The true power of cinema is expressed not by how successfully any given movie engages an audience's emotions but rather, within the right juncture of time and circumstance, how a particular movie might be able to change minds and actually reshape the future.
As noted in a previous entry to this journal, television forever altered the cultural landscape of movies with the new medium breaking the monopoly of the theater by bringing programing right into the home. Movies and television had come into an intimate relationship with one another as cinematic features became necessary staples for both the major networks and hundreds of local stations to fill up airtime. Inevitably, television would end up supplying movie productions for direct broadcast of its own. The early 1950s saw many hour and ninety-minute live dramas written by top screen authors such as Rod Serling, Paddy Chayevsky, and Stirling Silliphant, among other such giants of the field. But that genre had largely died out by 1964 as structured half-hour and hour drama and comedy shows filled network lineups in an increasingly competitive viewing environment and quality television became something of an oxymoron. Then around 1975, a new programing format, the dramatic miniseries, made its debut on network television, along with made-for-television movies to air during "special" events lined up through the season. Most of these efforts are wholly forgettable wastes of time: amounting only to extended prime-time or afternoon soap opera melodramas which said nothing. Pure light entertainment. A production which not only stood out as exceptional was rare and one which had a cultural impact, such as the landmark miniseries Roots, even rarer.
In a roundabout way, this is to say that television would end up becoming a moviemaking force in its own right, for both good and mediocre. But it would be in the pivotal year of 1983 that television's capacity to shape culture would prove to be as powerful as Hollywood's when the ABC television network presented one of the most noteworthy and controversial for its time made-for-TV films depicting directly the devastation of a full-scale nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union. This being the singular production known as The Day After.
Of course, there was already a whole catalog of films and television productions dealing wholly or in part with the subject of nuclear war, from tense dramas to black comedies to science fiction potboilers. It was hardly a new and original genre when ABC added their piece to the canon. Only the previous year, NBC had aired the two-part miniseries World War III, starring Rock Hudson and David Soul in a melodramatic runaround about events spinning out of control and desperate leaders misunderstanding one another, resulting in all the buttons being pushed and the world incinerated by atomic fire. It also advanced a standard narrative of the Soviet Union as the Big Enemy that was going to push America and the world past the brink of utter catastrophe.
This message was ramped up almost to fever intensity during that time when the Reagan administration was relentlessly drilling into the public mind the fear of the Soviet nuclear threat, the "Evil Empire" seeking world dominion and willing to conquer or destroy America to achieve that aim. Conservatives were firmly convinced of this vision of a Red Nightmare future. They wholeheartedly supported the Reagan nuclear buildup and absorbed the administration tough-talk and the widely-disseminated propaganda regarding the "survivability" of a nuclear attack with adequate warning and Civil Defense preparation as articles of faith. They gloried in grandiose plans of regaining nuclear superiority and the creation of a huge and vastly expensive antimissile defensive system designed to blunt a Soviet attack if it should come; assuming such a horrendously complex system would work perfectly at the moment it was needed.
Such visions, promoted on and off by both U.S. government sources as well as anticommunist groups and think-tanks since the 1950s, were savagely mocked by the 1982 cult documentary The Atomic Cafe, which didn't make much of an impact upon the mass movie audience of the time. Meantime, liberals —certain that the only realistic outcome of a nuclear war was extinction of the human species— desperately campaigned for peace, superpower disarmament or, as a popular alternative cause then, a "nuclear freeze" halting the further buildup of the arsenals on both sides by negotiated agreement. These counter-efforts were dismissed by the Reagan administration and mocked by conservatives as unrealistic, defeatist, and even darkly hinted to be possibly the result of Soviet propaganda and political subversion efforts orchestrated from Moscow; a tried-and-true method of scaring the American public away from the peace movement and one which, in the early 1980s, seemed largely to be working in the general climate of fear that prevailed in that time. The disarmament and freeze movements, the petition drives, the peace rallies, all were getting nowhere in their efforts to sway the public mind. In that time, the general sense was that the world was spinning right towards war and nothing was going to stop that mad rush short of hell. Optimistic conservatives hoped the president's "Star Wars" missile defense system would be completed before the Big Firework got touched off. Liberals, with increasing desperation, looked to something that would change the course of history before it was too late to save anything.
