The Day After: Thirty Years Later

mrs lawrence kansas thirty years ago millions of americans watched as lawrence suffered the effects of a nuclear war i'm kate mcintyre and today on kbr presents the thirtieth anniversary of the made for tv movie the day after more than one hundred million people were watching on november twentieth nineteen eighty three when abc broadcast the day after making it the most watched television movie of all time it won two emmy awards was nominated for ten others and is widely credited with changing the direction of america's nuclear weapons policy the day after was not only sad and laurence in the kansas city area it was filmed here with thousands of area residents playing extras in this landmark television event as part of the thirtieth anniversary of the day after kansas public radio and the watkins museum of history collected oral histories from many of

those local residents will hear answered throughout today's program but first director nicholas meyer had just finished working on the second star trek movie the wrath of khan when he signed on to direct the day after nicholas meyer joins us by telephone from his home in the los angeles area thank you for joining us today take us back to the early nineteen eighties then set the stage for us why did you want to make this film i didn't want to make the film i was the fourth director i believe who was asked head and i think the sort of the paradox involved is that we all live in the shadow know they are an imminent nuclear armageddon but we don't like to think about it so we don't and i think i fell into that category i

was a big supporter of a nuclear freeze or any form of but what could i do yeah what i was offered this i was in psychoanalysis at the time and i remember having a conversation with my analyst in which shows of lying there trying to rationalize my way out of doing that and he never spoke in ten years but one time he did and this was the time and he said i think this is where we find out who you really are and i hated him for saying that because then i knew that i would have to make the movie or i would never be able to look at myself in the mirror will shaving against it was one thing to sit around and both oceans or dinner parties and bitch about the world and it was another thing for

someone to hand you on a silver platter a chance to put your work in the service of your beliefs and ultimately it i couldn't turn it down have you ever regretted that decision never whipped it turned out to have been certainly debate the most worthwhile thing i've ever got to do with my life working on this film actually lead to you physically senate a lot of people worked on the film had a physical or psychological or emotional responses to doing it there are cast members who were so haunted by a lot of bad dreams there was a lot of gallows humor we nicknamed those dreams nuke mayors and the idea was sort of stomach churning at times and and the only way to

deal with that oddly enough was that sort of thick humor gallows humor and you know when it be cool if there was a real nuclear war while we were filming and imagine the footage we were that sort of thing well lawrence wow larkin campus at our moral at the center of the continental united states so i think we always see movie when they do do about nuclear war alert about washington the spirit about new york and what about everybody else would you what about casting this movie debut specifically you wanted people who were unknown and he made a real effort to cast a lot of people in the aereo why was the actors

and to come with baggage when you can't george clooney is an astronaut or sandra bullock we know who these people are and so we sort of enjoy and the summit and gore reassured by paying them again but this was a different kind of exercise in which it was less important to make a good movie and to make something so believable that you could lose yourself in the narrative without looking over your own shoulder to see a movie star and i went to the university of our lot and we have a lot of bad actors there maple gone to be big successes and i assumed that lawrence might have a similar cash crop and i think i was right but but even if they all worked the greatest actors they had the advantage of having no

staircases we just believe them because we had not seen them in other things i mean john coleman and joe both williams and jason rowe guards yeah actually be the bash yes but they're out there are going to be a good neighbor gave in the world in that world like the most iconic images for those of us who live in the lawrence area is there groups out that takes place in allen fieldhouse where the university of kansas plays basketball talk about the logistics of setting up that side well nate shot was inspired by the shot in the atlantic train station in god will win you know the shot i'm talking about absolutely ok that that

with the idea which was his start small and then just pull back and back and back to reveal this devastation that whole life idea of making the movie was not the editorial lies just to show if you have a nuclear war and we were by the way showing the optimists version of nuclear war we did not for example the fifth nuclear winter if you have a nuclear war or it might look or even on a good day for that reason there is very little music in the movie it was just like a kind of a public service announcement so the idea of cramming lee allen fieldhouse radiation victims was just

