Talk Radio

Alan Berg was a Denver talk-radio host who was murdered on June 18, 1984. He was a goofy-looking bird, with a thin face and a bristly white beard that hid the ravages of teenage acne. He wore reading glasses perched far down on his nose, and he dressed in unlikely combinations of checks and stripes and garments that looked left over from the 1950s. When the members of a lunatic right-wing group gunned him down in the driveway of his home, they could not have mistaken him for anybody else.

I met Berg three or four times. The first time I was going to be on his radio show, I listened to it as I drove from Boulder, Colo., to Denver. He was chewing out some hapless housewife whose brain was a reservoir of prejudices against anyone who was the slightest bit different from her. Berg was telling her that no one in his right mind would want to be anything like her at all.

“Why were you so hard on that lady?” I asked him, when we were on the air.

“She was asking for it,” Berg said. “Why would she call up and feed me all those straight lines if she didn’t want me to tell her how stupid she was?” Cruel, perhaps, but quite possibly correct. Berg was the top radio personality in Denver because he told people exactly what he thought of them. It was unusual to hear somebody on the radio who was not tailoring his words to the sensibilities of his audience.

Talking with Berg off the air, I found that he was a man who had been through a lot, including the loss of a law practice in Chicago because of alcoholism. Now he was sober and successful, but I had the feeling that he was grateful every morning for somehow having pulled out of his crash-dive. I liked him.

When I learned that he had been murdered, my first reaction was disbelief that anyone could have taken him that seriously. Jeez, didn’t they know he was just another poor guy trying to earn a living? “Talk Radio,” Oliver Stone’s new film, is inspired by the murder of Berg, but it is not based on his life. Berg was older, calmer and more amused by life than Barry Champlain, the tortured talk-radio host in the movie. Berg was not self-destructive or suicidal, and Champlain is both.

When he is mailed a suspicious box in a plain brown wrapper, he puts it next to the microphone. When he gets a call from the man who mailed the box, and the man hints that it contains a bomb, Champlain opens it on the air. When another caller rants and raves incoherently about Champlain’s beliefs and calls him a coward, Champlain asks him to come over to the radio station - and invites the man, a disheveled, wild-eyed street person, to come into the studio.

Champlain works in a studio in a Houston high-rise, surrounded by other high-rises. I was always aware of all the thousands of windows with a view into his studio. When the man who sent the box says, “I can see you have it,” I cringed, because I imagined someone with a sniper-scope.

But Champlain, played with rasping, aggressive sarcasm by Eric Bogosian, simply doesn’t care. He is gambling with his life in the same self-hating way as people who get drunk and point a speedboat into the blackness of a storm.