Child Actress from The Day After Sobs While Watching a Scene in the 1983 TV Movie ArticlePure

There’s an old saying that goes like this: “If there’s a nuclear war, only two species will survive: the cockroaches and Cher.” Thankfully, that theory has yet to be tested, although a 1983 ABC television movie called The Day After painted a vivid and terrifying what-if nuclear Armageddon scenario.

The newly released documentary Television Event goes behind-the-scenes of the Cold War-era television classic, which presented an alternate (and to many at the time, seemingly inevitable) reality in which a nuclear standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union leaves two cities — Lawrence, Kans., and Kansas City, Mo. — flattened. Both real-life cities were chosen as settings for the telefilm because of their proximity to numerous missile silos.

The Day After was initially intended to be a four-hour miniseries airing over two nights. It was also meant to put the fear of God into viewers… literally. Ed Hume, the film’s credited writer, reveals in the documentary that “Silence in Heaven,” a phrase he pulled directly from the Bible’s Book of Revelation, was the original title of his screenplay.

Television Event, directed by Jeff Daniels (not the Emmy-winning actor, but the maker of activism-minded documentaries like Mother with a Gun) reveals that The Day After filmmakers wanted to make a movie in which big-name performers wouldn’t overshadow the message. Stars like Donald Sutherland, Blythe Danner and Roots actor George Stanford Brown were passed over in favor of two-time Oscar winner Jason Robards, John Lithgow and Steve Guttenberg.

Much of the cast of extras and actors in some larger roles were handpicked from among locals in Lawrence. Ellen Anthony, who played Joleen Dahlberg, the youngest daughter in one of the featured families, was one of the chosen. She appears in the documentary and shares her memories of being cast in the movie and filming it.

“We surrendered our innocence,” she says. “We surrendered that to this larger goal. We were going to do something very serious.”

At one point, Anthony is seen watching the movie’s harrowing bombing scenes and breaks down crying.

“That’s really hard for me to watch. Because that’s… It’s really hard for me to watch,” she says, as tears fall down her cheeks. “Because that’s my town, that’s my child…” She stops in the middle of the word and closes her eyes before trying to go on. “I’m sorry, I can’t see it right now.”

“Those locations were the locations of my childhood,” she continues. “The group of students that you see vaporized was my actual fifth-grade class. That’s hard to watch. That’s really hard to watch.”

That was the case for many of those who saw the movie, which remains one of the highest-rated TV films of all time. According to the documentary, 67% of the people in the U.S. watching TV that night — some 100 million people total — watched The Day After.

Following the movie, ABC aired a special edition of Viewpoint in which ABC news anchor Ted Koppel comforted viewers by reminding them The Day After was just a movie, but also warning them that what happens in the movie could happen in real life.

“It’s sort of necessary to pick up a glass of water and say, ‘OK, well, wake up now,” Koppel, 85, says in an interview filmed for the documentary. “We’re gonna talk about this, but that movie — you know it was a movie, right? It didn’t happen. And everything is OK for the time being.’ “

That episode of Viewpoint included an appearance by then U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz, who assured viewers that the events of the movie would never happen in real life. Thought leaders of the time, including former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, William F. Buckley, Carl Sagan and former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, took part in a panel to debate the merit of the film.

The Day After, which was also shown in Russia and in Hiroshima, Japan — where the U.S. dropped an atom bomb on Aug. 6, 1945, hastening the end of World War II — had a lasting effect. In his memoir, Ronald Reagan, who was president when the movie aired, wrote that it left him “greatly depressed.” Television Event posits that the movie “led to the biggest decline in nuclear weapons in history.”

“The Day After was an important thing,” Nicholas Meyer, who directed the TV movie, says near the end of the documentary. “And people realize, in retrospect, just how important it was — certainly the most valuable thing I’ve gotten to do with my life to date.”

Television Event is now playing in select theaters, including Film Forum in New York City.