Angry Planet - The Movie That Scared Ronald Reagan Into Nuclear Détente

Episode Date: December 4, 2023

Forty years ago, a made for TV movie aired on ABC that changed the world. It was called The Day After, and it depicted life in Kansas and Missouri after a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union. More than 100 million people watched it when it aired. One of them was president Ronald Reagan.“I ran the tape of the movie ABC is running on the air Nov. 20. It’s called “The Day After.” It has Lawrence Kansas wiped out in a nuclear war with Russia. It is powerfully done—all $7 mil. worth. It’s very effective & left me greatly depressed,” he wrote in his diary after watching an early screening in 1983. “So far they haven’t sold any of the 25 spot ads scheduled & I can see why. Whether it will be of help to the ‘anti nukes’ or not, I cant say. My own reaction was one of our having to do all we can to have a deterrent & to see there is never a nuclear war.”This week on Angry Planet, we talk with David Craig about his new book Apocalypse Television: How the Day After Helped End the Cold War. More than just a “making-of” story, Craig’s book is a reminder of the transcendent power of art to change the world.Angry Planet has a Substack! Join to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in conflict.https://angryplanet.substack.com/subscribeAngry Planet has a Substack! Join to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in conflict.https://angryplanet.substack.com/subscribeSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. So this is, this is the danger of having a conversation at 3 p.m. the day before Thanksgiving, right? Hey, this is what I'm at my best. I can't speak for the rest of you guys. Well, I'm just excited about the holidays coming up so I can actually get the work done that I need. to do during my weekdays. It's been that kind of year. There's a meme going around that says growing up means convincing yourself that next week it'll get easier. I like the one where it's just like a stick figure and he's like, I just need to get through this week.

I just need to get through this week as this big cloud just keeps growing and growing. And you know, you get to next week and it's it's never better. Well, a big cloud growing and growing sounds like a transition to me. Yes. What's a lovely segue. Can you introduce yourself to the people and tell us about the book we are here to discuss? My name is David Craig. I'm a clinical professor at USC in the Annaberg School for Communication and Journalism.

I'm a visiting scholar right now at Harvard in the Berkman-Klein Center in the Institute for Rebooting Social Media. And I'm the author of Apocalypse Television, How the Day After Helped. in the Cold War. Fantastic. Oh, by the way, I'm Jason Fields, if I remember, right. And Matthew Galt is the other guy. You're on the microphone. They know who we are at this point.

So I loved you kind of, you blind emailed me. I think after seeing one of the other things I'd written about in Vice, and I was so excited, I didn't know this book existed. And I was so excited to get a copy of it. Because this is one of my favorite, favorite, favorite Cold War anecdotes. is that Reagan watched the day after and it depressed him. And there's other things going on, obviously, but was part of what spurred him into action towards, like,

trying to draw down a lot of this nuclear stuff. And this is a thing that we know is true. It's not just apocryphal because he wrote about it in his personal diary. Like it is something that he felt compelled enough to write. down and is like Ian you can go and look at it in the archive if you want to his thoughts on this particular movie but let's back way way way up because there's a lot more going on in this book than just I mean it's primarily about the day after but I was really interested in where you start in the prologue and kind of talking about you know what was going on

when you wrote the prolog and like what were some of the television shows kind of running through your mind. So can we start there? Can you tell me that story? Sure. As much as this is a history book for some, to me, it's a how to book for today. It's a primer for the fact that we are still sitting at the precipice of not one, but a number of existential crises that we're facing. And as we were sitting down through, oh, I'll obliquely refer to some political upheaval populist movements going on around the world that seemed to portend a lot of the same patterns from the 20th century that caused great ruptures in the way civilizations were operating. And then we were watching the re-emergence of new Cold War superpower contestations now with an even more

powerful and more mysterious and more challenging opponent. if you will, in China. And then, of course, the worldwide epidemic had emerged when I was finally sitting down to write this. And I was finding tremendous parallels to the last pandemic that we had just, that for many have still not dissipated, that we're still dealing with around the world 40 years later. And then, of course, I sit down to write the book and I turn on the television, I'm thinking that I'm taking a moment's breather. and I'm watching almost the exact scene that I was just describing in the book of a nuclear power plant on the verge, possibly of being destroyed and disintegrated and causing a mass, mass extinction event in that area. And in this instance, it was because the Russians were invading Ukraine and bombing the Zyperincia nuclear power plant. And I was having almost a surreal out-of-body moment thinking I'd stepped into a time warp or something because this,

was the opening sequence in the book around the author of the day after, the man who conceived the idea of watching the same scene in the China syndrome and thinking, well, what would happen if this were not a nuclear power plant, but a nuclear attack? So the book is, I think, it's a deep dive into like the creation of this monumental made-for-TV movie that shook up an American president. but it also, I think, is about the transformative power of art and also these little bits of pop culture ephemera that we've forgotten. And I want to focus on the China syndrome because I think it's like, I don't think there's even a place to stream it now. No?

