Backstory: Talk Radio and the Rise of Eric Bogosian

Building Up to Barry
Growing up in the Boston suburb of Woburn, Massachusetts, the Armenian-American son of an accountant and a hairdresser, Eric Bogosian began exploring an intense onstage energy while still in high school. As legend has it, while playing a mental patient in a school play, Bogosian once attacked and strangled a fellow student so convincingly that the student's mother leapt to her feet, yelling, "Don't kill my son!"

After acting through most of his school years in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Bogosian got sensible and attended the University of Chicago, only to drop out soon after and return to his hometown to sell jeans at the Gap. He reconnected with two high school friends Nicholas Paleologos and Frederick Zollo, both now Tony-winning Broadway producers to form the Woburn Drama Guild. After producing several plays together, Bogosian became sufficiently convinced that theater was his calling and enrolled in the drama program at Oberlin College in Ohio. While still a student, he got to experience New York City working as an intern at off-Broadway's Westside Theatre in 1975 and moved to the city after graduating the following year.

Although he's said to have applied for a job on Wall Street, Bogosian instead worked answering phones at The Kitchen, a popular performance space of the time, and eventually ran its dance program. He also started performing his own solo pieces and developing evenings of gritty character monologues, including 1977's Careful Moment, at the St. Mark's Poetry Project and The Ricky Paul Show, about a racist and sexist stand-up comedian. He hit the big time in 1981 when his 14-character solo show Men Inside opened at the Public Theater, followed by Funhouse directed by wife Jo Bonney, whom he married in 1980 at both the Public and the Actors' Playhouse.

Bogosian would later tell interviewers that he found material for his monologues during noctural walks through the seamier parts of New York City. Of the kind of people that interest him, Bogosian told The New York Times in 1983: "I'm not a fun guy...The challenge is to do the dark guys, the very dark guys."

Inspiration on the Dial
Bogosian first met Portland visual artist Ted Savinar during a 1980 trip to the West Coast, and later reconnected with him in 1982, after the success of Men Inside. Hoping to find a project to work on together, Savinar asked Bogosian if he'd ever listened to talk radio, which he often played while painting in his studio. Bogosian said he hadn't, but soon found himself fascinated by the psychology at play between host and callers on such emotionally charged broadcasts.

In 1984, after Bogosian had started working on what would become Talk Radio, controversial liberal radio host Alan Berg who infuriated listeners one Yom Kippur famously inviting them to call and say what they disliked about Jews was shot in Denver by what was believed to be a white nationalist organization called The Order. Although Talk Radio wasn't based on Berg initially, the murder may have inspired Bogosian to create a more volatile protaganist rather than what he'd originally intended to be a "boring Bernard Meltzer type." Meltzer's mild-mannered "What's Your Problem?" radio show aired from 1967 to the mid-1990s in New York and Philadelphia. "Shock jock" Howard Stern, who rose in popularity with New Yorkers as a morning DJ on WNBC Radio during the creation of the script, is another credited inspiration.

For just one weekend in 1985, Talk Radio premiered at the Portland Center for the Visual Arts in Oregon. The show was more of a performance piece than a play in this early form, although the idea of observing a night in the life of an outspoken radio host was intact from the start. Bogosian sat at a desk playing his newest character, radio host Barry Champlain, three local actors Michelle M. Mariana, R. Dee and Bob McGranahan played Champlain's callers and Savinar created images and videos that were projected behind Bogosian. Encouraged by audience reactions, he and Savinar agreed to keep working on Talk Radio and Bogosian headed back to New York to work on his newest monologue show, Drinking in America, which opened to great acclaim at the American Place Theater in 1986 and would go on to win him his first of three Obie Awards.

Praise at the Public
Public Theater producer Joe Papp came to see Drinking in America and asked Bogosian if he had any new shows that he'd like to do at his theater. As Bogosian told Broadway.com in a Q&A last year: "I said, 'Yes, I have this play Talk Radio. I've written 30 pages of it.' He said, 'Fine, it's on the schedule for next year.' And that was it. We never did a reading. We never did a workshop. We put the play on, and the play worked... That was the way Joe Papp did things: If you looked him in the eye and said, 'I believe in this piece,' that was it."

