{"id":6110,"date":"2012-04-10T22:31:47","date_gmt":"2012-04-11T02:31:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/?p=6110"},"modified":"2012-04-10T22:31:47","modified_gmt":"2012-04-11T02:31:47","slug":"45-years-ago-terry-southern-predicted-2012","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/2012\/04\/10\/45-years-ago-terry-southern-predicted-2012\/","title":{"rendered":"45 years ago, Terry Southern predicted 2012"},"content":{"rendered":"

The 200th issue of the Paris Review<\/em> features an interview with Terry Southern (who, among many other things, wrote the screenplay for Dr. Strangelove<\/em>) that’s been in the works for 35 years. Southern was interviewed in 1967, but never got around to approving the transcript, and since the magazine allows its interviewees that privilege, it never saw print. <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The interview has only recently been discovered, and I find these thoughts of Southern’s prescient:<\/p>\n

In five years television screens will be half the size of a movie screen, they’ll occupy a whole wall. And people will just sit there. They’re not going to leave the house except to see something groovy, something that they can’t see at home.<\/p>\n

The great future, not for creative writers, but for professional writers, is in television, because pay television is going to come in, and that will take the place of the art movies that exist now, and ordinary television will take the place of what now exists in movies. In twenty years, the movies that compete with TV and pay TV will have to be pretty far out. Otherwise people will simply hang with the tube.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So not only did he foresee the coming age of quality pay television—with Breaking Bad<\/em>, Mad Men<\/em>, and the like—but also the massive screens on which we’d watch them all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The 200th issue of the Paris Review features an interview with Terry Southern (who, among many other things, wrote the screenplay for Dr. Strangelove) that’s been in the works for 35 years. Southern was interviewed in 1967, but never got around to approving the transcript, and since the magazine allows its interviewees that privilege, it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[123,187],"class_list":["post-6110","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-paris-review","tag-terry-southern"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6110","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6110"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6110\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6110"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6110"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6110"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}