It was in this environment that The Day After was created. ABC Motion Pictures division president Brandon Stoddard had been inspired by the 1979 nuclear meltdown drama The China Syndrome to produce a similar drama depicting the aftermath of a full-scale nuclear war, in all its horrific dimension (or at least as far as Broadcast Standards and Practices would permit for a prime-time television show) and was quite willing to breast the inevitable storm of controversy the movie would draw. He readily recruited television screenwriter Edward Hume, who was attracted to the project as a chance to challenge the American public's perception of defending the United States with nuclear weapons. Hume launched into his task eagerly, interviewing scientists, doctors, and intensely studying Defense Department and FEMA information to buttress his screenplay's construction of the post-nuclear world that would result from such a war. Mr. Hume eventually spun out a script for a four hour film, intended as both a two-night "special event" for network television and theatrical release in a cut-down "road show" version. Getting the project moving proved difficult until Nicholas Meyer, just coming off cinematic success with Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan, agreed to helm The Day After as director after several other potential candidates for the job turned it down. Meyer, himself a staunch antinuclear partisan, hoped the movie would deny Ronald Reagan a second term in office before he managed to get the world blown up.
Meyer's vision for the project contrasted with Hume's. He did not see The Day After as anything other than a television event for one night, a glorified Public Service Announcement; reasoning that people wouldn't tune in for "two nights of Armageddon", and that he wanted to shock audiences used to seeing their usual weekly sitcoms, doctor shows and cop/detective shows. He also wanted no big name stars to distract viewers from the theme or to turn it into a standard Hollywood disaster movie. ABC partly agreed to Meyer's plan, but on condition that at least one star name be attached to the production, and thus Jason Robards was cast as Dr. Russell Oakes. Robards, also an antinuclear activist himself, joined the project on pretty much a handshake deal with Meyer during a plane ride. The network also originally wanted the two-night version in hopes of recouping advertising revenue on the US $7 million production. Meyer relented, and shot the four hour version, in 35mm widescreen format, and it took nine months in post-production to achieve the final cut of the film. Parts of The Day After were shot on location in the small city of Lawrence, Kansas and in Kansas City, Missouri. Lawrence, about as ideal a piece of Middle America as one could get, was the setting for the photoplay to emphasize the point that "There's no nowhere anymore". The mayor and residents of Lawrence readily agreed, partly because of the excitement of being involved in a major movie production (and for opportunities for garnering employment as extras and assistants in the film) and partly due to their town being located within the Minuteman field of Whiteman Air Force Base, a complex of 150 ICBM silos spread out across Missouri and eastern Kansas. The prospect of nuclear annihilation was a daily reality for the citizens of Lawrence, and Kansas City, Sedalia, and dozens of other towns within that field, and they wanted to be part of a movie that would say something about it.
