re: The Pick Of The Day

L.A. 2017

quote:

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"L.A. 2017" is a 1971 episode of the NBC television series The Name of the Game. Sometimes referred to as "Los Angeles: AD 2017" (the name of Philip Wylie's subsequent novel based on his script) or "Los Angeles 2017", this was a science fiction piece, shot for only $375,000, about a publisher, Glenn Howard (Gene Barry), who finds himself suddenly plunged 46 years into the future only to learn that the people of Los Angeles are living underground to escape the pollution and under the thumb of a fascist government run by psychiatrists. Its director, the 24-year-old Steven Spielberg, used imaginative camera angles to drive his first movie-length television episode across and remarked in later years that the show "opened a lot of doors for me".

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The script, by celebrated scifi novelist Wylie (When Worlds Collide), is an environmentalist satire on 1970 America in the manner of Planet Of The Apes or The Omega Man. I expected it to be badly dated but it actually holds up quite well. There is a classic scene involving a hippie rock band.