I don't think so. I think that that's like, because I was looking for that and I was looking for the Karen Silk movie that's got. Silkwood. Yeah, Silkwood. And I couldn't find that either because I wanted to watch that. There was this weird, there was this run kind of in the 70s through the 80s of these high profile movies about the nuclear industry in America, not just nuclear weapons, but also like the power plants and the people that like manual, like the people that work in this industry. Can you tell us about China syndrome and like why it's important and why it sets the stage for all of this? Sure. Well, just to say that I have a lot of anecdotal evidence that could take up the entire podcast of how throughout the history of Hollywood filmmakers, storyteller, studio executives, programmers have found the means to occasionally foreground social issues and urgent existential matters in the form of entertainment. But for a purpose, these were obviously.

often referred to as message movies in the day, which was almost a pejorative. And television movies in particular found that metier, it found a much more welcome site for a social issue and topic-themed kinds of stories that foreground these issues in the 70s. But every now and then feature films, particularly in that era, would address these topics. And the topic of the day that was most pressing, or one of the most depressing topics, was, of course, the threat of nuclear war and a nuclear.

power. So China Syndrome was a one of those message movies that got made that was very much in the character-driven model of, you know, kind of a hero's journey that's set against the, a what-if disaster movie scenario of a the meltdown of a nuclear power plant. Now, audiences up until that moment had never heard of the China syndrome and who knows what they imagine it meant. but once they saw the movie, they fully understood that this spectacular power source had the capacity to cause spectacular damage and man-made facilities to prevent that from happening were fundamentally always flawed and at risk. So it was a dramatization of what could happen in those scenarios. And it featured people like Jane Fonda, who was renowned for taking on such important causes. and oh, I'm just blinking on his name, but my, the actor.

But anyway, yeah, it was a pretty powerful film that was successful in its own right. And as I mentioned, the program executive at ABC saw the movie, and that's where he conceived of the idea for a television movie based on a similar premise of what would happen if there was a nuclear attack on the United States. But here's what made this eBird issue even more urgent is that around three weeks after China syndrome came out in theaters, the real world version of this appeared at Three Mo Island in Pittsburgh, outside of Pittsburgh. With the world almost experienced its first ever China syndrome came perilously close and caused a huge amount of destruction within the region.

That pales in comparison, of course, to what happened just four years. years later in Chernobyl. But it was really the first evidence that we had that we were not, we were not yet equipped to manage and handle this enormous power that we'd been given by Oppenheimer and that it was, it was likely, very likely that we were going to be headed down a spectacularly perilous path if we didn't come back. I remember some of the pop culture that was around this at the time, including the Pepsi syndrome, which was the Mad Magazine take on the whole thing. And it was someone, of course, knocked over a Pepsi onto one of the consoles, and that was the end of the world, basically, if I remember right? Oh, this is an S&L

skit. Oh, this, you know what this revises me of? Remember when S&L did a remake of Citizen Kane? And it It turns out it wasn't rosebud. It was roast beef. And he was choking on a sandwich. We've, Matthew, I'm not sure this is the tone of the podcast. Did we miss the brief?

Like it's the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. It's the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. We're talking about TV shows and movies. And if you, if you can't laugh at nuclear disasters, what can you laugh? laugh at. Well, that's just it, right? You know, as Matthew has described in previous accounts, you either place these contextually within horror movies, because that was the only way we could

process this information was in the guise of a horror movie or a disaster or some sort of dystopian science fiction fantasy, or we put it over in some sort of category where we had to laugh about it because the alternative was far too grim. But once in a while, once in a while, feature films and television movies could come out with a straight-for. in your face, very serious, if not some wildly dystopian account of what's very likely to happen if we don't change policy patterns, the course of history, etc. And that's what the day after is, right? And what it set out to do.

It was conceived in this way, right? It was meant to be maybe a polemic is the wrong word, but it was meant to frighten and show. you know, you mentioned the executive. It was Brandon Stoddard. I think I'm saying that correctly. Can you tell us about him and like why he wanted to make something like this? Absolutely. And it's just a reflection of the fact that this was not a coincidence or luck that this movie came out and achieved what it did.

There were other extenuating circumstances that I know we'll probably discuss. But Brandon Stoddard had been at the network at ABC for over decade. He'd earned his way up to prime. time by having handled children's Saturday morning television where he also brought Schoolhouse Rock in because he saw this is an opportunity to not only capture kids' attention, but also use that to educate in ways that might make kids more interested through not only state-of-the-art animation in the time, but now when you look back, the best jazz music we've ever heard, you know, that really instilled indoctrinated jazz to a whole generation of us. You're like,

Junction, Junction, we know that tune. And then he migrated over to, he took over all of daytime television and not only took on soap operas, but introduced the after-school special, which in many ways was a continuation of 50s health movies that used to be shown in the classroom. Instead, these were combining a Hollywood cinematic storytelling with a educational, usually a health communication type message for kids who were in the 70s increasingly coming home from school without parental supervision with nothing else to do and their parents weren't there to supervise and this was a great way for them to continue to learn but also do so in the form of

usually what we call would call them teen y a stories now um so he had a very strong uh commitment to harnessing the power of the medium as did his colleagues um not only to make money but to also educate. He came from a generation of program executives. And I don't know if you saw the quote in the book, but it's one of my all-time favorite quotes. Someone who worked with Brandon said that we all understood from our research that television was the only book on the shelf. It's my favorite quote. I love that quote because he said, you know, so we were very aware we had some responsibility. Does that mean that they didn't make crap an exploited affair? Of course they did. Of course, did. But where they could, where those opportunities afford themselves, where they had particular

power, license, strategy opportunity, they would come in and produce these, particularly in the TV movies, these issue-oriented message movies. So Brandon had had a huge, huge cultural hit with Roots, the miniseries. And in fact, it was one of the reasons he became known as the father of the miniseries. For those listening today, the miniseries is what we call a limited series, but we don't, because it's no longer many. But it became clear to Brandon that in his role as the head of TV movies and then also the head of ABC Circle Films, which is their feature film division, he had a platform where

he not only could make money for the network, but also address and foreground. social issues that really matter. Thank you so much for like bringing back all of my childhood. I mean, I know that Matthew is trying to keep up with this, but I was there. I remember these movies after school and the various lessons. It's funny. I was thinking about by the time I was a teenager like that, after school special was a joke, right? it's hard for me to conceive of anyone ever taking them seriously.