News of the production leaked out months in advance, prompting boycott threats and organizing by the Rev. Jerry Falwell, arch-conservative activist minister and head of the misnamed "Moral Majority", as well as other conservative political groups such as Citizens For America, to suppress the movie. Some sponsors did cancel their advertising commitments, prompting the cut-down to a two-plus hour film airing on one night, which ended up perfectly suiting the plans of Nicholas Meyer. The Reagan White House received an advance video copy of the movie, as did nuclear freeze activists. Protest campaigns aimed at ABC management decrying the movie as "Soviet propaganda" designed to weaken America's will to defend itself and urging the showing to be canceled were quickly organized, flooding the network offices with protest phone calls, letters and petitions. The Reagan administration, desiring no interruption of its military and foreign policy plans, attempted to persuade ABC to shelve the film and, when that failed, to prepare a public response to it. Such governmental attention to a nuclear war film had not been seen since the Eisenhower administration's responses to Stanley Kramer's production of the Nevil Shute doomsday novel On The Beach (1959). Both William F. Buckley Jr. and Ben Stein, conservative columnists (the former being the longtime editor of National Review and host of the PBS political discussion program Firing Line, the latter a former Nixon flack, some-time actor, comedian, commercial pitchman and game show host), penned hyperbolic and "satirical" pieces about the movie, suggesting ABC should also make a drama depicting America under Soviet military occupation following its defeat in a war with the Communist superpower. As it turned out ABC would do exactly that sort of production four years later in the form of the boring miniseries Amerika, which brewed its own firestorm of controversy and protest from the very same right wingers who suggested it in the first place.
There were powerful elements in the American body politic who wanted The Day After never to air. They almost got their wish. Not because of their protests or any of their behind-the-scenes machinations against the network, but because, in reality, there actually almost was a nuclear war.
Just two and a half months before the scheduled airdate of the fictional destruction of the world, the Soviet government, made paranoid over the prospect of an American first strike because of Reagan administration rhetoric and various American provocations in that period, was nervously watching the NATO military exercise codenamed Able Archer, the third such exercise in Europe held that year, and which was assumed by the KGB and the Soviet military intelligence leadership to be preparations for an actual attack. The world almost ended for real on September 26th, 1983 when Russian air defense radars picked up what appeared to be an ICBM launch of five missiles from North America. The duty officer at the console then, Col. Stanislav Petrov, kept his head when standing orders almost dictated immediate launch-on-warning, and sought confirmation of a signal from a system he knew had possible defects, also reasoning that the United States would make a massive launch of hundreds of missiles and not just one or five. He got confirmation of his suspicions, and did not pass on the false warning to superior command authority. There was no war. It would prove to be the last nuclear scare of the Cold War, and The Day After remained just a fictional drama and aired as scheduled. But not one person who watched or protested the movie at the time ever knew just how close they came to a fiction becoming an all-too horrific reality.
The Day After premiered on ABC on Sunday, November 20th, 1983, at 8 p.m. EST. The movie garnered a viewership of one hundred million persons, the largest audience for any single television program up to that point and one of the largest in television history outside of an international sporting event or the Apollo moon landings. Nothing like it had been seen on American network television before. It was a unique cultural event bringing the nation together to witness its own devastation. Because of the potentially psychologically upsetting nature of the production as it was reckoned then, press kits and toll-free counseling hotlines manned by trained psychologists were offered to the public to help prepare and soothe audiences and especially young viewers who might witness the cataclysm and not know how to process it emotionally. Schools had already planned discussion groups for their students who watched the film. Nationwide, the movie was viewed in groups meeting in churches, libraries, schools, and auditoriums. A two-minute introduction featuring John Cullum (the farmer Jim Dahlberg) aired prior to the beginning of the film, to prepare viewers for the spectacle they were about to watch and warning parents of the program and its very intense material. A one-minute PSA spot on behalf of a peace campaign filmed by and featuring actor Paul Newman aired during the movie. The second half of the drama depicting the nuclear attack and aftermath ran without commercial interruption, and a disclaimer after the final scene stating that what viewers had witnessed was likely far less catastrophic than the probable effects of a real full-scale nuclear attack was projected on