Without Warning
Well, here it is at last, Without Warning fans - your show’s finally on DVD. That’s the good news. I’ve had a tape of this for the past nine years, and in keeping with my hard-and-fast rule in the site’s FAQ page, I’ve turned down the literally hundreds of requests I’ve received over the years for copies. Now everyone can have a copy, albeit minus any extras, on a shiny round thing. That’s very good news.
Actually, I did almost grant one copy request: early in 2003, when I contacted screenwriter Peter Lance to talk about possibly doing an interview about the making of Without Warning, he confessed to me that he didn’t even have a tape of it (!). I almost made him a copy just to remind him of how good it was; fortunately it’s not necessary now. (If you want to hear something really funny, go to Mr. Lance’s site, PeterLance.com, and see where clicking on Without Warning in his resumè takes you!)
The lack of extras is mildly disappointing, but there are a few things to keep in mind this movie wasn’t promoted in the most obvious way imaginable (though it was promoted enough to alert people to the fact that it was a movie, not a breaking news event…ahh, don’t get me started!), so there isn’t anything along those lines to be included. Furthermore, and perhaps most tellingly, the controversy caused by the mock-newscast washed over CBS and Warner Bros. (the studio that produced Without Warning) - and both network and studio quickly divorced themselves from the movie afterward. You’ll note that Without Warning has been released on DVD by Madacy Entertainment, the mad masters of low, low, low-budget releases, usually of material that is either public domain to begin with (i.e. the NASA: 25 Years Of Glory documentary box set) or whose copyright has lapsed. That’s how far out of favor Without Warning fell with CBS and Warners (the latter of whom could easily have released this through Warner Home Video).
One final note: when I contacted Peter Lance and told him of the unending requests I’d received for copies of Without Warning in the last 9 years, he was both flattered and surprised, and promised to forward that nugget of information on to producer Mark Wolper to see if it would help in the campaign for a DVD release - something both writer and producer had been pushing for a long, long time. It’s just possible that you people out there who kept the faith helped to finally get this movie on DVD. Take some pride in that - and enjoy the show once again.
So, has my opinion of Without Warning changed at all in the intervening years? Not one lick. It’s one of my all-time favorite pieces of television fiction, and I’ve always found its panicked perception by the public to be a fascinating study in social psychology - why do we believe what someone else tells us? Because they’re in a suit, on a news set? Is that automatically a good enough reason? In the wake of the New York Times/Jayson Blair scandal, and with events such as Gulf War v2.0 and 9/11 demonstrating the kind of cameras-everywhere-instantly news coverage that was still fictional when Without Warning portrayed it…this movie has only gained relevance and potency with time. And it’s gained a lot of it. I’m glad to see it on DVD with or without scads of extras - it’s good just to have. And it’s still a great, hair-tingling-on-the-back-of-your-neck scary story told by the television campfire at its best.