part of well folks this is how it's going to be if we're lucky you just mentioned this is what it would look like on a day day as a filmmaker credit you find that balance between one he does show sort of the horrors of the situation and still have it be watch a bull we didn't have to find a balance because people sit in front of a television set with a clicker and i knew that if i made it to horrendous in they would reach for the collector it's was a sort of intuitive prof ayers i guess largely might call this a win we were going too far too fast too much bang the yard has no

walk at foreign why i i get that all those people they'd heard that i was more alive or do you think it made you made it too optimistic well what you're really talking about are some of the long range consequences of the movie i think that for the time it was about right the morning after the movie was broadcast or should i say the day after the day after i was called by the first the network through to tell me that a hundred million people have watched the movie and then subsequently by ha reporter reporters who were happy to tell me that in their instant survey a lovely audience nobody said that their mind had been changed one way or the other by the film about nuclear

war and what that i have to say to that and i basically said well i think it's too soon to figure out what people's reaction to the movie is or was i don't think people change their minds overnight i don't think they'd admit it if they did i don't think they would like to say that their minds were changed about nuclear war by something of slowly as a tv movie and i'd also add that i think a lot of times we don't know what we really believe we may think what we believe we may like to say what we wish we believe but deep down it's hard to tell and i was sort of temper i think because i suppose i was hoping that there would be a mass of people of some kind but

in fact it turned out that at least one person's mind about nuclear war was altered voice movie and that mine happened to be all right i have all kinds of sources for this fact and not least of them reagan's own memoir but also edmund morris who wrote the theodore roosevelt the trilogy that won the elixir was reagan's official biographer and was living in the white house at the time and reagan came into office be leaving in the idea of a winnable nuclear war and following watching this movie i don't know if it was literally overnight but he was according to mars with your time it ever seem upset

and three years of living in the white house and then and depressed and as we know he ultimately for the current generation of conservative base went off to reykjavik sat down with gorbachev signed the intermediate range weapons agreement and they're mirror came close to signing a unilateral disarmament thing except that the anti he wouldn't give up his star wars thing but that's you know that's how close he came and i remember at the time when he signed and somebody said you still think this is the evil empire and he smiled and shook his head and said no i think one i got i got a telegram from somebody and it wasn't anybody affiliated with reagan it was just the person i knew said don't think your movie didn't have something to do with this i think it was probably the right balance

that's nicholas meyer director of the day after which was broadcast in more than one hundred million viewers thirty years ago this week we'll hear more of that interview later this hour thousands of area residents were extras in this made for tv movie lying on the floor of the allen fieldhouse sitting in their cars parked on jay tan and camping out in a local park in the movies tent city seen abc circle films turned to university of kansas theater professor jack wright to help out i was asked there was a theater scene in theater at that time and i was asked to help courtney logistics forty i casting of that fell and so i set them up with rooms and gamble range and we'd announced the event setting up after that one of the producers said to me would you be interested in a working as extras casting director and i said well i've never had a film experience but

ib be happy to try so we remember we said no hold on man can track it right then that i would be ahead of extras casting had no idea what that entailed ah but in twenty four hours i did because i had have about eight hundred people the first day as extras on the set and so i am really organize my staff we were housed at the hull down so i would teach classes from eight to four in the afternoon and then over to the ashes start early in the morning i started about six in the morning and i organized over behold on the film and that i would go teach classes now going back to the film and did that for about three weeks that we did the shooting and every day was fifteen hundred and the next day was twenty five hundred and the next day it was for fiber and what's what we had fifty year only ten actors or something that was a massive massive project that we get it for the thousands of locals who were extras in the movie the day began with clothes and make up bard henry of lawrence was in the scene known as a

tent city where hundreds of refugees camped in lawrence as bertram park since we have survived the whole blast we had to look like we had survived the blast that mandates that once we got our costumes assigned to us we were told to roll in the dirt so we rolled and rolled and rolled in the dirt and we were filthy and it was a hot summer day if i remember crying out we rolled him older role then they realized through the makeup trailer so to speak which is a big semi trailer and so the first thing they did was take our hair with that was out like cheesecloth that they had put chuck chuck dustin it was great big ball of a chalk dust and they did but he did our hair and they pounded chalk dust into her here and then they spray craig painted it either red or black or various combinations of brown to make it look like it had cracked off and indeed for some people