screen. Following the credits was a listing of a number of scientific and military publications about the possible effects of nuclear war. Candlelight vigils for peace were held following the movie in several American cities. Afterward, also unprecedented, came an airing of a special ninety minute ABC News Viewpoint panel discussion program hosted by Ted Koppel and, before a live studio audience, presented as guests William F. Buckley Jr., philosopher and Holocaust author Elie Wiesel, defense and nuclear governmental advisor Brent Scowcroft, former Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, and astronomer Dr. Carl Sagan, popular from his Cosmos television series, his books, and appearing on the panel after the publication of the first intensive study of the possibility of nuclear winter, on which he was one of the participating scientists. Also briefly joining the discussion, to give the White House reaction to the movie by satellite from Washington D.C., was Secretary of State George Schultz; immediately demonstrating how sensitive the Reagan administration was to public perception of the nuclear war they had just watched. In Kansas City, site of multiple nuclear strikes in the movie, the Viewpoint discussion program was aired on a tape-delay to make time for local ABC affiliate KMBC to air its own special discussion program with panelists and a studio audience, with viewer reaction to the movie, and a truncated ten-minute news segment prior to the network special. And as this special edition Viewpoint program began, Ted Koppel took a moment to advise his audience to take a deep breath and look out their windows, adding "It's all still there". While Buckley used his time to argue the position that Soviet rule would be worse than a nuclear war and urged increased deterrence buildup, and Kissinger condemned the movie as simple-minded, and the panelists generally discussed history and policy, Sagan talked of the nuclear winter study which demonstrated the radical climate alteration that would result from a full nuclear exchange, with months of heavy cloud cover blocking the sunlight, freezing surface temperatures and destruction of agriculture. Dr. Sagan then pronounced a signature analogy of the superpower deadlock: "Imagine a room awash in gasoline, and there are two implacable enemies in that room. One of them has nine thousand matches, the other seven thousand matches, and each one is concerned about who's ahead, who's stronger".
In some ways, The Day After decidedly achieved its purpose. It was the first movie since On The Beach to state quite baldly that the only realistic outcome of a nuclear war was human extinction possibly, the end of human civilization certainly; a very bleak message bereft of any ultimately positive vision of a surviving America left just enough intact to eventually rise phoenix-like out of the ashes of the war. The film also took the position, as On The Beach did, that the actual instigator of the war was irrelevant, that both sides were guilty of creating the situation which made war inevitable. One scene in The Day After features Amy Madigan's character of the overdue-pregnant Alison Ransom at the University of Lawrence Medical Center —the only operating hospital left in Missouri— confronting Dr. Oakes:
"Hope for what? What do you think is going to happen out there? You think we're going to sweep up the dead and fill in a couple of holes and build some supermarkets? You think all those people left alive out there are going to say, "Oh, I'm sorry. It wasn't my fault. Let's kiss and make up"? We knew the score. We knew all about bombs, we knew all about fallout. We knew this could happen for forty years. But nobody was interested."
Ransom's accusation parallels a similar monologue by Fred Astaire's Dr. Julian Osborn in On The Beach:
"The trouble with you is you want a simple answer. There isn't any. The war started when people accepted the idiotic principle that peace could be maintained by arranging to defend themselves with weapons they couldn't possibly use without committing suicide. Everybody had an atomic bomb, and counter-bombs, and counter-counter bombs. The devices outgrew us. We couldn't control them. I know. I helped build them, god help me... Somewhere, some poor bloke probably looked at a radar screen and thought he saw something. He knew that if he hesitated for a hundredth of a second that his own country would be wiped off the map. So he pushed a button. And the world went... crazy."
On The Beach ended with the famous plot turn in which the surviving remnant of humanity in Australia, faced with the inexorable spread of the war's lethal fallout to their corner of the world, decide upon committing mass suicide instead of dying in agony from radiation poisoning, leaving no room at all for a hopeful outcome. The Day After has no such similar dramatic ending, just a winding down to the implied conclusion that the survivors of the war will slowly die off; left in the rubble of a hopelessly ruined world with no future to look forward to. Similar to another nuclear war drama of that same year which did go to theaters: Testament, starring Jane Alexander as a mother of three living in a distant suburb of San Francisco when the city and the rest of the country are destroyed in the war. Suddenly widowed, she is fated to watch her neighbors, her friends, and her own children die slowly and painfully.
