And I mean barely discernible. Towards the end of Charlie Wilson’s War, Texan congressman Wilson (played by Tom Hanks) having helped finance the covert war in Afghanistan looks up at a TV screen and sees Dan Rather introduce a piece that begins with the final column of Red Army tanks crossing the Friendship bridge back into the old Soviet Union.
There is a brief upsot and the voice of CBS News correspondent Barry Petersen comes through, narrating their departure. Watching it took me instantly back to February, 1989.
I took in Petersen’s piece as a very junior CBS staffer, track and rushes. I remembered the shots and the script. Barry always did an on-camera countdown into his pieces to camera: “In – uh – three – uh – two – uh – one…”
But what I most remember from those day of multiple telexes to arrange satellite paths, microwave hops to earth stations, and unreliable landlines, is the sheer number of people involved in co-ordinating the whole process. Staggering.
4 responses to “My tiny part in Charlie Wilson’s War”
I had a similar thought, for different reasons, when reading about the Telegraph’s on-line TV experiments: eg, http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/politics/threelinewhip/jan08/right_on.htm
And I like the comment posted:
Put a camera on your shoulder and start walking the streets,then you will have a real show of real ugly people in the real ugly world and you think it wont work?
Your Famous!
Forgive me. The headline says your part “in”….
I had disgusting thoughts about what to do with Julia Roberts’ body double … can I credit myself with a part “in” the fillum ?
Sure you can.