Mike Wallace Is Here

Mike Wallace Is Here documents the life and career of the legendary American broadcaster Mike Wallace. The film interweaves clips from Wallace's most famous interviews with personal remembrances, commentary, and archival materials to produce a detailed and incisive portrayal of American television's most effective interrogator. Television stardom, in the United States, has proven ephemeral. Once-famous television celebrities such as Ed Sullivan, Arthur Godfrey, and Milton Berle are today largely forgotten, and Mike Wallace's distinctive contribution to the medium's development as a journalistic vehicle is similarly threatened with erasure. Yet Mike Wallace Is Here provides an excellent reminder of Wallace's magnetic televisual power during the medium's most influential decades. By employing a rich trove of archival film and video footage, the documentary shows how Wallace proved to be such a spellbinding interviewer. Whether questioning politicians, celebrities, or even small-time con artists, Wallace asked the type of probing and penetrating questions that can still make audiences cringe decades later. Beginning in the late 1950s, with the local television program in New York City, Night Beat, which later became The Mike Wallace Interview on Abc, the audience sees Wallace interrogating gangsters about murdering innocents, actors about their vanity, and politicians about corruption. His take-no-prisoners approach to broadcast inquisitions made him famous, and it was in this period that he crafted his lasting persona as television's crusading tough guy

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