You were watching Total Request Live over on MTV and seeing Brittany show up in Times Square. Wasn't that your jam? Yeah, that was my, that was my era. You know, that was like, that's what was on after school. I wasn't here to learn anything. I beg to differ with you. I know the executives who put on those MTV shows, including real world, which was, in many instances, one of the most profoundly influential films or a series.

sorry, to address social issues, but in the form of this spectacularly salacious concept of, let's take a bunch of sexy, hot, diverse, 20-somethings into a social experiment and throw them in a house for three months and see what happens. And you saw so many important critical issues around identity and representation and queerness and AIDS and sexuality and gender and race were foreground in your era, Matthew. So every era has different formats. and different types of pop culture that come along and reflect and make us think more deeply about who we are and how we might be better. What do you think then? I guess what I'm missing now, and this is a tangent, but I want to go down the road, is there anyone doing similar work now?

And can I just not see it? Because the media landscape feels very fractured and catered to Tunisians and also more cynical. but also like I don't have kids I'm probably just not seeing I guess there's bluey right everyone loves bluey and that's not

and that's not cynical is there anything similar now do you think I would let's say how much time do we have I I'm renowned for being far too celebratory of these things but I would argue that the environmental message

in the last two episodes The last two Avengers movies were profound, and the debates that people were having around Thanos were in many ways spot on and deliberate and consciously part of the critique, as was the anti-fascist messages of decades of Star Wars and Harry Potter, as was the queer closeted messages that were being emitted through X-Men. but I'll also digress into other areas. Craig Mason is the heir parent, I think, of the Brandon Stoddard kind of model of, let's harness the medium to bring in the biggest possible audience to then also elevate and escalate issues that are of interest to us. So, of course, we all know about his success with Chernobyl, which, again, what made this so remarkable is it was not only hugely successful on HBO, but it went on to,

almost instantaneously across streaming platforms around the world, both legally and illegally, even in Russia, where received history of Chernobyl was totally different. So we saw that if that happened. And I would argue that the last of us. The last of us is, should be pure Galtean. It is. You've got, yeah, it is. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it is, it should be.

because every episode is set, of course, in a post-apocalyptic account with zombies that we almost never see, but each and every episode is a mirror on contemporary society and who we are and how we could be better. And, of course, the queer-themed episode itself is so profound and moving. It's, I think, probably the best hour of media. I can't call it TV anymore that we've seen in years. And it resonated in spaces no one could have ever imagined and people who would never dream of watching a zombie film. So I think those are examples of where those narratives are being told. But I'm going to save for later my discussion about creator culture and social media, which is an area that I've been researching and writing about for 10 years now.

And I would point out that the first, what is the first scene of The Last of Us TV show? It's a scene that is not in the video game is like a firing line style 1970s chat program where they're talking about the fungus that is going to be, I wouldn't even say the antagonist, but like the thing that causes the apocalypse. And what is he like, what does he warn about? Like, oh, if things get too hot, if the world heats up, it could create. the perfect environment for this thing to thrive. That's exactly what I hope. It's all parable for climate change, right? But you have on top of that, the COVID crisis, which, you know, every time these epistemic

kind of events occur in the world, whether it's the rise of structurally different ideological positions around how we organize the societies, democracy, fascism, communism, it's nuclear power, nuclear war, nuclear energy, or it's the capacities of pandemics to to, and nature basically to rise up and eliminate us because we've been terrible stewards of the planet. That's right. We've sinned. Yeah, it always introduces new waves of critical pop culture. And I use that phrase deliberately critical in the sense that it's pop culture that is designed to make us think about the power we yield in the world and the power relations that we exercise in the world, the way in which we treat others and treat our planet.

Oh, my God, it's the flood over and over again. It was flood. Okay, sorry. My mind is wrong. Anteiluvian. I love that word. Wow, that is a great word. Wow.

Okay. All right. I'm going home now. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. Let's bring it back to the day after. put a pin. I do want to talk about, I do want to get your thoughts on the social media stuff towards the end of the conversation. So let's put a pen in that. But there's a great paragraph at the opening one of these chapters. How is the creative team responsible for the day after

like a classic vaudeville joke? Oh, I can't even remember the exact framework, but you know, I wanted to hook people into that, that portion of the chapter, which is, you know, in many ways, it was a symbol, Avengers assemble, right? It was the A-Team. It was the seven samurai. It was every great, you know, collective kind of superhero movie always has an origin story. How did these people wind up all having to work together and collaborate around these things? So yeah, I think we brought in the ABC executives that work for Brandon, who were charged for taking on and managing the project from Stu Samuels to Steve White, we brought in one of the most remarkable lovely human beings I've ever spoken to in my life, Ed Hume, who just passed away a month ago, who was the screenwriter, who had made a career out of writing spectacularly successful pilots for detective shows. And at night he would also write TV movies that featured in foreground social issues, assuming that none of those would ever get made.

