A look at the career of “60 Minutes” newsman, Mike Wallace.
For almost 40 years, if the words…“Mike Wallace Is Here,” was uttered in your office, it was time to start schvitzing and shredding paper. It probably meant that the legendary “60 Minutes” journalist was on your doorstep and about to descend upon you with a microphone and TV camera.
Premiering at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival, “Mike Wallace Is Here” is Israeli filmmaker Avi Belkin’s outstanding documentary spanning the career of investigative reporter Mike Wallace. Using only archival footage, Belkin deftly weaves a story of a man who was not afraid to ask difficult questions, while chasing his own demons.
Often using a split screen to demonstrate the counter-point of an interview, Belkin manages to tell the professional side of the story about the man, sometimes using Wallace’s own interview techniques. And in some spots, skillfully editing Wallace’s own words that seem to contradict prior interviews. But Belkin is not content to reveal just the man we knew from “60 Minutes.” He travels back to the beginning of his career, where we witness Wallace, not so much as a newsman, but as a game show host and cigarette pitchman. It wasn’t until after the death of his son Peter, that Wallace decides to devote himself to more serious pursuits; the Mike Wallace we recognize from “60 Minutes.”
One of the highlights of the film, are segments of interviews you didn’t see when the originals aired. Skillfully, Barbra Streisand verbally spars with Wallace and perhaps bests him. Even watching him hawk Fluffo shortening was compelling!
I was fortunate to speak with the filmmaker, Avi Belkin, who gave me some insight into the making of the film and even how he conceived of the title. And I tried my best not to go Mike Wallace on him!
Below is an edited transcript of our conversation:
- Susan Kandell: Good afternoon (translated from Hebrew), Avi.
- Avi Belkin: (a little laugh) Nice. You pronounced that very nicely.
- SK: So let’s get right into this. The film was riveting, engrossing, captivating and I could go on and on and on with other superlatives. And I promise, as an interviewer, I’m not at all like Mike Wallace. There will be no hard-hitting questions today.
- AB: You can try!
- SK: No worries, not going to happen. This is a very timely story, so let’s start at the beginning. Why this story? What piqued your interest?
- AB: So you’re saying timely, when I started working on this film, it was roughly three years ago. So this was before Trump got elected. The truth is that journalism was in a lot of trouble before Trump’s presidency. And that’s why I wanted to do a film about it. I was looking for a story. I always look for a microcosm in a story that can tell a bigger story. And I was looking for an event or a person that I can tell the bigger story of journalism through. And Mike had this unparalleled career of over 60 years in journalism. So I had this idea of doing a portrait of Mike Wallace and through that, tell the genesis of journalism. And so I flew to America. I was still living in Tel Aviv back then.
- SK: So that’s how a nice boy from Tel Aviv ended up writing about an American journalist. How about the title? “Mike Wallace Is Here.” Did you ever consider anything else, like “Gotcha”?
- AB: (laugh) Excellent. So when I started making the film, I heard a story about Mike from the ’70s… He said basically when you’re going into your office on a Monday and your secretary tells you that Mike Wallace is here to see you, these are the most dreaded words in the English language because you know, you know, he’s got the goods on you! I felt like, at the end of the day, this is a very nice final statement to express. But also I felt like Mike Wallace is here, expressing again, the timely aspect of the story. Mike was still here. The legacy, the thumbprint that he put on journalism is always with us. He never left. And so I kind of like that. So “Gotcha” is a good title – perhaps the second stage.
- SK: Glad I can help. Well, there’s certainly enough footage to make another film. The bottom of the press notes had some Fun Facts listed. You had over 1,000 hours of footage to sift through. Did you consider making a series instead of a 90-minute doc?
- AB: No, it didn’t occur to me. Here are two reasons why. I’m not doing any interviews. I’m not shooting any recreations. This is an all-archival film and I really wanted this film to kind of tick and move quickly, the way Mike was. I wanted to capture Mike’s spirit. And I showed there was something very strong about a 90-minute film that’s very dense and intense to watch. You know, complex but also very fast-moving. And I felt like if I’m going to spread it out into a series, it will lose a little bit of Mike’s essence. But there was definitely enough material to do a six or eight-part series. No doubt. And that was one of the hardest things to do in this film was, (and I would say almost anytime you do a film), is to decide what you’re not showing, what you’re not telling.
- SK: So ultimately, how did you settle on which interviews to include?
- AB: Very early on I read this piece in Vanity Fair where Mike said that he’s fascinated with people’s weak spots and I was very interested in that. But also he continued to say that he is very much aware of his own personal weak spots. So when he goes into interviews, all he has to do is frame those weak spots in the form of a question. And I felt like that’s beautiful and that’s very revealing. So I started looking through interviews, basically looking for moments where Mike is revealing his own character in the exchange. Where there are moments Mike is asking a question, but the conversation is about him in a way.
- SK: Well, you selected some interviews that highlight exactly what you’re talking about. It revealed a lot about the man. So some of the footage, especially from Mike Wallace’s Interview show, which launched his hard-hitting style, came from the University of Texas at Austin. Tell me about that.
- AV: So I approached Rafael Marmor, the founder of Delirio Films, with this project and he felt like we first needed to talk with a family and that was the right strategy. So we talked with them and they were very happy and supportive of the end goal. Since all of Mike’s old kinescopes of “The Mike Wallace Show” were at the University of Texas, they were the ones who basically contacted the university and asked them to help us with the materials. So we got our foot in the front door and had those shows re-digitized from the original set of film reels. Which is why they look amazing. They are in black and white from the fifties and include interviews with Salvador Dali and Frank Lloyd Wright, people who are icons! And it was beautiful to see them again and present them to the audience.
- SK: I thank you for uncovering all that footage! Just seeing some of the original logos of CBS with the eye that looked like a camera lens was like a trip down memory lane.
- AB: That’s something that I didn’t expect when I made this film. I hear from a lot of people how nostalgic those materials are. I didn’t grow up with those images, but for a lot of people, it’s reminiscent of childhood and their early memories of news. So it’s a beautiful aspect of this film. Right?
- SK: Absolutely! One of the techniques you use is the split-screen that was very, very effective. How did that come about?
- AV: I read another story about Mike where he said that he always sees the interview as a ring, a battle of the mind where two people go at it. So I thought it would be so interesting if I used a split screen to tell a story. Close-up against close-up actually looks like they’re dueling. They used to shoot those interviews with two cameras, one for the interviewee and one for the interviewer. When you watch the actual footage on television, you’d never see those two cameras. It’s another element that I added and I felt it was very interesting to see the other person as well.
- SK: I thought it was very effective because you can see facial expressions like a raise of an eyebrow that you might not have seen in the original. So how has this affected how you look at the news?
- AV: Wow, a lot. I mean, first of all, for me it was just amazing to discover how intertwined Mike is in the original story of the news and how he was the one who was kind of a game-changer in a way. But it affected me mostly understanding that it wasn’t Mike that changed the game dramatically into what we see today. It was television, that changed the news. The moment television came into the game, news had to adapt and change into a medium that was much more a spectator sport. You had viewers and you had to compete for their attention. We see it, even more, today with the internet and it just added this element of showmanship and drama into the news that we see today.
- SK: I wonder how he would have felt about younger generations getting their news from the internet 24/7? We are out of time and that’s a discussion for another day! Thank you so much for speaking with me today, Avi. Have a wonderful weekend and I wish you much luck with this project. It deserves to be seen by a wide audience. Thank you.
- AB: Thank you. Bye Bye. Bye.
In select theaters Friday, August 2nd
