rock 'n' Roll"), Jonathan Alter (last seen in "Breslin and Hamill: Deadline Artists"), Yasser Arafat, Menachem Begin (last seen in "Jimmy Carter: Rock & Roll President"), Anwar Sadat (ditto), Jack Benny (last seen in "Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed"), Kirk Douglas (ditto), Dan Rather (ditto), Ronald Reagan (ditto), Dinah Shore (ditto), Thomas Hart Benton, David Boies (last seen in "The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley"), Ben Bradlee (last seen in "Life Itself"), Ed Bradley (last seen in "Butterfly in the Sky"), Tom Brokaw (last seen in "The Greatest Night in Pop"), Johnny Carson (last seen in "Love to Love You, Donna Summer"), Barbra Streisand (dtto), Dick Cavett (last seen in "Moonage Daydream"), Mickey Cohen, Stephen Colbert (last seen in "Money Shot: The Pornhub Story"), Bob Costas (last seen in "Yogi Berra: It Ain't Over"), Walter Cronkite (ditto), Edward R. Murrow (ditto), Tim Russert (ditto), Salvador Dali (last seen in "Super Duper Alice Cooper"), Bette Davis (last seen in "Always at the Carlyle"), Diana Dors, Hugh Downs (last seen in "Spielberg"), Eldon Edwards, John Ehrlichman (last seen in "13th"), Oriana Fallaci, Tom Foreman, Barney Frank (last seen in "Capitalism: A Love Story"), Aladena "Jimmy" Fratianno, Jackie Gleason (last seen in "What's My Name: Muhammad Ali"), Merv Griffin (last seen in "The Real Charlie Chaplin"), Sean Hannity (last seen in "Shock and Awe"), David Hartman (last seen in "Framing John DeLorean"), Barbara Walters (ditto), Leona Helmsley (last seen in "Let's Go to Prison"), Don Hewitt (last seen in "Scandalous: The Untold Story of the National Enquirer"), Jacqueline Kennedy (last seen in "The Special Relationship"), Rpbert F. Kennedy (last seen in "Elvis"), John F. Kennedy (also carrying over from "Stan Lee"), Larry King (ditto), Martin Luther King (ditto), Ayatollah Khomeini (last seen in "Rosewater"), Robert Kirsch, Steve Kroft (last seen in "The Queen of Versailles"), David Letterman (last seen in "Little Richard: I Am Everything"), Shirley MacLaine (last seen in "I Am Burt Reynolds"), Malcolm X (last seen in "Attica"), Groucho Marx (last seen in "Albert Brooks: Defending My Life"), Jon Stewart (ditto), John McCain (last seen in "You've Been Trumped Too"), Bill O'Reilly (ditto), Paul Meadlo, Arthur Miller, Manuel Noriega (last seen in "Bad Reputation"), Drew Pearson, Thomas Pike, Maury Povich, Vladimir Putin (last seen in "George Carlin's American Dream"), Harry Reasoner (last seen in "Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time"), Morley Safer (ditto), Geraldo Rivera (last seen in "LennoNYC"), Eleanor Roosevelt (last seen in "Nixon"), Lillian Roth (last seen in "Animal Crackers"), Van Gordon Sauter, Jean Seberg (last seen in "Airport"), Rod Serling (last seen in "Not Fade Away"), Eric Sevareid (last seen in "Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood"), Beverly Sills, Lesley Stahl (last seen in "Marcel the Shell with Shoes On"), Frederick Taylor, Donald Trump (last seen in "The Strange Name Movie"), Chris Wallace (last seen in "Mayor Pete"), George Wallace (last seen in "MLK/FBI"), William C. Westmoreland, Jeffrey Wigand, Oprah Winfrey (last seen in "Being Mary Tyler Moore"), Frank Lloyd Wright
RATING: 5 out of 10 commercials for Fluffo shortening. (WTF is that?)
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