“Barbara Walters Me Tell Everything” is a documentary a bit like her subject. It is lively and interesting in a fun way. He asks friendly questions but just knows when to reject a difficult problem. He measures important people with a worldly perception with clear eyes, but he is also captivated by the seductions of fame and money and power.
“Tell Me Everything” delivers the story of Barbara Walters, in all her tasty fascination and meaning (during the first 15 years of her television career, she broke the glass ceilings with every new role she played), and that captures a lot on Walters as a person because he refuses to be intimidated by the way she could be elusive. On television, she presented herself as a combat minense, someone who could disarm you with this sympathetic flicker in her eyes. However, outside the camera, it could be ruthless. She burned romantic relationships as if they were sugarstocks of seasonal shopping, and one of her closest friends was dreaded Roy Cohn. She was complicated. And the place she occupied in journalism too.
For a certain time, the film tells of two stories at the same time: the chronicle of the rise of Walters in television information, and the wider meaning she exercised because she was a woman. In 1961, when she joined NBC “Today Show”, she was brought to cover “Women’s Stories” (we see her in a clip in a Playboy rabbit outfit). Although this is in itself historical, it was up to her to get out of the mentality of the 1950s.
In 1971, his big break came, ironically, when the new host of the “Today Show”, Frank McGee, insisted on the network that he was allowed to ask the first three questions to any guest. This indignant Walters, so she began to continue the idea of doing interviews outside the studio. What no one, even Walters, could have gone is that she would create her own journalistic art form.
As an interviewer, she was personal, relatable, honest, accessible and penetrating. In its decorative way, it was revolutionary because it went to places at a human level that the harshly responsible male television interviewers, even the good, were trained. So, even if she was fighting a dozen sexist ideas, her sensitivity to gender in fact gave her a huge advantage. She helped the notes to goose. And then something fluctuating happened. In 1974, Frank McGee died of cancer at 52. It was in the Walters contract that if McGee left the show, she would become co-host. She became the first co-host of “Today Show” on April 22, 1974.
But the male antipathy she met was extraordinary. McGee had tried to put her in danger, and when she was hired by ABC to be the first presenter of new American female network, co-organizing the “ABC Evening News” with a salary of $ 1 million per year, his co-host, Harry Reasoner, treated it with cold contempt. During recordings of the show, it was avoided by reasoning and crew. She called to take the work an “error”. But then Roone Arledge, who had transformed ABC Sports into an entertainment complex to a network, had the opportunity to do the same with the division of news. Arledge saved Walters. His one -hour interview specials were about to become news.
“Tell him everything” opens with a montage in which we see Walters asking one of his questions of an essential clumsy interview with a variety of subjects: in Richard Nixon (“are you sorry for not having burned the bands?”), In Barbra Streisand (“Why don’t you kill you?” Courtney Love (“Never do drugs in front of your child?” Response from love: “My GodWhat a question! »).
“Sits with Barbara Walters,” said Cynthia McFadden, “nobody never left completely unscathed.” Andy Cohen describes how, as an interview subject, you would be surrounded by delicate flowers and lighting, only for Barbara to strike you with this hard question – which, in a way, was the question that everyone had gathered around the television to see. Oprah Winfrey, Connie Chung and Bette Midler offer memories told of subtle ways of Walters. She produced excellent television, and you might say that there was a moral dimension – that use of “Gotcha!” Questions to reveal the human side of colorful political and artistic figures in an essential dimension of our culture of celebrity power. After watching Barbara Walters interviews someone, whether cooperated or rejected or cried, you left with a deeper feeling of who was that person. (Just see Castro laugh Was an education.) So what might not be bad with that?
Walters has received a lot of criticism, in the sense that she trivialized the news, and “Tell me everything” tends to consider this criticism as one more example in the sexist culture of a sexist journalistic culture. But there is a greater image that the documentary has never completely confronted. Something happened that was bigger than Barbara Walters, although she (involuntarily) helped to open the way. And it was the American metaphysical transformation of news in entertainment.
In 1977, Walters arrived in the Middle East for the meeting of the Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and the Israeli Prime Minister Menachem, and the documentary shows us how Cronkite Walter Cronkite and John Chancellor were there. Start flirting with her in a head-on-head interview, then we see Sadat, in a joint interview, rejecting the idea that Arab leaders would never abandon a “busy” territory of territory-and Walters’ response is not to challenge it, but to act as if everything would be fine. In the documentary, Katie Couric returns at that time and said: “Walter Cronkite then interviewed the two, but honestly, if you are not first, you are nothing.” But is this really the case? Only if you have been part of the peace process as entertainment.
“Tell Me Everything” is entering Walters’ backback career, which warmed up after Diane Sawyer was brought to ABC to co-organize “Primetime”. The show was a direct challenge for Walters on “20/20”, and she reacted to her new rival by becoming obsessed with her. Walters considered Sawyer as a “blonde goddess” and as the “perfect woman” and her insecurities were massive. Their parallel careers have become a “gets” competition. Who could first nail the hottest interview? Walters won more than she lost, and the apotheosis of his journalism mentality as a competition was her exclusive interview with Monica Lewinsky, who has become the best rated television interview of all time (70 million people have watched). Walters organized a party in her apartment in the fifth avenue at night when she broadcast. But that has just seal the way our public life became a scandalous diversion circus.
The film devotes its last 15 minutes to “The View”, a show that Walters has largely created and it was, in her own way, as pioneer as everything she had ever done. The show brought the intimacy of women’s voices directly to American salons. It was talkative, and irresistible and revealing. This has extended Walters’ career (probably 10 years), but more than it was the fulfillment of his journalistic credo: to reveal how the staff and the politician were desperately, eternally intertwined. (This is what York Times magazine meant when he chose “sight” as the most important political spectacle of his moment.) But “sight” worked as brilliantly as because it took place in a world after transformation. Politics and entertainment were now one. They were joint. Our chief artist had not yet been elected, but the scene was defined.