In one corner sat Gore Vidal, author and liberal bon vivant; in the other was William F. Buckley Jr.,talk-show host, conservative blowhard and founder of the far-right publication National Review.It was 1968, and ABC News, desperate for ratings, had decided to throw a hail-Mary pass by inviting the duo to debate the two presidential conventions over 10 nights. The network was hoping for some fireworks and gotthem. By the time Vidal called Buckley a crypto-Nazi and Buckley threatened to sock his queer opponent inthe face on live TV, ABC realized it had struck gold.
That infamous moment is the centerpiece of Best of Enemies,Robert Gordon and Morgan Nevilles documentary on the broadcast-news experiment that suggests this clash of celebrity-intellectual titans gave birth to the partisan shouting matches that dominate todays political punditry. Both filmmakers remember reading about that particularly vitriolic exchange long after the fact, even if they knew little else about the debates as a whole. It wasnt until Gordon was slipped a bootleg DVD of the entire 10-night run from a friend in 2010 that he realized just how prescient these verbal spats were. As soon as I was about two-and-a-half minutes into the first one, I thought, My God, its like they saw the future, he says. They saw the culture wars were living through now and battled them then.
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Gordon then contacted his colleague Neville, the Oscar-winning director behind 2013s backup-singer doc 20 Feet From Stardom and a former fact-checker for Vidal telling him, Im going to send you something I think you need to watch. Soon, the two were combing through ABCs archives, uncovering the behind-the-scenes stories on what had been dubbed the networks Unconventional Convention Coverage and drawing connections between the twos tense tte--ttes and our current cable-news shoutfest.
Whats interesting is that ABC set up a situation that they thought might cause some friction, Gordon claims, while his partner chimes in to finish the thought. But they werent expecting a conflagration, Neville continues. I think they were worried theyd gone too far by the time the crytpo-Nazi comment happened in Chicago on Night Nine. Whereas most news shows today, they cant seem to go far enough. But the ratings were high, the concept attracted attention, and here we are.
Using talking-head testimonials and brief histories of the respective participants, Best of Enemies offers a quick contextual history lesson as to how the stage had been set and why the result had caused such a furor. But its the archival footage of the broadcasts themselves, with Buckley and Vidal trading highbrow witticisms and lowbrow insults as Miami seethes and Chicago burns, that shows how their rivalry turned into an epic battle of political-ideology one-upmanship. I think thats why they pissed each other off, Neville says. They both realized they were dealing with equals, regardless of who won that round. But we didnt want to pick sides. We wanted to make a film about how we argue now, because its a much important discussion.
The funny thing is, during the five years we were trying to make the movie, the most common comment we got was, Is this even relevant?' Neville continues. And then, after the film premiered at Sundance last January, those same folks came up to Robert and I, and said, Oh, wow, Im so sorry. I cant believe how relevant this is.
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