But some did, including a mini-series about the Munich Olympics. And so I like to call him Batman. So he was living a double life. But he couldn't believe it the day that his agent got him a meeting with Brandon to pitch his idea of what he would do for. post-apocalyptic look at America after an attack. And what it turned out was one of those rare instances where they already had kind of a Vulcan mind-meld. I'm using Vulcan deliberately.

You know where I'm going here, right, Matthew? And so he walked out of the room, shocked that Brandon had agreed to everything that he pitched because Brandon had already concluded that's the story he wanted to tell, a story that was set in the heartland that avoided politics, that did not. in any way engaged with, you know, the geopolitics or, you know, generals and pentagons and, and, uh, and warfare and, and tanks and, and so forth. He wanted this to be what television does, which is, let's take the banal and then make it a spectacle. So it was, uh, designed from the get go as, you know, a good hour and a half of character building about the most

mundane lives of Midwesterners that everyone watching in TV would immediately identify with, and then another hour of watching that completely disintegrate after the bombs draw. So the script came through, and Brandon called Hume and said, congratulations. Apparently Brandon was so kind of blown away. Everyone was by the script that they almost wept. And when he told Hume that his project was getting. made, Hume was despondent, which is weird. You spend two years writing a three-hour movie and

you find out they're making it and you're depressed. And it turns out, as Ed said, can you imagine what it's like waking up each day thinking about the end of the world? That just kind of tells you a lot about the character and the nature of who Hume was, just spectacularly profoundly conscious. It's a hard sell, you know. The story is a hard sell, I think. Because it doesn't have like the entire script

it doesn't focus on there are heroes in it, right? But not in the traditional way we would think of like a hero today in a story. And it doesn't have it doesn't have a happy ending really. No, you know. There's no salvation.

Yeah, there's no real catharsis. And like I think that it's funny. I'm just, working through this as I'm thinking, like, as I'm, I'm working through the thought as I have it. I think that that's something that marks a lot of the really great nuclear fiction for me is that you are left at the end of it with a, what the hell do I do with that kind of feeling? That there is no catharsis. There's no resolution. Or if there is a resolution, it's that things are demonstrably worse, right?

threads obviously which we will get into and the war game are like the big ones for me in this the day after right I'm going to commend you on mentioning the war game which is to me a spectacular twist in this whole story is that it was the plot of all those movies including testament were already done and it was already written and it had already been made 30 years before 20 years before by the BBC

who chickened out and didn't want to air Peter Watkins pseudo-documentary and didn't wind up throwing it out there in theaters theatrically and it won the best Oscar for documentary. Despite being a fictionalized account, it wins a best documentary Oscar. Yes. That's another podcast about how we've now ossified in these horrible taxonomies for what media content is.

And no one can tell me exactly what even a reality television even means. But yeah, so it's kind of a spectacular to think that there was an antecedent in that. I never got around asking Ed if he had seen the Wardock. But I think there's almost a IMO mythological kind of pattern that you saw emerge almost concurrently. We used to call it when I was pitching in Hollywood where they would buy a similar project and two movies that were on the same theme would be made at the same time like Asteroid

movies and so forth. They would call it the collective subconsciousness, and you realize they weren't using the words correctly. But Threads, testament, the day after, they all have the same premise. They just have different budgets and different audiences, but almost the exact same premise. I mean, those are fighting words for people who, you know, believe that Threads is an infinitely better movie, but the day after is important, and I love the day after, but Threads is I like threads better. And mine is testament, so there you go. But, you know, it's just, there's a great book on atomic cinema by a scholar named Jerome

Shapiro, to go back to your original comment, there's been over a thousand movies, or I think you said it in a previous interview, but there's been over a thousand movies that have foreground or put nuclear war in the background. and in many instances, various ways in which filmmakers and storytellers were desperate to try to elevate these issues and concerns beyond just the choir, the people who are already concerned about that. I would say, though, there's also the element. These are the stories that human beings want to hear. I mean, when you think about the fact that the Book of Revelations is actually something. somehow stuck there at the end of, you know, the New Testament, where they've tried to kick it out

four or five different times over the centuries, but people really like it. And, I mean, it's the one that you can get behind, and there's a number of the devil and, you know, all sorts of fun stuff, the horror of Babylon, whatever the, I mean, as he babbled on. But anyway, I mean, the point to me is partially, like, this human-made apocalypse is perfect. I mean, it fulfilled something in humanity that we need, that we need to see the end of everything. And we just, you know, how does it end? How does it all end? And I just think it's interesting. There's just something there that goes beyond looking at reality of what after the nuclear war would look like and just gives us some need. It fulfills it, you know?

I'm going to shut up now. It shouldn't. It shouldn't have worked, right? It shouldn't because this is even in the, in most of the narratives that you see on television and films, there's still going to be a third act. There's still going to be a way to come back from. There's a, the climax should come after. And I'm going to make the argument and see if we can really twist our audience into a pretzel here. but I'm going to make the argument that Oppenheimer was a two-act structure.

