Mike Wallace Is Here

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The first point director Avi Belkin makes in his absorbing documentary "Mike Wallace Is Here" is delivered via an exchange between the legendary broadcast journalist Mike Wallace and the now-disgraced Fox News commentator Bill O'Reilly. Wallace opines that O'Reilly is "an op-ed columnist," and not a journalist at all; O'Reilly fires back with, "You're a dinosaur," and follows up with the stinging claim that anyone who doesn't like O'Reilly's style (or, by extension, the style of Fox commentators in general) had better take their complaints to Wallace, because they are operating in a mode that Wallace himself established.

While not entirely justified - after all, tone, intent, and style do matter, and the Fox crowd have taken television commentary to places that no journalist of repute would ever have wanted to tread - O'Reilly's zinger is also not entirely wrong. Wallace, as this documentary illustrates, pioneered a type of interview that put the focus on hard questions delivered with unvarnished directness. Even fellow "60 Minutes" alum Morley Safer acknowledges Wallace's reputation as someone who might run roughshod over unwary interviewees by asking Wallace, "Why are you sometimes such a prick?" Barbra Streisand offers a similar opinion, telling Wallace straight out. "You are a son of a bitch."

The film consists entirely of archival material. There are no new interviews and no talking head to narrate the story of Wallace's life and career. Frankly, they're not needed; the source material is so voluminous, with Wallace appearing both as interviewer and interviewed (and, in voice-over passages drawn from interviews, as narrator, too), that it's best just to let the old clips speak for themselves.

Where Belkin is particularly clever is in editing and arranging the clips. The director pursues distinct themes and follows a rough chronology of Wallace's origins and rise. When an older Wallace snaps at an interviewer, "How many times have I been married? What in the world do you want to ask a question like that for?," the very next clip shows Wallace, some years earlier, asking Larry King about King's track record in the marriage department: "Women and Larry King - what a saga!" Wallace explains, as King, far from snappish on the subject, nods in agreement. "How many times have you been married?" Wallace continues.

Any life will contain paradoxes, contradictions, and complexities. Belkin doesn't shy from any of that, but he keeps a grip on the material, showing us an arc in which Wallace, television, and journalism evolve in tandem. We see Wallace as a young TV personality on "Night Beat" and, later, "The Mike Wallace Interview," a program that was canceled after prompting a few too many lawsuits.

By the time Wallace found his way to CBS ("the voice of authority" when it came to the news) in 1963, he had already had a long and storied career; a self-described showman, Wallace had been on game shows, peddled cigarettes and lipstick, and even taken on a few acting roles. The death of his college-age son Peter, in an accident in Greece the year before "focused my mind," Wallace recalls in one clip, but the stalwarts at CBS were initially cool toward him when he first arrived there.

But in 1968, producer Don Hewitt approached Wallace about anchoring a "news magazine" Hewett was creating, a show called "60 Minutes" that would allow Wallace to get back to doing the sorts of interviews he had done on his own shows.

"60 Minutes" wasn't a hit right away, but when it did catch on it solidified Wallace's career, and for decades afterward Wallace was a force to be reckoned with. Along the way, the show weathered a years-long lawsuit brought by a high-ranking military officer who claimed to have been "defamed" (the officer later dropped the suit), and Wallace himself endured considerable stress as a result, dipping into depression.

But that didn't stop Wallace from standing up to network bosses when a piece he'd prepared about the misdeeds of big tobacco was shelved after a threatened suit. Wallace stood firm; he was overruled, but he didn't give an inch. Eventually, CBS allowed the segment to air - but only after being scooped by the Wall Street Journal.

The documentary's somewhat elliptical structure allows themes to be fleshed out even as new themes are explored, and circles back to the same crucial points, including the one it began with. When we hear Wallace declare that " '60 Minutes' is the most-watched news program ever," O'Reilly's charge echoes in the mind. Fox News didn't spring existence in a vacuum; if its success was rapid and widespread, it's because there was a hunger for the brand of op-ed infotainment that Roger Ailes' brainchild peddled to the resentful and willfully misinformed.

Did Wallace prepare the way? It's a good question. Indeed, it's a crucial question. If so, mass media might well have begun eating its own tail decades before Donald Trump misappropriated the words "fake news" (originally used to describe fabricated claims circulating on social media) and declared, as strongmen inevitably do, that the mainstream press was "the enemy of the people."

And yet, don't we need journalists in the Mike Wallace mold even now, and perhaps more than ever? Reporters who will venture into the very heart of moral and political darkness, as Wallace did when he interviewed Ayatollah Khomeini during the hostage crisis in Iran? Reporters who will take on the powerful without flinching and deliver the sort of grilling that public officials must endure when they have violated the public trust? (In one key sequence, Wallace rakes Watergate main player John Ehrlichman over the coals in ways today's subpoena-ignoring, Congress-blocking White House has, so far, successfully sidestepped.)

If Bill O'Reilly's jab is memorable, more so is another early moment from the film, when a youthful Wallace looks directly into the camera and, framed by blackness in a black-and-white, lo-res transmission, says, "A nation's press is a good yardstick of a nation's health. Take a look at the history of any nation which has lost its freedom, and you'll find that the men who grabbed the power also had to crush the free press." Not for nothing do we see footage of Wallace talking to both a 30-something Donald Trump and, decades later, a patently disingenuous Vladimir Putin.

All props to Jon Stewart for having recently forced the a duplicitous GOP to do right by 9/11 first responders, but if we've now reached a point at which the nation's best hope is comedians, rather than reporters, then it may well be the case that the Fourth Estate is not long for this poor, darkening world.