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Shadow on the Land
I’m about to introduce you to one of the strangest, longest-forgotten TV projects ever launched: a December 1968 television movie for ABC made to pitch a weekly series called Shadow on the Land. The grim, Twilight Zone-like premise: the U.S. is ruled by a dictatorship, and has been for decades more than anyone realizes, backed by the Federal bureaucracy and their Gestapo-like ISF, the Internal Security Forces. The nation’s churches have been cowed or intimidated into submission. A small band of freedom fighters emerges within law enforcement and government, and their never-ending secret struggle of sabotage against their own agencies is the plot of the TV movie, and of the following series that was never to be.
This wasn’t The Man in the High Castle; no foreign invasion, no defeat in a war was necessary, it’s something we did to ourselves. One of the most disturbing and effective things about Shadow on the Land was a deliberate choice of the filmmakers: its normalcy, an America with freeways and shopping centers where you can drive a Pontiac, smoke Luckies, and fly TWA. Where even the men walking the halls of secret police headquarters look like the ad agency staff in Mad Men, with a visual background of typing pools and office Christmas parties. There are no futuristic props at all, nothing that suggests that what we’re watching is anything but today’s world. Wild stuff, huh?
This was an era of shows with open-ended story arcs, like The Fugitive, The Invaders, and Run For Your Life, and if Shadow on the Land had stayed around, that’s the overall format it would have had, just with more, shall we say, nightmarish subject matter.
The screenplay is claimed to be very loosely based on Sinclair Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here, about 33 years earlier, but there’s not much left of it other than the premise. There seems to have been some effort to make this a genuine “what-if” story, not a direct comment on fascism from the left or right. The rare bits of jargon in Shadow on the Land are a mixture of Nazi and Soviet cliches, and the backstory of how this all came to be is deliberately vague. Evidently, the Great Depression triggered a popular revolution and America doesn’t seem to have been involved in WWII, if it happened at all.
In 1968, the very idea of TV movies was still new; networks got great ratings running movies, but the studios squeezed the prices ever-higher. So in the mid-‘60s, the networks decided to partner with some of those studios to make their own, much more cheaply than renting feature film rights, but dressing them up just enough to make them seem (in theory, at least) a notch above average TV fare. This one had the same cameraman who’d film Patton two years later, Fred Koenekamp. Carol Lynley and Janice Rule weren’t major stars, but they were at least stars, who’d been the female leads in feature films. By the end of 1968, Gene Hackman was already acclaimed for his role in Bonnie and Clyde. But Shadow was filmed first before Hackman could command big money. It was held on the (metaphorical) shelf for a year while ABC decided whether or not to air it.
The idea of using a TV movie as, in effect, a mass public screen test of a series idea would continue for years. For instance, Kojak, the series, came from a 1973 TV movie called The Marcus-Nelson Murders.
Where did this elaborately produced show go wrong? You want your heroes to win, at least most of the time. But in the deceptively normal-looking world of Shadow on the Land, there’s realistically no mercy when people step out of line. The ISF silences dissenters with sudden bursts of gunfire, or imprisonment and torture. By modern movie standards, these are not visually graphic scenes, but they are extraordinarily grim and dramatic for broadcast TV more than half a century ago. Week after week of seeing America’s bravest patriots suffering terrible deaths didn’t fit the template of mass entertainment, frankly. Imagine this going up against Bonanza, The Dean Martin Show, or Gunsmoke.
A final note: Reading commenters online, I saw that plenty of them were, like me, people who’d seen this rare show once and been struck by it, but were never able to find it again. To my knowledge, it hasn’t been legally released in any media for many years. Finally, a YouTuber or two came to the rescue, with a sometimes-smearing VHS copy of a late-night broadcast of a local TV station’s jumpy 16mm print, with all the lack of visual quality that spells out. If you’re going to explore this forgotten film, be (slightly) reassured that the worst poor quality is near the beginning of the tape.
Because the copyright holders, Screen Gems/Columbia Pictures, haven’t released it, any link I could give you to a YouTube clip could be held against Ricochet, insane as that may sound, and I’d like to keep life as easy as possible for the gang. If you’re interested, copy this search term into YouTube and find the link yourself: Shadow on the Land Christian Arthur, which should get you there.
