User:Edhume1/Edward Hume

EDWARD HUME (born May 18, 1936 in Chicago) is an American film and television writer, best known for creating and/or developing several tv series and for writing the landmark 1983 tv movie The Day After,

TV SERIES

During the 1970's Hume wrote the pilot scripts for four television series: Cannon (which ran on CBS for six years), Barnaby Jones (CBS, eight years), The Streets of San Francisco (ABC, six years) and Toma (ABC, one year, before becoming Baretta). During the week of April 21, 1974, all four series were among the Neilsen top twenty ratings. (Tony Musante, a classmate of Hume at Oberlin College, was cast in the lead role of Toma.)

THE DAY AFTER

In 1981, ABC Motion Pictures approached Hume about writing a screenplay on nuclear war, placing no restrictions on the subject matter except to show "what nuclear war would be like." The story focused not on politics or military strategy but on a small group of average American citizens in the Midwest -- teachers, farmers, doctors, students -- who live among unseen ICBM missile silos in nearby Kansas cornfields. Early in the story there is background news chatter of mounting tension between the US and the Soviet Union, but the script intentionally leaves unclear which side fired the first missile. [See 8,100 word Wikipedia article on The Day After.]

The Day After was a media and cultural phenomenom, watched by 100 million people on the night of Sunday, November 20, 1983, generating a national debate on the use of nuclear weapons as the cornerstone of US defense policy. Immediately following the movie, ABC aired a special Viewpoint program hosted by Ted Koppel to discuss the impact of The Day After. Among the participants were Henry Kissinger, Robert McNamara, Carl Sagan, William F. Buckley, Elie Wiesel and Secretary of State George Shultz. In his diaries, President Reagan wrote that the film was "powerfully done, very effective...and left me greatly depressed." (See Ronald Reagan, An American Life, p. 585.) Eventually, The Day After was released in theaters around the world and aired on Russian television. The teleplay was nominated for an Emmy Award and won the Writers Guild of America Award for Best Original Drama Anthology.

OTHER TV & FEATURE FILMS

In addition to the screenplays for Summertree (1971), A Reflection of Fear (1973) and Two-Minute Warning (1976), Hume wrote several tv movies including The Harness (1971), Sweet Hostage (1973) and Parole (1982). 21 Hours at Munich (1976) dramatized the events surrounding the Black September attack on the Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics; the show was nominated for an Emmy. The Terry Fox Story (1983) -- the initial production of HBO Films -- about the young athlete who lost a leg to cancer, yet ran across Canada on a prosthesis promoting the Marathon of Hope raising millions for cancer research; won the Genie Award for Best Picture, Canada's equivalent of the Oscars. Common Ground (1990) based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning book by J. Anthony Lukas, revisited the racial turbulence of the 1976 Boston busing crisis; the teleplay won the 1990 Humanitas Prize.