You may have watched The Vast of Night already. It has been out for about year on Amazon Studios (aka Amazon Prime). But if not and you can, it is a must see not only for Twilight Zone style sci-fi fans, but for devotees of prior broadcasting/telecom environments, in this case the 1950s. The Vast of Night tells the story of two frenetic southwestern teenage geeks who bond while on the verge of having a Close Encounter.
In the small fictional town of Cayuga, New Mexico there is a radio station, WTOW, which runs a popular Saturday night rockabilly show hosted by Everett Sloan, a cocky and confident nineeen year old. Just before getting to his job, he tries to help his alma mater, Cayuga High, with some electrical wiring problems interfering with the public address system. It is urgent, since Cayuga is hosting an important basketball game with a rival. A lengthy discussion ensues about invading chipmunks electrocuting themselves. Then Everett runs into his friend Fay Crocker, she three years his junior and hopeful that he will help her learn how to use her newly purchased Westinghouse portable reel-to-reel tape recorder.
Everett walks Fay to her job as the town telephone exchange’s night switchboard operator, which happens to be near his radio station. The two take turns saying things into the recorder. “Are you a member of the Communist Party!?” he demands in a faux congressional voice. She summarizes Popular Mechanics type articles forecasting trains that will take commuters from Manhattan to San Francisco in two hours. Everett starts his show and Fay begins her shift. But then she gets a call full of strange radio signal noises. Intrigued, she patches the audio over to Everett’s studio. He quickly decides to broadcast the noises, asking his audience if they sound familiar. Fay worries if that could get in him trouble somehow. “I don’t care,” Everett responds. “It’s good radio!” When a retired Black-American Army vet calls in to say he knows exactly what those signals are, the duo discover that they’re in for a very strange ride.
The Vast of Night is a movie that takes its time, and thus serves as a wonderful reminder that every generation has its cutting edge telecom landscape, run by people who in their minds and hearts live in the future. As I watched, memories danced in my head of my first portable tape recorder, conversations with actual telephone operators, and New Jersey radio hosts suddenly going spontaneous. I was not crazy about the film’s less-than-subtle ending. But I loved watching Everett and Fay, both charming with their thick angular 1950s eyeglasses, connect and start finish each other’s sentences, long before their first date.
