Best
Of Enemies: Buckley Vs. Vidal
(2015/Magnolia Blu-ray)/The
Great American Dream Machine
(1971 - 1973/S'More Entertainment DVD Box Set)
Picture:
B-/C+ Sound: C+/C Extras: C+/C- Main Programs: B
Here
are two new releases about the last golden age of television (the
late 1960s to the mid-1970s) that are very much worth your time.
Best
Of Enemies: Buckley Vs. Vidal
(2015) is a new documentary by Morgan Neville and Robert Gordon that
does three things: tells a story about U.S. politics, tells a story
about TV as a rising medium and attempts biographies of both William
F. Buckley and Gore Vidal. It succeeds well for the most part, but
there is one glaring, borderline ignorant part of the program that
was mazing... and amazingly inaccurate that must be addressed before
we can move on. This has to do with that attacks on the ABC
Television Network of the time that had the Buckley/Vidal debates and
the highly immature trashing thereof.
It
is suggested that ABC was such a bad, low-rent network at the time
that all they could show were 'poor' series like The
Flying Nun
and Irwin Allen's Land
Of The Giants,
both of which were hits. In real life, not even including most of
their music, variety and anthology series, ABC was the home of
programs as good as what CBS and NBC offered at the time. To prove
this, I offer the following list of their shows from the decade,
usually hits and a few classics, including...
Maverick,
Surfside 6, The Rifleman, Ozzie & Harriett, My Three Sons, The
Untouchables, The Flintstones, Leave It To Beaver, The Lawrence Welk
Show, Ben Casey, Naked City, My Little Margie, 77 Sunset Strip, The
Jetsons, Combat!, McHale's Navy, The Outer Limits, The Fugitive, The
Patty Duke Show, Burke's Law, Honey West, Voyage To The Bottom Of The
Sea, Peyton Place, Jonny Quest, Bewitched, The Addams Family, The
F.B.I., F Troop, The Big Valley, Rat Patrol, The Invaders, Batman,
That Girl, Time Tunnel, It Takes A Thief
and The
Mod Squad.
Plus, they were smart enough to pick up the British TV spy classic
The
Avengers,
plus the now cult spy show Man
In A Suitcase.
Does
that look like the slate of a TV network in trouble or with
second-rate shows? Only if you wouldn't know a good TV show if your
life depended on it and hey... no reality TV shows!
If
anything, I would argue that the network that would pick up some of
these shows would be the only one that would even consider the
Buckley/Vidal pairing. Until PBS (initially known as NET) showed up,
ABC was the network most likely to try something different that was
smart, though that ironically ended soon after when they made the
mistake of passing on All
In The Family,
but hey would be #1 before
NBC ever was by the mid-1970s, so that should refute the
documentary's glaring error that makes it look bad.
With
that said, it gets much of its central story correct as the network
did not do full coverage (for money reasons, among another mixed
factor; news was not supposed to be a for-profit business and ABC
couldn't afford to lose the money from hot shows) so they get the
conservative Buckley and liberal Vidal, both from elite backgrounds,
to debate the issues. To their surprise, they agree and off they go
to both major party's conventions and at first, it is smart,
interesting and becomes a surprise hit for ABC. It also changed
political coverage on TV and all media forever, including one heated
exchange so shocking, even the network was stunned.
The
documentary is also very thorough about their extreme views, their
successes, sometimes unique stances, controversies and in Vidal's
case, his secret cinematic assist (he wrote a nice chunk of the 1959
Ben-Hur
screenplay) and giant critical and cinematic bombs (Fox's Myra
Breckinridge
and Penthouse Magazine's Caligula,
reviewed elsewhere on this site) that would bring even the most
liberal person to wonder what exactly he really grasped about human
sexuality, no matter what his was. But the other thing is to see the
TV medium (still getting its credibility at the time before that went
out the window starting in the late 1980s) a mere years after the
Kennedy Assassination where Walter Cronkite had to hold up a
newspaper to show the audience that they were not kidding the the
President had been killed (controversy notwithstanding).
Thus,
despite a big side faux pau, Best
Of Enemies: Buckley Vs. Vidal
is absolutely worth your time, even if I had a few issues with it.
