The good people who live up there on Jupiter were probably surprised to feel an enormous comet striking their happy planet a few months ago. We’d be surprised too if it happened to us right here on Earth. Surprised and afraid.
That’s the premise behind “Without Warning” (8 p.m. Sunday, CBS-Ch. 2), the latest network attempt to arouse some good, honest hysteria like that caused by Orson Welles when he curled the nation’s toes with “War of the Worlds” in 1938 (also on Oct. 30).
Genuine news personalities Sander Vanocur and Bree Walker-Lampley front a “We interrupt your regular programming” pseudo-newscast about the crash of three large asteroids onto the Earth’s surface sometime in the near future. Unlike O.J. Simpson’s wild ride in his Bronco, this truly is an Earth-shattering cataclysm.
But there’s something more than meets the eye here. Why do all three of the huge rocks strike at nearly the same latitude? What is the government concealing? Could there be alien intelligence behind this event?
Thus, CBS has sent its helicopters out to the vast quarry north of Los Angeles where “The Flintstones” was shot and dubbed it Impact Site Alpha. Powerful lights search the striated face of the “crater” as blond and brainy Bree Walker-Lampley, until recently a local news anchor in Los Angeles, describes the scene for news junkies in living rooms all over the country.
Walker-Lampley, her hair hardly ruffled by the rotor backwash that turns the “Without Warning” set into a duststorm, says she was offered a newsroom role in the movie.
“But I wanted to get out in the field. I’m an action-oriented person,” she says.
On vacation in the very state (Wyoming) where the asteroid falls, Walker-Lampley quickly reaches the site to report for “Evening World News.” Her news chopper vies for crater airspace with a government craft bringing in the National Guard to keep the curious away. As on any breaking news site, the effect is of barely controlled chaos.
The mile-wide “crater” reflects the impact of a rock 200 yards in diameter. The movie’s producers Donald Yeomans of Pasadena’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Yeomans is the planetary dynamicist who predicted the path of the comet that hit Jupiter. He says scientists who are tracking “large Near-Earth Objects” estimate that they have so far located about 10 percent of the ones big enough to cause us harm. “None of them will be close to us in the next 200 years,” he says reassuringly. What about the other 90 percent not yet tracked? They will be catalogued in the next few decades, he says.
Speaking as a scientist who has all of the facts but none of the answers, he assesses the danger this way: “You can argue that you’re just as likely to die from an asteroid impact as you are from an airline crash. People die in airline crashes every year. Weigh that against the chance that a billion people would die in an asteroid impact every million years.”
Even though it’s a million-to-one shot, “Without Warning” is treating the asteroid smash as a realistic event-at least “until the hint of alien involvement near the end,” producer Mark Wolper says.
The movie’s 8 p.m. timeslot spans the duration of the events depicted, known as “real time” pacing. News cameramen are being used for verisimilitude. They’re shooting the show as if it were live news.
“Without Warning” originated as a David Seltzer script bought by Mark Wolper’s father David in 1969. It was never produced.
This summer the younger Wolper was going through the Wolper company files and noted the word “meteor” on Seltzer’s script. The events on Jupiter were headline news at the time, and CBS bought the idea instantly.
To anchor the movie, the Wolpers resurrected newscaster Sander Vanocur, 66. Although active in producing documentary videos for schools and PBS, Vanocur’s last network assignment ended in 1991.
Vanocur knows all about reporting big events and the personal stake news people can have in them. As NBC’s White House Correspondent during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, he was taken aback when he was informed that if missiles were actually launched, he would be the one reporter allowed to go with the presidential party to underground safety. He declined the offer, saying he preferred to stay with his family if the worst occurred.
One of Vanocur’s most vivid childhood memories, he says, was listening to the original “War of the Worlds” broadcast in 1938. He and his family were huddled around the radio at home in Cleveland.
“It scared a lot of people, mostly around New York. It was very believable. In those days, as Walter Lippmann wrote, radio put `pictures in our heads,’ and Welles was a genius at evoking them. This movie plays on our imaginations in a different way.”
There’s no chance that will happen with “Without Warning.” A disclaimer will appear every 15 minutes: ” `Without Warning’ is a realistic depiction of fictional events. None of what you are seeing is actually happening.”
“I’d have preferred not to have the disclaimer,” says Mark Wolper. “In a horror movie you don’t have warnings, `Watch out! The monster is going to jump out now!’ But the Federal Communications Commission says CBS has to do it or they’ll lose their license. So they’re doing it.”