based one hair tight by the end of the filming at the end of the day this was early early morning that we did make up and we didn't finish until end of the day people's hair and literally we're cracking you could reach up and the deep to be doing all the dirt and everything that had been painted you could just literally crack your hair off i remember going to the thrift shopping getting old clothes because they said we had become dirty out like denver of lawrence and her son michael were also in the tent city singing so i ran into the wash cycle and then let them drive very greedily and rub them in the dirt but they were still being and then the red dirt all over our arms and faces and even in our hair and showed up and they had the audacity to tell a sweeper to cling so they proceeded to make us very very dirty and believe me it was not in a glamorous makeup trailer they ate sprinkle this with water spilled is with der spiegel this with ash and it's rolling in the mud hubble's i don't know what all they did i really don't have a clear memory except

i was a whole lot dirtier than i have ever been in my entire life and i'm a pretty sturdy farmhand kind of girl and was used to getting dirty but believe me that was the dirtiest i had ever been in again barb henry then you ran through and now you get the makeup put on you so it looks like you have been in a blast so depend upon what the makeup artist were doing to you and i i had it in my arms in the side of my head they put rubber cement tan at the time and then the rubber cement was kind of blended with benches once it dried it they would spray painted and put the watch like a bomb out of reach in those days i want to make it look like a bird had actually occurred and then they they took us down to the park and end om unit in this tent city which they had very carefully prepared ahead and shallow breath and broken pieces of debris and stuff so i was assigned to a lean to that meier lawrence and i and they had a huge

huge fans great humongous fans that were going on various objects at us to see which film better and one of the the end that look like ash that was floating in the air and one of the things that really look like cash turns out to be or i was told at the time and it smelled like this are not going to doubt it that it was sound sterilized chicken coop and down and so and then as soon as they started filming they would start the fans that they would be blowing this stuff on us and we just looked like we were there you know digging through the debris are trying to port staffer whenever and and we'd look around it's the people that have them make it when we were all sweaty by this time i mean it was hot out there and the wounds were real and we end there was just a point somewhere around nine o'clock from looters like we're nineteen thirty nine o'clock

whenever it got really dark that was just like you know this is where the really the flight this is why that could really feel it only we get to go home as it happens i can see myself i'm a real fan of confidence of lawrence was also in the tent city theme because in the same steve gutenberg character came ashore a boat wanders through the camp and he happened to wander right by where i was sitting atop oil that they just sitting waiting while they planned out scenes ended test runs and that sort of thing you know but because of other without a landmark show when he's walking through her i knew that we're looking at the injured people were to walk around and round and round is that they are in a complete days while steve depending with steve guttenberg a star walked through the crowd and of course made comments and some story i never heard them sandra weichert of lawrence that the rest is just milled around form a substantial period of night i thought that and

city was probably the most moving one of the scenes that we staged a threat that three week period because it dealt with survivors after them won't cost them to a nuclear blast so every it was the ideal behind it was each was a home whenever people gathered and formed a packed tent that was their home and everything they brought their personal possessions all that they could carry and so each one was different had some and dolls in the outside some and cooking utensils i mean it was just amazing and undermine and i'm just guessing of the least three hundred tents were set up all around the area that they were shooting and i remember was so powerful the camera was on the track and as it moved through the city you saw these people they were like families and just had to spend their days in the in the tents i thought it was extremely moving him very well dan and peter woolley should be given an academy award for that logistics but the sad thing was only about

