Day: August 13, 2006

Ya know, it seems like me and about six other people in the world remember this movie. It was a shot-mostly-on-video HBO production, made in Canada and aired in 1984, depicting a series of live news broadcasts about a series of events leading to the first exchange of nuclear weapons between the United States and the Soviet Union – an exchange taking place in, of all locales, the mouth of the Persian Gulf.
I remember seeing this movie played late one Saturday night, after an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, on KHBS (ironically, the station I now work for), in 1988 or so. As I was already taping Star Trek, I wound up taping this is well, though something later happened to that tape and it’s long since gone; in any case, it was broken up by commercial breaks in a way that I don’t think, even today, live breaking news of this magnitude ever would be, to say nothing of the constant crawling disclaimer at the bottom that THIS IS ONLY A MOVIE.
The thing is, unlike another “fake newscast” scare favorite of mine, Without Warning,, the fact that it was a movie was blatantly obvious. For whatever reason, the writers and producers decided to go “behind the scenes” and show some personal drama in the newsroom – big whoop. To emphasize the change, these segments were shot on film, giving the whole thing a bizarrely BBC-esque feel (as in Monty Python’s “We’re on feeeeelm suddenly!!”) for something made in North America.
Still, toward the end, it’s got that same great zinger as Without Warning – i.e. showing you all hell breaking loose and then cutting to a faked Emergency Broadcast System signal. Supposedly, Countdown To Looking Glass was based on a real military study of a possible scenario for the opening volleys of WWIII, and the appearance of then-familiar newsies Eric Sevareid and Nancy Dickerson lent it just a little bit of the reality of which that the filmed “drama” segments persistently robbed the proceedings. … Read more