I’ve been online since 1984; 37 years. At any previous point, I’d have regarded these precautions against letting informal links legally threaten our much-liked website to be excessive, and they probably are, but I can’t be sure anymore. That protective instinct goes to the heart of the social distrust that, in a way, this TV movie is all about. If trivial infractions of the rules are going to be held against anybody, does anyone here doubt that we, the big R>, would be on that list?
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Maybe leave out the part where you recast every single role for each movie.
That was unfortunate, never really understood why they did that. But I was able to enjoy the movies anyway.
High concept is a term coined in the ’70s, when TV-trained executives started rising into power over feature films. All it really means is, “You can explain the plot simply”.
“a spoiled, pretty Southern girl lives through the Civil War, marries three times, and learns a few things”.
“A sheriff in a small western town has an hour to find allies who’ll stand with him against outlaws arriving on the noon train”.
“An uneducated but goodhearted amateur boxer is given a chance at the world heavyweight championship.”
“A farm boy on a desert planet is called to help save a princess in an intergalactic rebellion”.
The storyline of Atlas Shrugged doesn’t lend itself to that. (“And then, Galt electrifies the courtroom with a 455 page monologue about property rights and freedom.”) But Shadow on the Land would; you can explain it to anybody in a sentence. “In an alternate reality, America is a ruthless dictatorship, but few people are willing to do so much as raise a finger about it”.
It was actually part of the enjoyment. It some cases, it seemed that they were trying to find the one actor in the world who looked the least like the previous one. Check out the group of actors playing Ellis Wyatt or Wesley Mouch.
“Mouch”. Mooch and mouth in the same word. Ayn Rand always had the gift of using names to subtly nudge you, ever-so-slightly, what to think of a character, like “Sniveling Limpdick the Third”, or “City Commissioner, Mr. Thieving Worthlessass”.
Without spoilers, I can say that one moderately clever thing about the climactic action scene is the fact that since it’s a false flag, Reichstag Fire-type scenario, the agents of the evil ISF are dressed as rebels in order to sabotage an electric plant to plunge 40 million people on the West Coast into darkness on Christmas Eve. That means the rebels all dress in ISF uniforms, making it hard to cheer when a bad guy gets shot, since you had to constantly remind yourself who the bad guys were.
And of course there is always the TV miniseries Amerika.
If you are a fan of Marlowe/Spade et al, Cast a Deadly Spell is a treat. Much to my delight it’s on HBO. Where it debuted back in the 1990s. Is it Oscar caliber? No. But it is fun to watch.
Gary, thank you for dredging up this ancient memory. I remember watching it, but couldn’t have told you the plot much beyond “contemporary America with a fascist dictatorship”.
Amerika was written and directed by Donald Wrye, one of our board members (American Cinema Foundation). Donald was one of the most conservative directors in town, and this seven-part miniseries was meant as a reply to the success of The Day After. It took years to get financing, and by the time it opened it was dismissed as a copy of Red Dawn. Which is s shame, because they aren’t all that similar.
Nah, it’s just how the leftist knuckleheads “think.”
“This is a thing I don’t like. That was a thing I didn’t like. They’re practically the same!”
Wrye had an interesting career. (He died six years ago, at age 80). He brought a conservative viewpoint to his scripts, but unlike Amerika, most of them weren’t typical conservative subjects, but things like adapting John Gunther’s Death, Be Not Proud. We needed more people like Donald. He never expected much from liberal critics, but deserved better than jeers, calling his mini-series “Red Yawn”.
One tiny anecdote: Amerika did a lot of location shooting in Nebraska. Considering the plot of the story, Donald joked that he found it disconcerting to be surrounded by banners reading, “Go Big Red!”
As I see it, this was an era when an overwhelming majority of prime time drama series was standalone hours. As a loyal and enthusiastic viewer of both The Fugitive and Run For Your Life, I’d also make the argument that those two series were also closed weekly story arcs in most episodes, with the concept-driving cumulative narrative usually in the background.
In The Fugitive, episodes featuring Lt. Gerard (36 out of 120) and The One-Armed Man (9) brought the open ended narrative into the foreground. These were the best episodes and the most eagerly anticipated, but their scarcity was what made them precious and credible. More often Kimble’s fugitive status followed him around like a cloud, while he attended to the altruistic problem solving that called his inner physician into play. Risk of capture was always there, but this was no soap opera. The window into working class life in JFK-era America as Kimble “toiled at many jobs” across the land kept us interested until the long awaited payoff. So much did the audience adore stories with closure in those days, that when the long-deferred two part finale aired — in the summer, mind you — it only became the highest rated episode in the history of television.