a minute of that tent city remained in the movie you know the day after was originally set up to be tonight's iran and the scripted for tonight's an abc get worried that people when they entered the first night wouldn't come when watch it the second night and they couldn't take the chance and this is so much money into it so they had to reduce the film to one episode for one night and when they did that a lot of really great scenes work on last week got to ninth in mississippi again beth meyers we're calling the end of that long day of shooting the tent city's three and at the time the little quick shop online in mississippi was right across ones now corcoran barrel but at that time with the disco called shenanigans and it was at this town and so these people were also taking some summer break there was a lot of people coming in quick shot from there on they were reeking of holstein c fourteen and polo and then they're wonderful colorful polyester clothing and on some bigger staggering in there and we just we didn't even notice these people were just like

pop folk whatever tv whenever you know an end and anything we could grab and packages this management of we were so hungry and that we would come up in this like there were like fifteen a vis the region massing around the counter and the guy just one service goes and emigrate to pursue parading ruins of their shaved heads or in closing the dirt everywhere smiling like a and uses rough day we're hearing from a number of area residents who were extras in the made for tv movie the day after these oral histories were recorded as part of a reunion event held last year at the watkins museum of history marking the thirtieth anniversary of the filming of the day after this year marks the thirtieth anniversary of the broadcast of the day after which more than one hundred million people watched on november twentieth nineteen eighty three

while most of the people cast locally were extras in crowd scenes there were a handful of more substantial roles cast locally allen anthony grew up in lawrence and now lives in new york city i realize ten years old i had just it was in the summer is you know already and i was caught between fourth and fifth grade and although they cast most of the speaking roles in the major character parts out of los angeles a new art there were a couple of medium sized roles that they were going to go ahead and cast in lawrence and so i attended a casting call in craft empire theatre at the university of kansas and audition and i am there about ten other girls they're my age and we auditioned often on all day long is a very long day craft empire theatre worst cram packed with people auditioning they also for my part edition people in other places and so i didn't

really know what the outcome is going to be except that at the end of the audition and craft and prior they handed me a scrap and they said would really like you to play this character of our guinness see actors in new york and la and will get back to you with your kansas tech surge you know is going to happen i did an etching fourteen days that i found my character's name is jillian dahlberg we were the farm family that lived in the house and when the bombs start to go off we had to go live in the basement and my brother first implement brother tim and danny was the way that flash blinded and have its ais wrapped up in my older sister's character story was that she was getting married in and of course when a eureka of nuclear war and i was the final girl with pigtails yes you know the truth but then a funny thing is is that

it's also this other experience because of the subject matter this isn't a romantic comedy this isn't about fun things you know this is about the devastation of that world the station so you're having is threatening to do all experience the everyday climb anonymity and with this man in and then you know your made up with vaseline in dirt in your you know your you're a man singing what it feels like to me farmed into know you're dying if you're just joining us today is k pr present marks the thirtieth anniversary of the made for tv movie the day after i'm kate mcintyre you're listening to k pr presents on kansas public radio later this hour we'll hear from more local residents who were involved in the day after coming up our interview with director nicolas myer continues right after this clip from the nineteen eighty three movie the premium

the reality is the nuclear device what he really needs is a lie nowhere does not know where any more recent next whiteman air force base right now it's about four hundred and fifty minuteman missile silos for an apple announced it was aurora that's bob marbles lives were you surprised at the reaction of the movie winter's came out whether there i had no idea that they're watching it with my girlfriend who later became my wife and i got there and i thought it was one of my movie would i be sitting through this

and the answer was no it's too awful it's too upsetting and to learn the following morning that a hundred million people or record never broken and never likely to be broken now because there's too many channels habitat and watched this thing was then and now so that in comprehensible to me i think we got a big boost from the conservative faction of the country who ran up and down like chicken little screaming at the sky was falling and that no one should watch and so forth there's nothing like being banned in boston enough to help your book so and i think they did us a lot of good and this was not the first movie made about nuclear war and its aftereffects what did you strive to do differently than other movies about nuclear weapons will point it was real