In other ways, however, The Day After proves upon objective viewing to be a rather pedestrian and formulaic film. In the first hour, the pre-war phase of the story, we see a lot of standard movie-of-the-week tropes trotted forth, played out by a set of more or less stereotypical characters we're meant to care for and mourn when they get killed or hopelessly irradiated and their lives and hopes for the future crushed, all going through their melodramatic convolutions just before the world goes to hell, but from whom we're detached for the most part. And the one sequence which is supposed to be the most shocking and horrific in the whole production, the actual attack on the United States, is partially undermined by some sloppy staging of scenes featuring people still going through their normal, daily routines while quite oblivious that anything is about to go wrong: people at their offices conducting business at their desks, or in the movie theaters seated for the next show. Crowds of people are seen being vaporized at weddings, picnics, in hospital or at the shopping mall. There is a panoramic view of a full stadium crowd out for a college football game about to get underway just as Minutemen missiles launch off in the countryside. And all unbelievably juxtaposed with scenes of widespread panic in the streets of Lawrence and on the I-70 after twenty minutes beforehand of news radio and television carrying the reports of the rapidly deteriorating international situation.
Most laughably, there is the scene in which the Hendreys (Clayton Day, Antonie Becker), farmers who live right next to one of the Minuteman silos, are sneaking upstairs for some quick mid-morning sex. They leave their two kids to be babysat by the television which, at the very moment the parents are making for the stairs, interrupts the cartoons with the Emergency Broadcast warning tone and a clearly upset female news anchor reporting the detonation of three atomic warheads over invading Soviet troops in Germany. The parents, intent on their little carnal break, don't hear any of this. And the kids seem completely unengaged with a sudden and very frightening reality coming over the TV; not even trying to find mommy and daddy to ask what's going on.
The mere idea that there would be anything anywhere resembling mundane life during such a train of events still spinning forth is unspeakably ludicrous and damages the overall believability of the film. The British nuclear war telemovie Threads (1984), a production which makes both Testament and The Day After seem light entertainment by comparison, presents a far more graphic depiction of the disintegration of pre-war society just prior to the first bombs falling on Sheffield and its even more hideously graphic depiction of the post-war world, and remains as black and horrific in any viewing today as when it first aired on Channel 4 thirty-two years ago.
So yes, as far as nuclear doomsday movies go, The Day After is Romper Room material compared to far more hard-hitting dramas even of its time. But Romper Room material of this type would prove to have a profound impact upon an American public which had spent decades hardly even thinking about the real consequences of a nuclear war, given the effort by government along with pro-military and conservative political groups for thirty-five years previous to shield American minds from any sense of the horrors such a war would bring and how completely anything like normality would be swept away in an unparalleled catastrophe, and it proved to be hard viewing for such a cosseted audience.
In the weeks that followed, The Day After was the feature cover story of the three major news magazines on the stands: Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News And World Report. While the right-wing New York Post blared charges of treason against director Nicholas Meyer for "doing Yuri Andropov's work for him" and Buckley's National Review thundered that the film was "pro-Soviet", the longtime children's television broadcaster Fred Rogers aired a week of Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood episodes under the umbrella title "Conflict" to help young viewers process the violence they might have seen in the movie. The national conversation on nuclear war changed, with the public reexamining wholesale the issues of defense, deterrence, and survivability. And, unknown to the public and to the Soviet leadership at the time, The Day After had even gotten to President Reagan. Up until his own viewing of the movie, Reagan was every bit the stereotypical "nuclear cowboy" he was publicly seen to be; who openly doubted at a National Security Council briefing whether Soviet leaders were capable of feeling or understanding fear, and who had just made his big push for the Strategic Defense Initiative antimissile system to render the Soviet nuclear force useless, or so he hoped. But after watching the movie in the privacy of his Camp David retreat the previous month, he wrote in his diary:
"Columbus Day. In the morning at Camp D. I ran the tape of the movie ABC is running Nov. 20. It’s called THE DAY AFTER in which Lawrence, Kansas is wiped out in a nuclear war with Russia. It is powerfully done, all $7 million worth. It’s very effective and left me greatly depressed…"
According to Reagan biographer Edmond Morris, it was the only admission by the preternaturally optimistic president to ever being depressed about anything. It also was not long afterward that Reagan's overheated and irresponsible nuclear rhetoric began cooling down. Following the ascension of reformist Mikhail Gorbachev as Soviet Premier, Reagan turned from confrontation to negotiation, reaching an accord with the Soviets to bring about the elimination of intermediate range nuclear forces in Europe, and later laying the groundwork for strategic arms reductions; showing just how far Reagan's thinking had evolved at least in part because of this one ABC special event presentation.
