About this episode
Continuing our Oliver Stone series, we analyze the psy-ops within his 1988 film Talk Radio. Starring and co-written by Eric Bogossian, this film is strangely out of place in this era of Stone's filmography, and we discuss why Stone was led to direct such an unusually impersonal film. Based in large part on the career and assassination of liberal shock jock Alan Berg, the film gives us occasion to look at cultural engineering campaigns related to fears of right-wing extremism and anti-semitism. To that end, we also take close looks at the 1988 film Betrayed (directed by Costa-Gavras) and the 2024 film The Order (directed by Justin Kurzel), two other movies that showcase distorted depictions of the events surrounding Berg's murder. Finally, Brett also explains the relevance of Reversal of Fortune and Iron Maze, two other joint production credits for Oliver Stone and Edward Pressman (also a producer of Talk Radio, along with Wall Street and Blue Steel). If you enjoy Psyop Cinema, check out the Decoding Culture Foundation and Cultural Engineering Studies magazine - https://decoding-culture.com/magazine-home/ https://twitter.com/CinemaPsyop https://www.patreon.com/PsyopCinema https://psyopcinema.com/ https://linktr.ee/psyopcinema thomas-psyopcinema@protonmail.com brett-psyopcinema@protonmail.com