Talk Radio

with Eric Bogosian, Alec Baldwin, Ellen Greene
Written by Eric Bogosian, Oliver Stone
Directed by Oliver Stone (Cineplex Odeon, 1988)
by William Ham

Six years before he subsumed two hours worth of trite received notions about media and celebrity under a tsunami of virtuosic technique in Natural Born Killers, Oliver Stone took a more precise bead on the same subject in what I consider his finest safari through darkest America, Talk Radio. Based jointly on Eric Bogosian’s brilliantly inflamatory play of the same name and the true story of Alan Berg, an ascerbic Denver radio personality gunned down by white supremacists in 1984, the movie stars Bogosian as Barry Champlain, a Dallas “shock jock” whose talent for pushing his listeners’ buttons (whether to piss or cut them off) has brought him to the double edge. The edge of success, as his Yuppie station manager (Alec Baldwin practicing for Glengarry Glen Ross) has made him a lucrative syndication deal behind his back; and the existential edge, as the penchant for infective invective that has made him popular, leads to him gambling his career, and ultimately his life, over the course of three feverish days, allowing, of course, for lengthy flashbacks.

Stone’s camera swoops through the comparatively cramped studio like a bennie-crazed hawk as Champlain goads, cajoles and baits His People – the lonely, dispossessed and bitter fringe-dwellers for whom his show has become “the last neighborhood in town.” The supporting cast is, to a person, able and skillful, but it’s Bogosian’s show. He becomes Champlain where too many of Stone’s protagonists are merely symbols. And the downward trajectory of the narrative leads to two utterly classic scenes: Champlain coming face to face with his audience in the person of a crazed metalhead he invites into the studio (Michael Wincott, repeating his stage role, is terrifyingly hilarious), and his climactic monologue, where he drops his persona and tears out his soul on the air while the studio circles behind him, gradually fading to black. Absolutely, malevolently mesmerizing. In this era where reality is trash-TV fodder and nihilism has become the American way, Talk Radio becomes more and more relevant every day. This unrelentingly black tragicomedy may just be the peak of both Stone’s and Bogosian’s careers. A little-heralded masterpiece.