The Day After would go on to win two of the twelve Emmy awards it was nominated for, got a repeat showing on ABC and theatrical releases in both America and Europe. Several of its cast members, including John Lithgow, Steve Guttenberg, Bibi Besch, Amy Madigan, and Stephen Furst went on to more productive careers in film and television. The film also seemed to bring about the onset of what could be called 1980s New Wave Atomic Cinema: Threads, Special Bulletin, Where The Wind Blows, The Manhattan Project (also with John Lithgow), Whoops Apocalypse and Ground Zero all coming out within a three year period of The Day After's airing. Also premiering in that time was the fictional docudrama Countdown To Looking Glass, a 1984 Canadian production for the cable network HBO starring longtime CBC newsman Patrick Watson as CVN network news anchorman Don Tobin. The movie featured real-world television news and governmental luminaries such as Eric Sevareid, Nancy Dickerson, Lincoln Bloomfield, Paul Warnke, Robert Ellsworth, Sen. Eugene McCarthy and Congressman Newt Gingrich in the cast, along with actress Helen Shaver and a then relatively-unknown Scott Glenn as CVN field correspondent Michael Boyle. Based on a professionally-modeled wargammes scenario, events are presented as a series of news reports covering the relentless march towards holocaust, with a couple of minor romantic gyrations here and there but more or less sticking strictly to telling the main story of a world going mad. The movie ends inconclusively, with a final shot of the presidential command aircraft, codenamed "Looking Glass" taking off from Andrews Air Force Base in Washington and clawing for the sky as the voice of the Emergency Broadcast System takes over the network. At that moment, however, the scene freezes and a shrill tone similar to the phone-melting sound effect from the nuclear war drama Fail-Safe (1964) is heard as the movie fades to black. It was the first such original cable TV drama produced for HBO and the pioneering entry in the genre of original made-for-cable movies and series.
Thirty-three years later, it is easy to view The Day After as the flawed and rickety production it is, and the movie's shock-value has faded almost down to the same level as Panic In The Year Zero! (1957). But the film's appearance came at just about the most critical time in world history when the possible life or death of mankind was at stake, cracking open the wall of self-protective ignorance America had built up to insulate itself from the ugly realities of the nuclear world. It instantly smacked one hundred million Americans with a vision of their country laid waste and with no outside world left to help pick up the pieces afterward. The movie profoundly changed the trajectory of public opinion and the thinking of a reactionary president. Six years afterward, the Berlin Wall came down and the Cold War ended, and the human race at the very least received a stay of execution that continues to this day.
In the final analysis it could fairly be said that, despite its defects but because of its timing, The Day After proved to be possibly the single most important movie ever made.
For further reading:
http://www.pages.drexel.edu/~ina22/301/hnrs301texts-Day_After.htm
http://www.conelrad.com/atomicsecrets/secrets.php?secrets=12
http://conelrad.blogspot.com/2010/08/nuclear-landscape-look-back-at-day.html
http://www.screeningthepast.com/2013/06/fallout-on-the-beach/
http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB43/
http://militaryhistorynow.com/2013/05/20/the-cold-war-heats-up-new-documents-reveal-the-able-archer-war-scare-of-1983/
http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB426/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alarm_incident
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