It was the explosion, everything leading up to the explosion, including his whole backstory, and then, of course, spending the rest of his life futilely, spoiler, trying to put the genie back in the bottle. I'm also going to argue that this book and the events surrounding the day after is the third act. Yeah, absolutely. We live in the third act of the author. Oh, that's so great. I love that. There you go. Thank you. Yeah, I got points from Jason. Yes. This is if you will, Oppenheimer, the sequel. I think you're, you're absolutely right. We are the, we are the far away look in his eyes at the end of the at the end of the film, right? Like this is, as he reckons with what he's done, this is what he's done. We're in it. We live in it every day. Right. Although as you've raised in prior interview,

that has lulled us into thinking that we're out of it. No, no, no, no, no. All we did was temporarily pull back from the precipice. We haven't necessarily eliminated the threat of this energy, nor have we necessarily found even better ways to curtail the possible effects. So I would argue that it turns out even this is a limited series now. So we still have much more to try to do. and even going back to your reference to Silkwood,

which I would add, by the way, was produced by ABC Circle Films, which Brandon's daughter commissioned. So as the day after had aired, he was on his way to the premiere of Silkwood, a movie that he'd commissioned, which, of course, helped in many ways contribute to combined. I can't imagine one single person

having had as much profound an effect on the nuclear age. All right, Angry Planet listeners, we're going to pause there for, We'll be right back after this. All right, Inreplanet listeners, welcome back. We're talking Reagan and the day after. Can we talk about, I want to pick you, I want to take you up on your foreshadowing, your Star Trek foreshadowing.

Let's talk about the director of this, of the day after. Why? You're probably one of the most brilliant guys that you'll ever meet. Why did the person who just had the, who just saved the Star Trek franchise with wrath of con, slum it and make a TV movie? Yeah, that's the best. That's the seven main dollar question. He couldn't avoid what was this overwhelming sense of responsibility to try to bring

the world back from the precipice, period. He was willing to sacrifice what at that moment could have been not only money, fame, glory, all sorts of things. And that doesn't mean he walked away from feature films, but it was a detour. And it took him really not only off the feature map for a while, but it also took him deep into despair as through the process. But fundamentally, this came from someone, again, who shared a fundamental belief in the power of entertainment and Hollywood to reach unpersuaded and unaware audiences of the peril and risks out in the world. all within the guise of Hollywood cinematic narrative storyteller. And he wanted to draw blood, right? Like that was his intention.

I mean, he wasn't able to keep his political leanings at bay, although it was not permitted within the context of the film. The film was pretty much the script that was written. And so there was no introduction, for example, in fact, he was the reason the film did not feature, kind of explicit political account of who started the war. So ironically, he's the person who saved that from happening because of a bad judgment call on the part of the editors in the network.

But he did reveal himself as wanting desperately not only to pull us out of the madness mindset of Cold War thinking, but also to, in fairness, he was not a fan of Reagan. and wanted Reagan to go down and hope that this might persuade audiences that the path we were on led by Reagan at that moment was perilous. I don't think he had probably any idea that his movie would actually align with Reagan's beliefs, which had been really masked and held close to the vest. And Reagan was a, I don't know if you're ready to go into that, but the iron. here is that Reagan was a nuclear abolitionist. He really hated the bomb and did not believe, as his Pentagon officials did in a winnable nuclear war, but he wasn't pursuing a very effective strategy up until that moment. Let's pause real quick and let's describe the movie.

Okay, so the camera comes up. Amber waves of grain. We literally sweep across the mid-brose West, like the opening sequence of Dallas. I don't know if any of you, you won't remember that. Jason might. And we land in this very small town of Lawrence, Kansas, which is right outside of Kansas City. And it looks like anywhere in Middle America. But that includes the fact that it is surrounded by nuclear bombs. There are missile silos dotting the entire landscape, which the production mentioned that you couldn't, you couldn't. couldn't fly from Kansas or drive through Kansas City to Lawrence, which is about half an hour without seeing dozens of them. If you really could use a helicopter, you could really see

smack in the middle of all the cornfields where all these ICBMs. And then there was a military base in one direction, a nuclear power plant, in another direction. If there was going to be a place where the Soviets would like to attack to truly cripple our defense system, it wasn't inconceivable. It was rather deliberately thought of as Lawrence, Kansas, ground zero. So as much as people fear the attack happening in major city centers, this is where you would disable a lot of our nuclear deterrence and facilities. So we're in Kansas. And like you said, the first, the beginning of the movie is basically a relationship drama?

it's a soap opera it's a soap opera yeah with the thing that is going to affect all of their lives kind of a hum in the background right they're going to the museum they're getting married they're talking about having

you know teenage sex they're getting haircuts in the barber salon they're walking you know it is as bucolic if arguably dull and boring as you could possibly imagine which just makes it all the more remarkable on that audiences stayed through to the second half, but also why the movie, which had originally

been planned as a two-night event, would have never worked because audiences might not have made it all the way to the bomb dropping. The second half of the movie, so all of a sudden, in the middle of this film, which is an hour of screen time, but that's not including ad breaks, of which there weren't many, because there weren't many advertisers. All of a sudden, inexplicably, for reasons that aren't fully detailed in the film, and by design, they see the missiles take off, which they know means that if missiles are leaving, missiles will be landing. And everyone goes immediately into panic, and the streets are chaos, and people are racing to get to their homes and their families and to get to their get food from the shelves and to get down into their shelters and then boom.

It all happens. And it all happens in many ways as we probably had imagined from previous films, but it lays out in this spectacular montage sequence that goes on for about eight minutes. And they threw everything into that sequence. They had collected all sorts of footage. that they found of previous nuclear tests and effects and imagery. They applied some pretty spectacularly cheesy special effects of x-rays of skeletons of bodies to emulate the x-ray effect. You saw, of course, the less known, but even more profoundly disturbing EMP effect,

which was the fact that immediately upon impact all electronics would shut down, including cars and every technology that we own. And then, of course, the mushroom cloud, the famous mushroom cloud, which we talk about in the book. It's been described in other places, which was the hardest thing for them to recreate until by accident someone poured milk into a glass of tea. And when it hit the bottom, it exploded just like a mushroom cloud. And they just simply filmed that, turned it upside down, colored it, and boom, there you have it. Wow. Seriously. Seriously.

