‘Talk Radio’ comes between ‘Wall Street’ and ‘Born On The Fourth Of July’ in Oliver Stone’s filmography, but seems mostly forgotten these days.
That’s a shame because arguably it’s his finest movie. It has three crackerjack acting performances, fruity dialogue, potent themes, suspenseful direction and some brilliant moments.
‘Talk Radio’ draws upon the life and death of Cleveland shock jock Alan Berg (renamed Barry Champlain in the film), superbly played by Eric Bogosian who co-wrote the screenplay with Stone and also penned the 1987 stage play of the same name.
Stone and Bogosian take a long, hard look at American popular culture at the end of the 1980s and are less than impressed. The anti-semitism explored in the movie is shocking for the time and still shocking today, but Stone and Borgosian deserve credit for going there. But is Champlain a free-speech hero or bigoted loudmouth? We must judge for ourselves.
‘Talk Radio’ was fairly cheaply made and quickly shot, Stewart Copeland adding a brooding, admirably low-key synth soundtrack. Stone and DoP Robert Richardson make superb use of the studio set, fiddling around with the mise en scene and using drastic lighting contrasts, a striking, De Palma-esque ‘circular’ dolly shot and stunning closing helicopter ride through Dallas (changed from the play’s Denver setting).
Alongside Bogosian’s superb star turn (why wasn’t he nominated for anything?), Alec Baldwin plays a blinder in a fairly thankless role, warming up for ‘Glengarry Glen Ross’. Michael Wincott gives a knockout performance as the hapless teenager Kent – amazingly, he was 30 at the time of filming. Other performances are uneven though. Ellen Greene and Leslie Hope seem miscast.
The callers into the show make for a fascinating Greek chorus of America’s modern morays (one sounds a hell of a lot like Mike Patton’s character in the Faith No More song ‘RV’). And the ‘dead air’ scene is still as spellbinding today as it must have been in 1988.
The movie gets a little bogged down in Berg’s backstory though, with a lengthy and rather superfluous flashback. Arguably we should never have left the studio.
But the silence over the end credits (after a brief bit of Penguin Café Orchestra) suggests Stone meant ‘Talk Radio’ to be an important, cautionary movie, and he could well be right about that (though he doesn’t mention it in his memoir ‘Chasing The Light’). But sadly it didn’t hit a nerve with the public, barely breaking even on its $4 million budget.
No matter – it’s well worth seeking out, a late-‘80s classic, and if you look hard enough it’s currently available to view for free on YouTube.
movingtheriver.com 