#popmatters

Oliver Stone didn’t declare himself the King of the World after winning Oscars for Best Picture and Best Director for Platoon, but, after following Platoon with the success of Wall Street, Stone clearly had his choice of projects in 1988. However, before the run of ambitious and controversial films that would follow, Stone made one of his smallest-scale films with Talk Radio. In adapting Eric Bogosian’s acclaimed play, Stone and the playwright added details from Stephen Singular’s biography of Alan Berg, a Denver radio host murdered in his own driveway by a neo-Nazi group in 1984. Shot in four weeks in Dallas, almost entirely in a warehouse converted into a radio station, the film is Stone’s examination of Reagan-era American culture through the transmission of a radio talk show in the middle of a Texas night.

Every aspect of the modern American cesspool that the film takes in — neuroses, self-destruction, corporate machinations, racism, schizophrenia, violence, stupidity — is filtered through Barry Champlain, the acerbic host of Dallas radio’s top-rated show, “Night Talk”. Barry, as his theme music warns you (or promises), is bad to the bone, in more ways than one. Barry is all of the things Americans desire in their highest-paid talk-radio hosts: loud, opinionated, short-tempered, condescending, and rude.

Those who call in to talk to Barry represent a cross-section of frightening insomniacs. These folks are stock-character masochists, calling in for a fresh Barry pole-axing. Hicks, derelicts, rapists, burnouts, bigots, simpletons — they all call in and convince Barry that, as he says, “this country is rotten to the core”. The voices of the night in one American city provide Barry with enough bile to keep him going, but it’s also a relationship that seems to be eating him alive. “I’m glad people like Kent are out there, and I’m in here,” Barry claims after one particularly gruesome call, yet when Barry spits vitriol about the decay of the American scene, he looks and sounds like a man on a suicide mission to be consumed by it.

All the while, people watch Barry from behind glass. He is an animal trapped in a cage, talking, chain-smoking, and watching people watch him. Stone creates a vortex of claustrophobia, circling Barry in arc shots with the camera or, in Barry’s final epic rant, rotating the background to circle a solitary Barry. Despite these occasional flourishes, the scenes of Barry at work — the bulk of the film — capture the single-set design of the stage show, and Stone is mostly content to stay out of the way and let Bogosian work.

It’s a sizzling performance. Bogosion crawls so deep into the troubled psyche of his creation, it’s impossible to distinguish between the two, especially given the frantic pace of shooting, as Bogosian looks exhausted and demented by the end of the film. Pushing Barry further over the edge is his boss, played with drippy smarm by Alec Baldwin, who kisses the ass of the corporate radio giant, Metrowave, interested in taking Barry and “Night Talk” to the syndication big leagues. Barry, however, is just self-destructive enough to raise the shock-talk ante and scare Metrowave away, that is if he isn’t too busy verbally mutilating his ex-wife, ruining his chance at reconciliation with her. Or goading his audiences into killing him.

Amid the neon lights and perms and skinny ties in Talk Radio, what holds up is the prescient examination of the downward spiral of America’s cultural perversity, not the least of all in the ways we communicate and the fascination we have with mutual abuse. Callers are essentially begging to be insulted and vilified by Barry, and thousands of others listen in for nightly doses of public humiliation. In an age of message-board flame wars, reality-television shouting matches, and muckumentary exercises in embarrassment, Talk Radio, for its time, was not only a table-turning expose of the Howard Sterns or Don Imuses reaching national celebrity at the time, but a dizzying, complex view of a country going straight to hell and one fascinated by watching it happen.

Q: What do you think the biggest difference between Sacred Heart and Hormonally Yours was?

Siobhan Fahey: The approach was very different. Sacred Heart was very much a studio, programmed sound. With Hormonally Yours, we had excellent musicians.

Marcella Detroit: And it was a concept album. Most of it was written around this movie, Cat-Women of the Moon,a really cheesy 1950s, American movie, 3D. I think Dave [Stewart] brought it to our attention.

Fahey: Dave had this crazy idea that we should buy the movie and shoot some additional scenes that would put us in the movie so that it would be a movie/album. It was a pretty original concept that the record company didn't quite understand, but it inspired about half the album.

But when we came to record it, we were so lucky because Dave was good friends with George Harrison and George invited us to spend a month at his house in England, Friar Park, and use his home studio. It was a very intimate, private, organic process. There was lots of cool, old gear and fantastic musicians.

Detroit: That was truly incredible. What an honor. There were 59 guitars on the wall. I counted them one day. There were lots of Gretschs and every kind of amazing guitar you could think of. I got to play one of the guitars he used at Shea Stadium with the Beatles. And the Vox amp.

Fahey: Do you remember which track you played it on?

Detroit: I'm sure I used it on "Hello (Turn Your Radio On)". I played the guitar solo on that.

Fahey: That was the Shea Stadium guitar?

Detroit: Yep. Not too bad, right? If you had told me that was going to happen when I was a 12-year-old girl going crazy over the Beatles, I would have said, "That would never happen!"

But it did and it was incredible. Quite surreal.

Fahey: So we're very much indebted into George's generosity and his wife and son putting up with us for a month.

PopMatters reviews Nathan Gelgud’s perception bending A House in the Jungle.

“Gelgud’s most intriguing oddities occur at a deeper meta-level. A House in the Jungle isn’t just a story—it’s a comics story exploring the comics form that contains it.” — Chris Gavaler, PopMatters

Agree with this review on how to fix the show.

It’s pretty easy if TPTB want to REALLY save it.

180 degree reversal Flip in story direction. Get main leads under one umbrella arc- Red/Liz/Ressler like in S1 and in S3A and maintain it.

Remove the character that alienates your core audience the most, the Post Office needs an overhaul. Like in S1, Harold Cooper’s life hung in the balance. This time, it needs to again.

TaskForce needs to merge with Red’s Team in order to take on the Cabal. Old world- task force wanting Red behind bars-new world: Task force Needs Red’s inside influence and connections to remove the Cabal OUT OF THE WHITE HOUSE.

This is a no brainer and not because of what I wrote last season. I simply followed the original 3B arc and came to that conclusion.

Put Ressler in charge like Cooper really would’ve wanted and now you’ve got Red/Ressler conflict on how to work together with Ressler as Red’s asset in “his” world, while they protect “our girl”

The dynamic shifts but it’s one the audience can root for and this also puts all three leads under one story integrating the entire cast. Imagine that. You should it was in the plans last season. So go back to it.