And it was almost like the day before they had to show the cut and they just were panicking. And all of a sudden they walked into the producer and said, take a look at this. Wow. I could really use some tea right. Okay. Well, you have to have milk in it. So you have to speak with a British accent. Can we talk for a second a little bit about, do you have anything in the book, which I apologize for not reading? because I know you love spring.

It's a graphic novel. Wait for the graphic novel, Jason. Okay. Yeah, that'll help me. Anyway, but do you talk much about what the effect on school kids? Because I just remember because I was one. And my junior high school said, okay, this movie's coming on. You can all go home and we'll talk about it tomorrow,

unless your parents won't let you watch it. Anyway, I just, so can you talk a little bit about what the, you know, things are going on around it? So what's fascinating is to remember, again, ABC had a very large commitment to educational television, which means they had a lot of partners with the National Teaching Association, partnered around ABC after school specials, that a whole department dedicated to educational research around the effects of television. And the data came back that suggested that there might be some very real reasons to be concerned about exposing children to this subject matter. And there was an exhaustive amount of focus group work and a lot

of prep in terms of sending out all sorts of educational curriculum. They went in and gave schools all sorts of recommended pedagogy, holding pre-sessions to talk about the film, advising parents about whether or not they should show the film. A lot of questions about whether or not it should come with a censor or an adult warning on the film. This was all part and parcel of the much bigger and broader and spectacular level of hype and hysteria that surrounded this film. And I suppose this is where I get to bring in one of my favorite subjects that's never been discussed before around the making this film was that it got hijacked by some

rogue publicist who had managed to get a hold of a copy, an early cut of the film, and had used that copy to get the news journalist to be interested in this subject matter and start writing about it and doing feature stories well in advance. But they also sent out press kits to hundreds, if not thousands of nuclear activist organizations who were already well aligned around this cause because we were at the peak of the nuclear freeze movement. So this became no longer just a piece of entertainment. It became a tool, a vehicle through which both sides of the nuclear debate wound up playing out their deepest fears and anxieties publicly in the press and in the media on the page of every magazine in every newspaper on the cover of every magazine through

op-eds and radio, television, broadcasting, which of course bought the film more PR marketing the you could, no one could afford to do today. It was a kind of once in a generation kind of event. And then there was also a big panel discussion about what the film meant, right, with some pretty, it was a pretty fascinating panel. Can you tell us who was on there? So it was, Ted Koppel was, the ABC News had been approached by the White House to air a, a news special after the movie in a way to try to not, only reframe the movie in their better interest and to promote their policy, but also to prevent moral panic. There was a genuine reason to think that the streets were going to go fill

up with people in total terror. I personally find this special called The Viewpoint to be more terrifying than the actual movie itself. It was a part of an experimental form that Ted Cople had introduced and ABC News had introduced, which was basically live public debate. And we can't even get our head around something like that today. And so featured on this panel were arguably

some of the most powerful and important public intellectuals of the air. So William F. Buckley and Casper Weinberger, I think. Carl Sagan, the astronomer. Ellie Wiesel, the Holocaust survivor.

a number of other Kissinger and Robert McNamara Oh, I don't know why I'm blanking on it because I won't keep watching it over and over again There are three things I'd like to highlight about that First was This movie ends on this spectacularly terrifying note

And it cuts to Ted Cople sitting at his desk saying Get up, look out your window as you can see, we're still here. I mean, I'm sorry, that gives me such spectacular chills. What you've just witnessed is something like the equivalent of Dickens, a Christmas Carol, which if you think about was almost spectacularly perfect framing for this. Because, of course, that whole point of a Christmas Carol was a morality tale. It was a message story, right?

And his job was to both keep us from screaming out. into the void, but also pay closer attention now to the debate that was about to occur. Then a bunch of these men sat around the table in the most civilized way and debated whether or not they thought the world would end. I think that was more horrifying that anything we'd witnessed in the film before. Just the fact that people could just very civilly say, oh, I don't know. my hunch says or my scientific beliefs would tell me or my ideology or my political philosophy tells me and it was such a crystallization of the fact that

even the most profoundly brilliant human beings could disagree over the most mortal kind of issues and then the third thing about that viewpoint special which you can all see online is that they then cut to audience questions now these were all pre-planned but still The audience questions were so much more profound, so much more powerful and meaningful, and really, I thought, crystallized what real Americans were more concerned about than these kind of esoteric debates about whether or not nuclear winter would happen. And to me, the viewpoint special is the double punch here. It's, it's, it, having that follow on the heels of the movie wound up delivering,

an infinitely more profound message. It's said to audiences, while you think you've watched some sort of disaster, Hollywood disaster, science fiction movie, we're going to sit around and debate the fact that it could possibly be true

one day. It's funny, because I think the first time I've learned about that special was before I'd come to the topic of nuclear weapons. I remember reading about it. I think it's in

amusing ourselves to death by Neil Postman. And he derides it. Yeah, of course. Like despises it. Because it's like kind of counter to his, his entire argument. By the way, the book, Apocalypse television was right below Neil Postman's book on the bestseller list over the weekend. Nice. Nice.