it was the tv movie which is to say you didn't have to get off your rear and then find a babysitter and pay the money to go see it as you did with on the beach or failsafe or to some extent dr strangelove part ox about nuclear war as i indicated before is that here is the most urgent and terrifying problem that has ever confronted the human race and yet it felt terrible that we can't bear to think about and the only people who do think about it you know are sort of the dark princes who are just to build more weapons than good people hold in all that stuff that noble in his right mind wants to sit around thinking about this much less go downtown pay the money to see a movie about that no more for the fact

that we were in people's living rooms or church basements was something that i think made it much more accessible and i think the fact that we you know we're sort of a tv movie in may we're very common at the time and sullivan remarkable research has snuck in through the backdoor it's also true i think that we were we caught a wave we were in the public consciousness at the right time the nuclear freeze movement was in full flower at the time and i know i think that we sort of caught a but others like guys and the other thing is that we have a sort of novelty value nothing like this nothing this grownup had ever been shown on network television before i mean if everybody's sitting around watching the flying nun or

bewitched or whatever was made it out when they offered it to me and i sat down and met with a much of this is never going to get on the air you realize that and they boo lively assuredly that it would but in fact it's barely got on the air we didn't have to cut things out of it because the network was so terrified they didn't practice the movie with all these disclaimers of how we don't know who made it or not responsible you know if you have a heart condition but on everything that they were so terrified but come form of it obviously did get on and i very very the dish out little arm from phyllis schlafly and william buckley were so great that a lot of people just thought whoa what that all about and why can i watch it in you know so it became a kind of a phenomenon that transcended perhaps even the

subject matter like what is this how did you decide how to film that actual nuclear blast were all dale you know we would have probably done a much better our budgetary resources and they built this is pre digital era or just on the big at the beginning of the digital era when i did star trek to the wrath of conn which was right before this week were the first people to use digital effects and a feature film we get the genesis planet nowadays if we were doing a nuclear explosion they would've been a lot more persuasive then what we did which was to use that footage of nuclear explosions you know the day back from the fifties as well as our attempts at special effects such as they

were at that time and what we could afford i remember the scene in which the kansas city is had by the bomb and everything freezes it's heart stopping everybody have their own moment of you know what is the remote appalling or gut churning moment in the movie some people freak out at the end when jason awards goes back to his house for some people at the moment in kansas city well as you say when everything freezes and people got older burned into walls and there's there's no getting around that they're really bad part about a nuclear bomb during we showed which we had big arguments about with the network was the electromagnetic pulse which you know they said well we don't know that that

is really true and i think yes we do in a net with the notion that a an air burst nuclear bomb would short out all the transistors so everything electric with thought because we're transistor based electric society so you know car batteries airplane our phones all kinds of communications bull about that if you had old fashioned tubes you might make it i asked about the scene again i'm allen fieldhouse take me back to some of the other scenes side campsite here in lawrence you have any idea i almost hate to use the word favorite scenes that can you talk about filming here in lawrence and some are the memories you have the best memory that i have about filming is is not a specific one but it was there's no question that i think the movie is dedicated to the people of law and there was no way

that if they hadn't come out in the thousands to be part of this movie that it could never have happened and in fact you can say well yes a bunch of people probably came out to see what it was like to be in a movie and been found out how boring it was but that really doesn't i think ultimately explain how many people came out and stayed and stayed sometimes when we were shooting on interstates in the hot highways all away you know for very little money and bought lunch and i realized in talking to many of these people that they weren't there for the role of being in a movie they were there out of a conviction that was not dissimilar to michael that here was a chance to i express my feelings about something and i

am i didn't i think very emotional even know remembering the numbers of people and the attitude that brought them out i just i was really really very moved and i remained moved by that my favorite memory beyond that we need a new day after thirty years later yeah and i'll play was i think history in my experience is only one generation deeper the same lessons have to be learned again and again and again you know that philosophers have said those who do not learn the lessons of history teachers or condemned to repeat so i think yes every generation you have to revisit old it's a co op it's

just so at the carnival sort of oh it can't happen here and that is that there is a generational amnesia develops so we have to do it all over again going into this project you were already very strongly pro nuclear freeze so obviously didn't change your mind on it in terms of that but did you feel like this changed you well it didn't change me politically com i am a bleeding heart liberal tom i know enough about nuclear weapons to know that they can be used and that we should get rid of whole film carol then out weapons who wore their weapons you should probably never heard this expression mass destruction destruction so great that renders point with annie then possibly also

