Some artists can see where our culture is going before anyone else does, and one of them is Larry Gelbart, a writer who has been making America laugh, ever more darkly, since he broke into radio as a teenager a half-century ago.
Perhaps no one fixed the futility of the Vietnam War more firmly in the mass American imagination than Gelbart did, under the guise of writing about Korea, in the TV series "M*A*S*H." And perhaps no writer in any medium so fully anticipated Whitewater. His savage 1989 play satirizing the Iran-contra hearings, "Mastergate," foresaw "the next, inevitable whatever-gate" and offered a prescient moral: "Those that forget the past are certain to be subpoenaed." Were "Mastergate" to be revived on Broadway now - where another Gelbart revival, "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum," already holds forth - it might pass for the evening news.This week Gelbart was in New York to screen his latest project, a TV movie called "Weapons of Mass Distraction," before an audience of media folk. They did not seem to enjoy it. The film is about two competing show-business moguls - played by Ben Kingsley and Gabriel Byrne, both sounding at times like Rupert Murdoch - who stop at little to add a pro football team to their already vast multimedia conglomerates. They bribe senators with book contracts, use their tabloids to punish rivals and benumb the public with "a steady diet of the titillating and the inconsequential." Few at the screening laughed when one of Gelbart's moguls testified to the value of sports on TV: "While one-eighth of the viewers) are rooting for the winners that they themselves can never be, you promote all your series, your movies, you name it, to bombard what's left of the poor b------ senses." Such is the reality of the media jungle, not comic hyperbole.
"It's increasingly difficult to be satirical," said Gelbart. "You can't keep up with the headlines." When he first started writing "Weapons of Mass Distraction" over two years ago, he had been struck by stories about the Italian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, who controlled the state TV system even though he also owned three commercial TV stations. Could such a concentration of media power happen here? In the period over which Gelbart wrote his script, much of what he anticipated came true, from the Disney-ABC merger to the Murdoch-Ted Turner feud. So did the merger of Turner's empire with Time Warner - owner of HBO, which produced Mr. Gelbart's movie. (Has the potentially meddlesome Turner seen it? "Not yet.")
The unrestricted power of these few media giants to shape "domestic policy and foreign policy" - let alone entertainment - makes Gel-bart far angrier than he was about the tobacco executive, F. Ross Johnson of RJR Nabisco, he spoofed in his last movie, "Barbarians at the Gate." "Tobacco executives are only dangerous to smokers," he explained. "But we all smoke the news. We all inhale television. We all subscribe to what these men are putting out. They're much more dangerous. . . . I'm mad as h---, to quote the immortal Paddy." Paddy is Gelbart's late colleague Paddy Chayefsky, who cried out about the trashing of TV news in the movie "Network" 20 years ago.
Given that "Network," a huge hit, did nothing to slow the cultural collapse it decried, who or what will counteract the megamedia powers dramatized in "Weapons of Mass Distraction"? Our real-life congressional watchdogs are just as impotent as the whorish politicians Gelbart satirizes. As Leslie Wayne reported in The Times on Monday, a Congress fattened by campaign contributions and fearful of unflattering TV coverage looks the other way while the media giants gorge themselves on corporate welfare and disdain the public interest.
If anything, these corporations' excesses are escalating so quickly that "Mass Distraction" could be the first Gelbart script to be dated before its TV premiere (May 17). Even as the screening audience in New York this week watched his chilling parody of a salacious afternoon talk-show host reminiscent of Jenny Jones or Jerry Springer, the real Jerry Springer was graduating to a nighttime gig as commentator on the 10 p.m. news at the NBC affiliate in Chicago.