Does anyone remember Special Bulletin? This was a 1983 TV movie that was presented in the same was that War of the Worlds was. It starts out with a commercial, goes to a game show, and then is interrupted by a Special Bulletin. Terrorists have built a nuclear device and threaten to use it unless the U.S removes all of the nuclear detonators from the submarine fleet in Charleston Harbor. These anti-nuke protesters who are using a nuclear device to make their point also demand a TV crew.
When it was broadcast there was a disclaimer after each commercial break to let people know that the story they are watching is a dramatization. (A friend in the South said the broadcasters there also added “(Fiction)” under “Dramatazation”.) The broadcasters were trying to avoid widespread panic, such as happened almost five decades before.
I taped it off the air, and watched a few times since then. Just last week, I bought the VHS tape from Amazon. I can’t wait to watch it again. ([Hank Kimball]Well, I have waited. So obviously I can wait. But I don’t want to. Actually, I hadn’t really thought about it. Too many other shows to watch. [/Hank Kimball]
This sounds a lot like The Day After. I know when that was aired there were many “dramatization” disclaimers, and a good thing, too - I know that if I had not recognized the actors, I probably would have panicked. Then again, I was young and naive then, so who knows?
Don’t think I’ve seen the one you’re talking about, though it sounds interesting. I’ll have to look for it.
Yes, The Day After was also released in 1983. IIRC, it came out some time after Special Bulletin. I don’t remember why, but I remember that I didn’t like it as much as Special Bulletin.
“The Day After” was presented more as a drama where "Special Bulletin was presented as a quasi-documentary.
The guy who played the older doctor on “St. Elsewhere” was the host of the news show covering the event while the evil boss from “Thirty Something” was great as the twisted terrorist with the device on a boat in Charleston Harbor.
What made the movie for me was that in the end…They really detonated the bomb and blew up Charleston. The post-blast news footage was EERIE.
I think that’s why I liked Special Bulletin better, now that you mention it. It was portrayed as “real-time”, whereas the other one was a regular drama.
I really liked Special Bulletin and even taped it once when it was rerun. I agree that it was an underrated TV movie.
The scene that made it really real was after the bomb has been detonated, and video contact made with the lady reporter who was on a ship about two miles from the blast. She and a cameraman are relatively unhurt, because they were standing away from the view windows when they were blown out by the shock wave. Of course the anchors in the studio are very concerned for them, but when they can see that the camera that caught the blast is intact, they want them to replay it. Gotta get those ratings don’t you know. So we get to see the small mushroom cloud and the guy being shredded by glass turned into shrapnel.
A minor nitpick, the folks that made the bomb weren’t really “twisted terrorists.” They were peaceniks who wanted to use the threat of the bomb so that US naval vessels would be denuked. I don’t think they really meant to use it. And they didn’t actually set it off. They were overcome and killed by a SWAT team, and the specialists trying to dearm the thing did something wrong and the countdown accelerated.
The most chilling moment for me was when the on-the-spot reporter at the scene of the bomb (played by Charles Rocket, IIRC), who’d been told he had twenty minutes to get well away from ground zero, saw members of the bomb squad running away.
“We still have twenty minutes, don’t we?” he asked nervously.
Oh, and Baker, I don’t know how you define “twisted terrorists,” but my definition is plenty roomy enough to include those “peaceniks” and their actions.
For me the best part of the whole thing was right after the terrorists made their first demands, the network started to lead off their “special-bulletin-this-just-in-updates” with a really cheesy “America under attack”-style graphic. And the best part was when they interviewed one of the “peaceniks” and he commented both on how cheesy the graphic was, and how quickly the network set it up, as if they had already had it planned.