More than 100 million people gathered around their television sets 40 years ago to watch a mushroom cloud rise over a Midwestern town.
The ABC broadcast of "The Day After" was one of the most watched television movies of all time. The film won two Emmy Awards, was nominated for 10 others and is widely credited with changing public opinion about the arms race during the Cold War.
The grim portrayal of the aftermath of a full-scale nuclear war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union shook up audiences at the time. The message even reached then-President Ronald Reagan.
"It has Lawrence Kansas wiped out in a nuclear war with Russia," the former actor later wrote in his diary. "It is powerfully done — all $7 mil. worth. It’s very effective & left me greatly depressed."
A new documentary directed by Jeff Daniels details the making of the film. Liberty Hall in Lawrence will host a screening and discussion of the documentary, “Television Event," on Monday evening.
It explores the 1983 movie’s impact and legacy, and looks back at the many challenges the cast and crew faced during filming. Daniels' new work also digs into the many battles with network censors and politicians as the film was being made.
Filmed on-location in Lawrence and Kansas City, the movie made use of more than 2,000 local residents who played extras alongside well-known actors like Jason Robards, JoBeth Williams, and John Lithgow (as a KU science professor whose vain search for survivors rang out over empty radio airwaves — "This is Lawrence, Kansas. Is anybody there? Anybody at all?”)
When he was cast in "The Day After," Steve Guttenberg was a young actor on the cusp of stardom. Guttenburg went on to leading roles in some of Hollywood's biggest films of the 1980s and 90s, including “Short Circuit,” “Cocoon” and “Police Academy.”
He says the movie still packs a punch for him, and working on a set surrounded by so much fictional devastation left a psychological mark.
"I had a nightmare almost every night, that I was running to a payphone to call my parents because a nuclear war was starting,” Guttenberg remembers.
Ellen Anthony was just 11 years old when shooting began in late summer of 1982. Anthony, who now lives in New York City, played a Kansas farm girl who had to leave her dog Rusty behind when her family sought shelter in a basement.
“It was hard, because I had a dog (in real life),” Anthony says, so the scene was an emotional moment. That feeling is part of what made the movie so powerful.
“If you're trying to sort of relay something very ordinary about childhood, it's our relationship with our pets,” she says.
It wasn't until years later that Anthony found out about the film's influence on Reagan, who screened it at the president's Camp David retreat.
"Reagan understood the world through movies and through performance, and that's a big part of why he was such a popular president at the time,” Anthony says.
'A really cool chapter in Lawrence's history'
Times have changed, though, and the current splintered information network makes a relic of the notion that a movie could simultaneously reach such a large audience and change American policy.
In Lawrence, however, memories of the film still resonate.
When filming was ramping up, locals responded eagerly to a newspaper ad seeking extras for the film. It was Kansas University theater professor Jack Wright's job to wrangle them.
The end of a particularly long, hot day of shooting still sticks with him, when 400 extras rolled by in cars to claim payment.
“I had a suitcase full of money,” Wright remembers. “I think I paid them $40 a car. So I would stand there with the $20 bills in my hands and, as the cars would pass me by on either side, I would give them the money.”
The Watkins Museum of History keeps a cache of artifacts from "The Day After" on display. The museum recently had several researchers visit, working on books inspired by the film’s anniversary.
“It is a really cool chapter in Lawrence’s history, and we do like to talk about it here at the museum,” says Will Haynes, the museum's director of engagement and learning. “It shows us that history is ongoing, it never stops — whether you're talking about the Civil War or the Cold War.”
A decade ago, the Watkins Museum teamed up with Kansas Public Radio to collect oral histories from the film’s director, Nicholas Meyer, and many of the actors and locals with roles in the filming. The interviews are archived and accessible online.
Meyer told KPR that, back in the early 1980s, he'd just finished working on the second Star Trek movie, “The Wrath of Khan,” when he signed on to direct “The Day After.”
Meyer said choosing to film the movie in the Midwest was no accident.
“Lawrence and Kansas City are more or less dead-center of the continental United States,” Meyers told KPR. “We always see movies, when they do deal about nuclear war, that it's about Washington, D.C., or it's about New York. And what about everybody else?"
The approach worked so well, even Reagan, who grew up in Illinois, was swayed.
“My own reaction was one of our having to do all we can to have a deterrent & to see there is never a nuclear war," he wrote.
The "Television Event" screening and discussion begins at 6:30 p.m., Monday, Dec. 4 at Liberty Hall, 644 Massachusetts St., Lawrence, Kansas 66044. More information and tickets are at the event's website.