A longer and slicker Talk Radio opened to mostly rave reviews at the Public Theater's Martinson Hall on May 29, 1987, under the direction of Bogosian's Woburn theater friend Zollo. Bogosian again played Champlain, Savinar provided expanded visuals and Mariana repeated her Portland performance, with nine new actors Linda Atkinson, William DeAcutis, Susan Gabriel, Zach Grenier, John C. McGinley, Mark Metcalf, Peter Onorati, Robyn Peterson and Michael Wincott taking on the roles of radio station staffers and callers. Seven of them played 28 different callers phoning in to Champlain's show, including a pre-op transexual, a pregnant suicidal teen and an anti-Semite, performing in three separate sound booths offstage.

Bogosian, who was 34, was more settled during the off-Broadway run of Talk Radio than he was during his ragtag monologue days, heading home to suburban New Jersey after performances to be husband to wife Jo and dad to newborn son Harry. When Papp asked Bogosian if he wanted to take Talk Radio to Broadway after the off-Broadway run, he declined: "It didn't seem like the place for it," he told Broadway.com.

25 Days in Dallas
Film producer Edward R. Pressman, in New York at the time overseeing Oliver Stone's Wall Street, saw Talk Radio during its successful six-month run at the Public and optioned the film rights. The timing couldn't have been better, with Stern now enjoying national notoriety with syndication on Infinity Broadcasting and the antics of popular TV talkers Morton Downey, Jr. and Geraldo Rivera making headlines regularly. Pressman previously brought two other Public shows to the big screen—Plenty and The Pirates of Penzance—but knew Talk Radio would need to be adapted carefully. He was adamant about one thing: keeping Bogosian in the lead role one potential director apparently wanted to see Dustin Hoffman behind Champlain's microphone.

It was around this time that Pressman found Stephen Singular's book Talked to Death: The Life and Murder of Alan Berg and decided that combining real details of Berg's life with the character of Champlain was a viable solution in opening up the play. Bogosian thought the idea could work, as he had always been influenced by Berg's story and had, in fact, given out copies of Talked to Death to the off-Broadway cast of the show to read as background. Originally agreeing only to co-produce and help with the screenplay adaptation, Stone signed on to direct the film himself in late 1987.

Thanks to a Best Director Oscar win for Platoon and an adoring critical and commercial reception for Wall Street, 1987 was a big year for Stone. In 1988, he was scheduled to jump into a personal pet project, Born on the Fourth of July, leaving him with limited time to shoot Talk Radio. He hammered out the screenplay with Bogosian, giving Champlain a more liberal slant, adding flashbacks and the character of an ex-wife played by stage favorite Ellen Greene of Little Shop of Horrors and moving the action from Cleveland to Dallas, the heart of the bible belt. The entire production which welcomed back stage performers Atkinson, DeAcutis, Grenier, Mariana, McGinley and Wincott and added up-and-coming talents like Alec Baldwin, Leslie Hope and John Pankow was shot in Dallas in just 25 days in April 1988 with the slim budget of $4.5 million.

Released on December 23, 1988, just a little over a year after closing at the Public, Talk Radio enjoyed one of the quickest stage-to-screen journeys in memory. The darker, moodier film did not, however, enjoy the same success that it found on stage, with The New York Times film critic Vincent Canby sniffing that it was "a nearly perfect example of how not to make a movie of a play." Although other critics were nicer, Talk Radio did not find a mainstream audience, grossing just $3.4 million. Released on DVD in 2000, the film now has a cult following and is considered one of Stone's underrated works. Bogosian, who won an award at the Berlin Film Festival for Talk Radio, praises the one film on his resume to cast him as a leading man. "I love Oliver Stone," he writes on his website blog. "He made a nasty good film out of my play."

Broadway Bound
Since Talk Radio, Bogosian has found success in film and TV currently as a regular on Law & Order: Criminal Intent and with plays that have either put him center stage Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll, Pounding Nails in the Floor With My Forehead, Wake Up and Smell the Coffee or not subUrbia. What's eluded him during a 30-year stage career is the mainstream world of Broadway, which changes with the arrival of Talk Radio at the Longacre Theatre this season. With self-professed Bogosian fan Liev Schreiber leading a cast of nine as Barry Champlain, the playwright seems happy to stay on the sidelines this time out: "To get the absolute creme de la creme of talents to do my play?" he said to Broadway.com. "I'm in heaven."