Yeah. So it's, it's kind of funny to have really come around, myself, to this point where we can't, you have to be people where they are and we the mediums change the mediums change and the messages that are transported through those mediums change but it doesn't you can't fight against the medium itself uh you'll lose and you'll end up writing something that like gen xers think is really cool uh briefly and then we'll be forgotten i think uh that was just an aside uh just like it was a weird way to first learn about this thing um well i'm actually going to to jump on that, Matthew, and say one of the first projects that I did around this topic was convincing a publisher to produce a graphic novel about Trinity. And it was designed explicitly for educational audiences. It has gone through multiple publications. My name isn't on it, but I can, I can show you the letter. And the editor basically said, no, you're absolutely right. This is an important thing. And it was designed for the fact that kids don't read history books, but they

read graphic novels. And they play video games that often have history in it. And so we, he, the editor managed to get the book out there. And that's managed to go through multiple publications. I did design a project that never got out the ground with the History Channel that was basically using game elements to recreate history. And the first topic was Trinity. So like you, I have a whole book of whole shell, entire shells filled with atomic bomb books because it's consumed to me. And I've always looked for vehicles and models to tell the story. And Apocco's television was originally a pitch for a limited series about the making of the most important movie ever made. And maybe it will be one day again.

But that was originally what I had tried to do as I don't think we've decided. discussed, I was a producer of TV movies for 25 years. This was going to be my swan song, my last hurrah, because to me it was the most important subject that I could possibly tell, which was the fact that once upon a time, but as in every time, storytellers came together to figure out a way to save the world, and they're going to have to do it again and again and again. Is the movie the reason why I don't wake up screaming anymore in the middle of the night? because I do remember watching it and going through that, am I going to wake up tomorrow thing through a big chunk of the 80s?

And I don't feel that same way, even though maybe Matthew, maybe you would tell me that I should because nuclear apocalypse is closer than I think. It's worse now. In some ways. Thanks, Matthew. I think it's probably been mitigated. Matthew is much more eloquent.

on why we don't still think about nuclear war the way we should. And I think it's, I think it's changed since that, that 2016 interview. I think it's changed pretty radically. Yeah. You know, when you've got,

it was this week or, it was last week, scientific American putting out that, like, just this enormous, uh, package that's got a documentary in this amazing reporting about the new nuclear age that we're entering into.

I have friends that are like pinging me like, why is everyone talking about nuclear modernization now? Like, great question. I would love to tell you. Here's why. Editors are more interested. My bosses really want to know about nuke stuff. They want new stories.

I think it's changed. I think that like the Trump era frightened people and have made people pay attention. And then Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer really, really, really has got, like, you know, that's an interest, that's an entrance point. And then people are like, hey, why is China building so many silos? Like, I didn't know about this. Like, wait, we're building new kinds of nuclear weapons? What's this Russian?

So it opens all these, all this stuff in people's brains. And it's becoming more, it's not like it was, I think, back in the 70s and 80s, but it's coming back around. Like the anxiety is starting to build again to answer the moment. Well, congratulations. humanity, it's not the only existential concern that we all are also trying to grapple with that, of course, climate change and of course geopolitical strife. And so that's really the point of why I even wrote this book is to say we once upon a time, this was all feeling very familiar to me.

And I was trying to figure out what we hear before, and it turns out we were. We wore in the mid-80s. We wore in mid-40s. The world has cycled through a number of these periods where everything could come to an end and we somehow have found the will and the wherewithal with the medium and the technology that we have to pull back from the brink. And

that's what I'm hoping audiences take away from reading, or sorry, readers take away from this book is that it is possible, but we have to pull out and meet people where they are to use your phrase. And use every arrow in the quiver

to try to get the message out there. can you then, can we use that as a transition to talk about what we put a pin in earlier? Can I get your thoughts on social media, TikTok, how we meet people where they are now? Sure. Well, as I mentioned, I've been studying this for 10 years. I've written three books on creator culture. I've now am lucky to be surrounded by hundreds of academics emerging young scholars who were very invested in this topic because we now know. that there's these powerful technologies called social media that have spectacular effects

that are everywhere around the world and in every sector of our society. And that the people who seem to be harnessing this technology are often very young people who don't fully understand or have an appreciation for the power of the medium, but also some nefariously horrible, awful people who use the medium in the most horrific ways, which has always occurred with every technology and every media that comes along. But the most important takeaway here is the fact that we cannot and shouldn't. It would be a mistake to describe social media as another version of 20th century mass communication. It is, in fact, not a narrative engine, as I'll use that.

It is not about producing copyrighted film and television intellectual property. It is a means for organizing communities. It's the social in social media that matters. And what creators, influencers, TikTokers, vloggers, game players, now numbering in the millions are doing, is they're organizing these communities and then making money off of that. Now, that may seem like a very horrible or unsettling thing to say, except that you have to take a moment to think that we are making money off of all sorts of patterns of socialization.

We always have for the minute we left the cave, probably while we were in the cave. But it is a fraught concept that there are hundreds of millions of people using these technologies, not only to share their values and their interests and their identities and their hobbies and their expertise, but they're also making money off of it. But it is also important to also understand that there are of those hundreds of millions of people doing this, people who are very much aligned around the same sorts of anxieties, fears, concerns that we have.

