'Television Event' about the making of classic 'The Day After' (1983)
Tuesday, November 17, 2020 at 12:30PM By Glenn Dunks
I didn't expect to be throwing in an extra review from DOC NYC but I wanted to bring to your attention a film that is relevant to the interests of many Film Experience readers. The film is Television Event, a wonderful documentary about the making of The Day After (1983).
In a 24-hour news cycle full of of doom and terror, even young audiences are not blind to the world’s ills due to social media and a rapidly politically engaged society. That wasn’t the case in 1983 when Nicholas Meyer’s The Day After aired on ABC to an audience of an estimated 100-million people. The made-for-television movie brought the Cold War into American living rooms in a way that had never quite been done before.
There had not been any prime-time newscast announcing the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, of course. But for many viewers of The Day After, even though it was fictional, the power of its message and its images made them feel as if they had just borne witness to something of that magnitude...