Extras
include an hour of Extended
Interviews, the Original Theatrical Trailer and on-camera interviews
with the co-directors.
Of
course, innovation was starting to happen everywhere and the rise of
public television was a big moment for the medium, pushing the big
three networks to get more innovative. First known as National
Educational Television (or NET), then the PBS Network it remains
today, The
Great American Dream Machine
(1971 - 1973) which was produced by WNET in New York was a
groundbreaking series that mixed skits, films, music performances,
comedy, politics, avant garde filmmaking, animation and much more in
a show that quickly understood the power of videotape and the kind of
editing that made Laugh-In
a huge comedy hit, then did a more adult, intellectual take on it
with the title sticking to exploring what exactly (before the
pre-Reagan era wanted to end upward mobility) what in a country that
was at war with itself at the time (Vietnam was not over until a few
years after the show ended) brought people together, in which ways
were we not at war and what is that dream about. What was it always
about?
The
result included early commentary segments by Andy Rooney, who
eventually became an icon thanks to CBS' 60
Minutes,
similar segments with Studs Terkel, Dick Cavett and Marshall Efron,
the disembodied head of a then unknown Chevy Chase as one of two men
shown as such lip-syncing music and sound effects comically at the
beginning of most every episode, music legends in action like Artie
Shaw, Elaine Stritch (in a particularly remarkable moment), Carly
Simon is here, the great Jazz/Rock band Blood, Sweat & Tears from
rarely seen tour film footage giving interviews on the road is here,
another amazing film has the Velvet Voice himself - Mel Torme in
exceptionally powerful form and there are more music acts.
Then
you have early acting turns of future big stars like Albert Brooks
(Penny Marshall plays his office secretary in a brief turn at the
beginning of one of several of his filmed skits), several skits about
women with Linda Lavin before her star turn on Barney
Miller
and classic star-making role as Alice,
Henry Winkler in an improv with some other good actors, Charles
Grodin & Martin Mull show up, no less than Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
reads from his classic book Slaughterhouse
Five
(which had just been turned into a remarkable feature film), Amy
Vanderbilt, we get some fun (and time capsule-valuable) people on the
street interviews on various topics (the original episode shad them)
and other people of means let their guard down and also give
remarkable interviews.
Yet
all that does not do justice to how rich, smart, clever, advanced and
surprisingly enduring the show is. I remembered many of the segments
as I watched it when it was on and in reruns, including repackaged
shows (i.e., season highlights) that turn up on some of the discs
here. Sadly, the show was never revived, but it is a lost classic
long overdue for re-release and rediscovery. As a result, this is
easily one of the top DVD box sets of the year.
A
paper pullout with an essay on the series by David Bianculli is the
only extra.
Ironically,
both great releases are built on classic work in the
standard-definition analog TV of U.S. color TV. The 1080p 1.78 X 1
digital High Definition image on Enemies
has plenty of such footage, plus vintage film footage, old black and
white videotape and stills throughout that make for an effective mix
usually edited together well and usually of the best quality one
could expect. However, some used to HDTV all the time might be
initially thrown off, but don't be. The
1.33 X 1 color image on all episodes of Machine
are transferred pretty well, though I wonder if more advanced NTSC
decoding and some tape repair could have helped at times. Still,
this is as cleaned up as you can get otherwise and looks good. Some
segments are filmed, but they are only here as the old analog
transfers from the 1970s they were first made as. I hope those
(mostly if not all 16mm films) have survived on film. A Blu-ray of
those segments would be a nice idea down the line.
The
DTS-HD MA (Master Audio) 5.1 lossless mix on Enemies
is well mixed and presented, but obviously much of the key audio is
old television monophonic sound, so only expect so much dynamic range
here. The newer audio is simple stereo interviews, but music is well
used to the makers' credit. The lossy Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono on
episodes of Machine
are a little more compressed and lower in volume than I would have
liked, but I bet these could sound better depending on the condition
of the original television monophonic sound. Otherwise, be careful
of volume switching and high volumes.
-
Nicholas Sheffo