impossible any form of life so the movie did not change me in that sense but as i said earlier i look back on it and that you know you try to sum up your life in certain age where and when you look back on things and you know you try to sum up where you've been and what was important and what mattered what you're proud of and i guess i'm proudest of this mr moore thank you so much for visiting with us today and again that's nicholas meyer director of the nineteen eighty three made for tv movie the day after we're marking the thirtieth anniversary of the broadcast of the day after on today's kbr prisons william cokie was a theater in russian studies professor at the university of kansas as well as a

professional actor he was cast as a county agricultural extension agent in the day after we were about three weeks after the bomb and we were emerging from our basement and it and we had all gathered to enter what was left of the building downtown in lawrence and thirties are all farmers of course and they're saying ok what we do as a county agent i have a number of voters of various kinds describing what to do in a variety of overpriced seats blizzard of drought that kind of thing currently i had won her least according to the script you know what to do in case of nuclear attack know the holocaust and among other things the brochure suggested that we need to get

back in production right away as soon as we could because food was going to be scarcely dull been alleviated and so they said oh ok how do we go about doing that my response was well you know you've got to remove the first five inches of the soil in your fields amber below that it should be safe course the obvious question is what the world are we going to do with the first five inches of a hundred and sixty acres story out basement or whatever and end and the meeting went downhill from there one of the most iconic scenes and the day after was a massive crowds sat at allen fieldhouse at the university of kansas more than two thousand extras were needed that day among them where markets all mary ellen pre empt federal weicker basically we just lay around in the

forefront of the field house knows the day while they were doing their filming steve gutenberg would walk through it every year their rifle or something or some sort of stick or something he was pounding him as he walked in i think he was searching for someone in and amongst the dying and so basically we just lay there all day while if he had a lay on cots or be sitting next to a cot and i'm you weren't supposed to look at the actors but every by was peaking in serb i talk in and you get the right angle of all there's one odds over there and steve gutenberg he was coming our direction we're all excited and a revised really acting in any takes it turns away it can get disappointed but it was there was profile when i turned around and saw my youngest daughter with blood streaming down her face the set i say actually broken bones her here in a complete mess it was so realistic my heart just sank to think that this was my beloved child and this is what

happened to her in the holocaust and is very heart rending to me corsica to be funny as the morning went on when everybody else that i'd ever known as they're looking just the same way that i do remember the ad a complete shock of seeing my children look like they were barely surviving the holocaust another iconic scene and the day after was i weighed it again mark i was out on highway ten women of people fleeing the city so i'm i sat in my car for an entire day in like every hour so they'd have a smooth a few feet farther her for her where her day and that was the scene where jason robards was riding a bicycle i think trying to get out of the city and he remembered that they let us get out of our party once in a while when it wasn't necessary for us to be in and we can walk down and see what was taught the most uptight we sat on our car but i remember we drove the back roads and kaine are on kettle creek road and

then we got on highway chin coming towards alliance and we i think that trip the main trade off there for desoto i remember i sat there for a while i'm you know i did that mean turn off that every few every hour or so we'd be asked to move our cars for just a little bit you know there's kind of monotonous it was a long day i was asked to help pay people we we're we had them up i think was ten dollars per carload twenty dollars to occur again jack wright so i had to get the cash and i went over to the bank the next morning and they gave me having something like twenty thousand dollars in cash and i had to put my truck and so about the highway being repaid people at the end of the period so i'm i went to a police officer i would trauma early in the morning i said we've come and get twenty thousand dollars nationwide tried natural nervous about what you put in your trash and they said no way isn't know where i would want them i would want that responsibility he felt

