Ya know, it seems like me and about six other people in the world remember this movie. It was a shot-mostly-on-video HBO production, made in Canada and aired in 1984, depicting a series of live news broadcasts about a series of events leading to the first exchange of nuclear weapons between the United States and the Soviet Union – an exchange taking place in, of all locales, the mouth of the Persian Gulf.
I remember seeing this movie played late one Saturday night, after an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, on KHBS (ironically, the station I now work for), in 1988 or so. As I was already taping Star Trek, I wound up taping this is well, though something later happened to that tape and it’s long since gone; in any case, it was broken up by commercial breaks in a way that I don’t think, even today, live breaking news of this magnitude ever would be, to say nothing of the constant crawling disclaimer at the bottom that THIS IS ONLY A MOVIE.
The thing is, unlike another “fake newscast” scare favorite of mine, Without Warning,, the fact that it was a movie was blatantly obvious. For whatever reason, the writers and producers decided to go “behind the scenes” and show some personal drama in the newsroom – big whoop. To emphasize the change, these segments were shot on film, giving the whole thing a bizarrely BBC-esque feel (as in Monty Python’s “We’re on feeeeelm suddenly!!”) for something made in North America.
Still, toward the end, it’s got that same great zinger as Without Warning – i.e. showing you all hell breaking loose and then cutting to a faked Emergency Broadcast System signal. Supposedly, Countdown To Looking Glass was based on a real military study of a possible scenario for the opening volleys of WWIII, and the appearance of then-familiar newsies Eric Sevareid and Nancy Dickerson lent it just a little bit of the reality of which that the filmed “drama” segments persistently robbed the proceedings.
Anyway, at some point I’m going to review this one fully, having obtained a fresh copy through what I shall nebulously refer to as Nefarious Means. (Before anyone asks: it’s bad enough that I had to get what basically amounts to a bootleg copy, and I don’t intend to turn into a clearinghouse for same, so please don’t even ask, and no, my copy didn’t come from the station archives – their tapes had long since been sent back to the distributor, so my employers are inculpable. Thank you. Why don’t you bug HBO Home Video or Warner Bros. Home Video for a copy? I’d buy an official DVD in a cold second if it were available.)
To celebrate the finding of this personal movie grail of mine, I’ve cooked up a nifty DVD cover for it (well, I think it’s nifty anyway), which I’m making available here for anyone who has also gotten a copy through Nefarious Means but wants a Respectable Cover to wrap around it. I’m actually happier with this puppy than I am with most of my recent video game cover art, so there you go. The nuclear explosion photo and the USAF KC-135 photo (standing in for the modified EC-135 that the U.S. Strategic Air Command used as the real Looking Glass aircraft circa 1984) are public domain works found on Wikipedia; everything else I created out of thin, pixellated air in Paint Shop Pro 8 and Animation Shop with various and sundry filters and effects.
Enjoy!
