'Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything' is fantastic boomer broadcast history
The Tribeca documentary, now on Hulu, covers five decades in the life of “Baba Wawa”
With Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything, director Jackie Jesko has assembled a hugely entertaining archival documentary, telling the life story of the legendary newswoman, who passed away at age 93 in 2022, less than ten years after she retired from The View.
In it, Jesko has put together all of the necessary footage, while also telling a coherent story: Walters was a pioneering journalist, doing quality and memorable work over a long period, while battling condescension and sexism from her male colleagues, even the famous and respected ones. Peter Jennings, it turns out, had a disappointingly Anchorman-style attitude towards women in his profession back in the ‘70s.
Walters was also equally comfortable interviewing presidents and world leaders, as she was with Hollywood stars and true crime figures like the Menendez brothers. And her interviews were never pure softballs- she kept her subjects on their toes, and often yielded news.
At the same time, her private life was a mess, with multiple divorces, affairs with famous people (including two different U.S. senators), and a not-so-smooth relationship with her daughter. And that was nothing compared to her years-long blood feud with her ABC colleague Diane Sawyer, one of the few relevant living people who didn’t participate in the doc.
And while Walters looked very different at different ages, her speaking voice was always the same.
Thanks to both her talent and the direction network news and PR have gone in the last 25 or so years, it’s hard to imagine a Barbara Walters-like figure ever emerging from a network news division again.
Was Walters an “access journalist”? I don’t feel like that term has much meaning. Doing what Walters did required using her own Rolodex, and sometimes finessing some of the world’s most powerful people. But her interviews weren’t usually about buttering people up; Walters tended to ask tough questions.
The film is judgmental towards Walters about exactly one thing: Her long friendship with Roy Cohn, and the implication that he once intervened, in an ethically dubious way, to help Walters’ father beat a tax case.
It’s a Disney/ABC News project, which might explain the easy access to all of the footage, as well as interviews with Disney CEO Bob Iger, who’s speaking more in his capacity as a former ABC executive. Talking heads include everyone from Oprah to Bette Midler to Katie Couric to onetime interview subject Monica Lewinsky to different cohosts from different eras of The View.
Beyond all that, the documentary is fascinating for all the history, to the point where boomers are going to love this. We see Walters with every president from Nixon to Trump (although her interviews with the latter are of much earlier vintage, when Trump had the same familiar sneering attitude, but expressed it much more articulately). She also interviewed more than her share of dictators, including multiple people (Muammar Gaddafi and Fidel Castro) who were in the opening scene of The Naked Gun.
And speaking of comedy, yes the film features both definitive SNL impersonations of Walters, both Gilda Radner’s in the 1970s and Cheri Oteri’s, in the early days of The View in the late ‘90s.
Despite some confusion in the press releases over whether it was coming out on June 23 or July 23, Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything is available now on Hulu.