i was left with a twenty thousand dollars to go through the whole day at the end of the day we stood in two lines and passed out the twenty dollar bills as the cars came through every cargo twenty dollars and now we're about twenty thousand dollars but i was an and i was nervous because two highway patrolmen stood right beside hers and they had their hands on their guns and as the cars went through because anybody could've robinson and it would've been easy and then that's when i really get nervous i thought oh my gosh the highway patrol stand here beside me is to store you know some but it was just one event after another one special day where they were always biggies tent city was in the end allen fieldhouse we had about twenty five hundred people and allen fieldhouse it was it was a big day and somehow it is doing and he just make it happen and if you funny memories from the filming of the day after these from michael beers mark becker and eleanor patton i was handing rations out of the back of a truck and i just had a couple two or three lines

there was a water a black lady who was a home was upset because she wasn't getting directions inch thick brought corrupted of holding her back really to the back of the truck while i was handing out question so it's a shot simeon at a couple lines in and i have a large force confession to make when we are doing these scenes you've seen lots of people and we practice it through or maybe just once or twice so when they were getting ready to be that that first take or second take or something and they gave the signal to go and i couldn't think of my wine it was just one of those sweat pop out things and some other person said the line from the movie itself and then i had a couple lines after that that i was able to walk back in on but still if you listen to the scene the you can hear someone else see the line that i

was first and only i know that and no one else really would have remembered that until this vote so i'm having a garage sale with another graduate student friend of mine and we are and tennessee and we have all the stuff not the only been there all day and all of a sudden three o'clock in the afternoon comes the props heard from this artist don't really buy the whole grout so they grow rod sailed because they needed so much debris they needed piles of distressed stop stuff after the bunkers a very dramatic scene it starts off looking at me the feet of a person being dragged in a hay field and then it pans back and i was an army soldier holding the stroll the shoulders of mission coed and another are a guy at the back of the feet and we were picking up dead bodies and loading them onto a wagon and the funny part about this is we shot that scene four times because the young co ed miller has been lifted who is a k u

drama major the tickets and i can do this better in on the last in fourth scene we picked her up and virtually through around the wife in her head made a terrific rack and their production and those cut its perfect i was working in local television at that time john tibbets teaches film at the university of kansas we were doing lots of stories about it and then when the film itself came on everybody was terrified that i was going to turn out to be another orson welles' war of the worlds the film did not set itself up to be that at all but nonetheless the use of news footage reporting and all that abc family channel so called i was really terrified that i was going to foment a nationwide panic and so we were almost twenty four seven with news crews going out across kansas city interviewing people veterans groups were gathering there was a

hotline established and i understand there were hot lines all across the united states the abc had helped establish and the whole purpose of that i think was not so much informative as to be a safeguard against any kind of a panic situation or put it yet another way i kind of traumatized thing situation especially with younger viewers that it might leave everybody freaked out and you know what you know that's the whole idea we had not yet been inundated by so many films of that ilk before end of the world disasters joubert with the section of movies like seven days in may dr strangelove things like that that was hollywood that was out there somewhere the day after was right here are literally in our own backyard a launch a tan and i think the image that stayed in my mind it was most terrifying

typically of everybody probably was the shot of jason rowe barred stuck on the highway a high altitude detonation head blotted out all electronic a magnetic devices so there's a huge gridlock traffic jam along a highway in their shoes and roll bars over his shoulder you see the mushroom cloud rising up above kansas city boy did that bring it close to home and the fact that like a film called testament which came along a little later like that film this had a considerable about time spent on the aftermath where you see the individual stories and the rampant radiation eldest that was telling people by the hundreds and thousands right there on screen at all the dozens of incidental tragedies many of which you know we're just the lawrence citizens recruited for small parts independent filmmaker kevin willmott who also teaches at the university of kansas city i was actually be very much involved with the anti