Run For Your Life kept Paul Bryan’s status as a dying man in even deeper background. He never showed us so much as a sniffle. Only the opening titles reminded us why in an era when conformity in society was challenged, this fellow was out there taking risks every week. This gave the series depth and complexity, and attracted a bright galaxy of guest actors. Roy Huggins, who wrote 32 of the show’s 85 episodes, was proud of the show because without the benefit of a classic franchise (Bryan had given up his law practice) the program held the audience’s interest with strong character-based stories in an anthology-like open format.
The forerunners of today’s many open-ended streaming narratives were the mini-series of the 1970’s. Prime time soaps like the 1960’s hit Peyton Place wouldn’t be proven sustainable until Dallas, etc. in the 1980’s, but when ABC scheduled the mini-series Roots on consecutive nights, all records were broken. So popular were big event mini’s of the 1970’s that one of the most highly regarded programming executives of the time, Paul Klein, predicted that they would out-rate and ultimately displace standalone series. Not quite. What did happen was multi-episode arcs were sewn into the high quality ensemble dramas which revolutionized prime time in the 1980’s. But even as Hill Street Blues, St. Elsewhere and their successors piled up the Emmy nominations, studios like Universal TV hit far greater syndication jackpots with standalones like Magnum, P.I. and Murder, She Wrote.
I raise this distinction now because the standalone episodic drama has diminished in prime time today. Those that have lasted the longest, such as CBS’ Blue Bloods, and, particularly in reruns, NBC’s Law & Order, do so because of qualities which the audience values more than the Hollywood creative community. Primary is the satisfaction of a valid underlying premise, inherent to the crime genre in the day when police were on the heroic journey, and no excuse sufficed to excuse criminals. There is also the universal need for escapism, reassurance that the problem posed in the first act of an hour drama can be resolved by its conclusion. Character development in the best series will go on for its entire run, but along the way viewers want the satisfaction that before each evening is over, our stories tell us that the good guys won the fight that day. No matter what narrative the newscasters are selling, the underlying truth we all want to believe is that each day, somewhere, patients are being cured, mysteries are being solved, and courts are delivering just verdicts. Sharing such narratives may well encourage us to actually make it so.
Jim, I know you played a role in the development of the mini-series in the ’70s, the next stage of evolution from the TV movie-of-the-week of the ’60s. The mini, or longform, was a big jump in prestige for broadcast TV, at a time when cable production was still in its infancy. Operation Prime Time brought network-like quality and production values to syndicated production. Your years in that field coincide with some of the most interesting TV of its time.
Thanks, Gary. Full credit for OPT belongs to Al Masini, founder of TeleRep, and a member of the Broadcasting Hall of Fame. OPT proved that late in the three network era, a coalition of independent stations could support top quality original programming, like A Woman Called Golda with Ingrid Bergman, and Sadat, starring Louis Gossett. (Seeing what a mere “ad hoc” network could do, Rupert Murdoch would buy the Metromedia station group, and Fox Network was born.)
Al Masini is also famed for creating Solid Gold, Entertainment Tonight (the first live original satellite delivered daily broadcast competitor to the major networks), Star Search, and Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. He also created the pricing of individual TV spots the 1950’s. Before they could buy individual ads priced according to ratings, sponsors either had to buy a season long sponsorship of a show, or made other arrangements like big chunks of airtime. Probably the greatest and most innovative salesman in the history of television.
I remember “The Girl, The Gold Watch, & Everything” and “Goliath Awaits” of which I always keep a digital recording of, full-length (over three hours), in several different locations for safety.
“Goliath” had a pretty amazing cast.
Side note: Sadat was written by Lionel Chetwynd, co-founder of the American Cinema Foundation, and probably the most outspoken conservative in 20th century screenwriting.
IIRC, “The Girl, The Gold Watch, & Everything” had a big promo campaign for a syndicated film. “A watch that can stop time brings two lovers to the brink of disaster!”
Such a great post, @garymcvey, thank you! I’m sharing this with my mother-in-law who loves the older shows.
The first Kolchak movies were in the early/mid-70s too, and led into the much-missed series. But they were “official” Movies Of The Week for ABC.