And what they have is a skill. They have this profound ability to organize communities around those interests and concerns. I call them online community organizers for profit. And a lot of the people who occupy nuclear non-proliferation organizations are desperate to figure out how to go online. And so there's a beautiful Venn diagram that can emerge that can be drawn between creators who need to make a living on these platforms but are also interested in sharing and advancing and enlightening and educating their community about the most critical concerns of our day and age. And activists and NGOs and civil society organizations who are equally as passionate about these causes that don't necessarily fully understand how to harness that technology. And there you have the future brand and starters of the world are more likely going to be on TikTok and YouTube and Twitch and Snap. And then they are necessarily across Netflix or Disney or HBO.

That makes sense to me, except for there's one thing that I wonder about with all of the individual creators. Don't you lose a lot by not having collaboration? They do have collaborators. I think it's a misapprehension to think that they do. don't. Tell me. Tell me. It's not like a lot of the, a lot of these personality driven channels, there is a lot more than just the personality in front of the camera, uh, working in the background. And also, I would also, I would also argue that one of the biggest strengths of these channels is that they are in collaboration with their audience in a direct way that previous

mediums are not. Matthew, are you a closet creator scholar that I didn't know about that I missed that interview? I did my, I thought I did my homework, but I I didn't fully realize you were already up to speed on this. Yeah. These are social entrepreneurs and part of being entrepreneur while they are running their businesses out of their bedrooms and their, and their home office are very deeply involved in what a scholar calls relational labor. And that is a sort of relationship that is not only between them and their community, but between them and other creators. And by the way, members of their community are very likely to also be creators. So it is, the unique nature of the networked nature of these technologies that allow for these collaborations

and these kind of communities to organize and grow and cross-pollinate. And I've been doing research over the last three months on this sort of world of creator activism and advocacy. And what's been so interesting is finding that for a lot of the organizations entering into the space, they're less interested in the creators who are already. explicit about these causes and these concerns, more interested in the people who built communities around a whole other set of concerns, let's say, I don't know, science fiction or our gameplay,

but then happen to also think this matters and are willing to find ways to organically raise these concerns to their community. Many of whom may also share these concerns. It's just not the center of the culture that they've, that they've built online. I need to talk to Noah Coldwell-Dravei. Have you ever, he's a YouTuber. You're familiar with the Fallout video games?

A little bit. I'm not a gameplay. Don't, I'm gonna hate me now. No, no, no, they're turning it into a TV. Oh yeah,

it'll be early next year. On Amazon, yeah. Yeah. He's a YouTuber. He does like these, he's one of these guys that will make like a nine-hour video about one video game.

It's like really in depth and kind of fascinating. he has one where he travels around America filming the locations of, like filming the real life locations from the fallout video games and talking about their relationship to the game and to nuclear, like American nuclear history. Like very fascinating stuff. So yeah,

there's like there's so much good stuff out there in these spaces that I think we would not not like the maybe older members of the audience would not traditionally think, uh, these kinds of stories and this kind of activism is happening. It's all out there. I'm so sad, but you're so right. You're so right.

Speaking as the, an older member of the audience. Uh, I, you know, no, you're, you're totally right.

I feel like I need a Google for this kind of stuff where I can easily, you know, pull it all together. Or will Google do it for me? Uh, increasingly no. Yeah. It's falling apart. I think JNAI may.

do it for you. Yeah. You may have to ask Chad GPT to make you the list. Yes. If it has a CEO. Or as my nephew tells me all the time, just Bing it. Wow. Wow.

But I do want to just leave on this one note is that this was, again, as much as I tried to write a pot boiler, a page Turner. or almost a murder mystery, if you will, of what the struggles and the battles that were waged around this project and this film and the surrounding set of extenuating circumstances that led to Reagan finally coming out as a nuclear abolitionist and changing, very dramatically changing his rhetoric in tone. I'll just add, by the way, the first group I ever spoke to about this book after was at the Reagan Library to a bunch of great historians, including the historian that I cite heavily in my book, who came and sat in the front row as I presented and read the chapter featuring her work. And they came up and said, no, he's absolutely right. There's two Reagan's. There's the Reagan before the day after. and then there's the Reagan after the day after,

and these are not the same two people. You can't, it's a very stark turn in rhetoric and policy that went on behind the scenes at the administration to come up with another way to not only bring the Soviets to the table, but to at one point put on the table eliminating every weapon in the world, nuclear weapon. So, yeah, this is a how-to book, I hope, not just a history book.

I used that reference before because I think we're going to need to figure out the latest ways, strategies to harness the media that we have today to reach the audiences where they're at. And the communities who care or may don't even realize they care. And that comes from a very different approach and it usually relies on the storytellers who know how to use the medium the best. David, thank you so much for coming on to Angry Planet and talking to us about this.

I'm sure you will be back. I much appreciate it. It's a pleasure really and an honor to get to talk to you. Thank you so much, you guys. That's all for this week. Angry Planet listeners, as always Angry Planet is me, Matthew Galt, Jason Fields, and Kevin O'Dell.

It's created by myself and Jason Fields. If you like us, if you really like us, AngryPlanetpod.com or AngryPlanet.substack.com. where $9 gets you early access to all of our shows. And there will be commercial free. And then the occasional bonus thing that we do, stay tuned there, some stuff coming down the pipe soon. Thank you all for your patience.

And putting up with us really does make the show enjoyable to be part of this community and to have you all around. We do listen to the feedback, by the way. I think that should be apparent from the last couple episodes. I will talk to you all soon. Maybe a little bit intermittent here going into the holidays and could be hard to get guests on. We'll be back. We'll steam in January.

I think Jason and I are going to record a couple of things to get us through December. We'll talk to you soon. We will be back soon with another conversation about conflict on an angry planet. Stay safe until then.