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Remembering Ned Beatty

The acting world has lost a giant. Ned Beatty has died. Most remember him for his riveting, truly show-stopping performances in movies like “Deliverance” and later “Network.” But I remember him for another role. Back in 1981, I was producing a controversial movie called “Pray TV,” about the rise of — and the dangers of — television ministers. Ned agreed to co-star (with the late John Ritter) as the powerful and politically motivated TV evangelist. And writer Lane Slate had crafted a brilliant and explosive sermon for Beatty to deliver on camera — a stinging, nasty and persuasive diatribe against women, minorities, and equal rights…among others. Director Robert Markowitz decided to shoot the entire scene without a single cut and with just one camera. And when Markowitz yelled “action,” Beatty looked at that one camera and then did the entire ten minute, non-stop incendiary speech in just one take. When he stopped, the crew was stunned and silent — it was that powerful — and when Markowitz yelled “cut,” everyone on the set broke out in applause. When the movie premiered on ABC a few months later, we superimposed a bogus 800 number on the screen as Beatty implored the television audience to pray with him, to call in and send money. ABC television affiliates were suddenly inundated that night with calls from thousands of viewers who had called that number only to discover it wasn’t working. They desperately wanted to contribute to the terrible causes that Beatty’s character was promoting. In fact, so many folks called trying to donate that it created a bigger problem for ABC. By the next morning, many of the real-life TV evangelists were on the phone — led by the Rev. Jerry Falwell — talking with the heads of those same affiliates and told them that if they ever ran my movie again, they’d no longer buy time on their stations, and the pressure worked. The affiliates pressured ABC and the network never re-ran the movie. That’s when Ned Beatty called me. He said his character’s sermon revealed how many “dangerous, bigoted racist people there really are out there,” who actually believed in everything his character was saying. And how much that disturbed him. And how much he hoped that this revelation might lead to some genuine healing and an end to the TV ministers manipulating so many Americans for right wing causes under the guise of spiritual guidance. But it also reminded me, then as now — and to just about everyone else who ever worked with him — what a great actor Ned Beatty was. He will be missed.