BEST OF ENEMIES
Saturday 20th June, 18:00 at Regent Street Cinema. £11/£10 concession/£7 Westminster student.

In the lead up to the 1968 American general election, the struggling television network ABC hired two great public intellectuals, the liberal Gore Vidal and the conservative William F. Buckley Jr. to debate the issues of their day live on air. Best of Enemies is a gripping behind the scenes account of this now legendary series of debates. Vidal and Buckley Jr’s vitriolic and often explosive encounters came to define the modern era of public discourse in the media, marking the big bang moment of our contemporary media landscape when spectacle trumped content and argument replaced substance. This film delves into the entangled biographies of these two great thinkers and luxuriates in the language and the theater of their debates, begging the question, ‘What has television done to the way we discuss politics in our democracy today?’

http://bit.ly/OpenCityBestof