nuclear movement at the time i was you know being arrested a second if you're doing a lot of things that you know you know to try to help the cause and so i watched the film with some nuns at that that i work with at the time there were activists nuns the sisters and that's angels and i washed it with that we have traveled get together we'll watch together an end it was it was you know it was a very effective i thought you know because you know it was like a national event and other incentives like you know we'd all been talking about this issue but then it was like well a sit down to watch a movie can about this and you know television still had that can affect them i mean it wasn't it mean channel show and there wasn't that the divided nation about you know you can still have the communal kind of viewing a loaf of a tv show and then discuss it the next day and most people would have seen it had made the country have to talk about ford's for a few days and in this was really good because you know a four or four weeks after that you know nightline would

have shows on about a ten and there was a lot of discussion about him and of course the debate was always you know but people really fun to play down effects of nuclear war when people try to say it wasn't you know it wouldn't be that bat you know that you can survive and it was good to see it made real and i was it was really great to see such an issue that's hard to get your head around tribune it was great to see a fill you know a story that could could capture the essence of what people would go through and you know the whole debate about the movie was obviously you know due to underplay the effects over plague of weeks and you know it was a it's a tough one because i thought they did a pretty good job of showing how you know we everyone pretty much ties to fill an old which i think is a very real question is how fast and how much would they suffer

and in arizona people that argue that was overplayed and this is you know that that you know this was kind of a propaganda film and that it was something that you know mutual chef leigh said things about you know that this is like you know we russian like propaganda film or something like that right so you know there's always always those kind of reactions to about but i think it was it was a great kind of teaching well you know i mean what kind of weird now when you look back on is that we'll still talk about the issue a meaningful whether still exist and you know we've gotten rid of some of them what they still do exist as the old saying goes one nuclear weapon all right so it's interesting in the sense that that that film and that moment in our in our cultural history was so much about the weapons but since then we've kind of would kind of stop talking we never fully

realized the impact this movie would have or do you write the day after with a family affair she played an x ray in the film her daughter allen anthony played jolene delbert and her husband jack wright was the local casting director until it was just a few days before it aired and there was a lot of publicity and a lot of people came to tan and jack collins said she at time magazine is here and they want to interview ellen mr hass is that ok and i said do you think the living room is straight but the night that it showed my husband was at work and so i promise i would watch it and tell he got home and they said for a date to go sit with your families and sit inside so i went out and took a walk and i walked outside and i walk down the sidewalk and i could see people in front of their tvs with their families watching and i walked over a massive there were no

cars out but ninety the maps and then beautiful evening and it was so sad so serle that night i remember when i watched the film being so proud that it was such that was it was holy a midwest proper credit nicholas meyer big time director coming in from star trek takei but it was mostly it was shot here and even the music that was used in the fall a lot of it was by virgil thompson a kansas city native and if you get the opening credits your kiev on some of the themes that you hear in the farm and virgil thomson hugo it is such a devastating notion that you just a gold in it and if you go there you just you go down a really depressing all end and in that moment in an eighty three when we were talking about it was was great because we're willing to go there when you know when i think that like what does it mean that i think it was just for me a

very very special time arm in the history of lawrence and later when it actually was not shown up on tv when i remember so specifically was the next door neighbors that lived my folks did not believe in television sets the time but they said they didn't have one of their own that they wanted to see this specifically because of what it was about and what it might might befall america or before the whole world if this were to happen and i just remember them coming over and thus all getting ready and sitting in front of the tv and lined up on the sofa watching and just the end result was wow so amazing it took the town by storm i mean there was hardly anybody in lawrence that time there was an affected in some way we were already down the street with our makeup on and after we left that we go to somebody's house to sean how distressed her clothes were or what dustin on there and then everybody was psyched about the

university community of which i was a part of everybody we knew was talking about it and they all went down to be had to be an excerpt in some way and everybody i think it was the most galvanizing moment in the city in a certain way i loved it the most watched television film ever made and it's over a hundred million people sought so it's pretty incredible that lawrence did lawrence created i mean nick meyer came in from la father pays introduced a bbc produced to but lawrence opus or are many things to those who took part in this oral history project marking the thirtieth anniversary i've been made for tv movie the day after thanks also to seed novak of the watkins museum of history in to dana mccoy and on the bomb and for their help i'm kate mcintyre at our present

is a production of kansas public radio at the university of kansas