The Wave

The Wave was the first movie I ever made. I pitched the project to ABC and plunged forward. As an After School Special it was done on a very low budget, roughly $250,000 when an average Prime Time hour in those days was done for roughly $1,000,000. All acting and writing was done for scale fees and the number of shooting days were very few to hold down costs, As I remember it shot in 8 days. When ABC saw the final show they took it out of the After School slot and aired it in prime time against 60 Minutes on Sunday night. Needless to say the ratings were very low, but even at that, back in those days about 17 million people saw it in the States. And since then millions more have seen it around the world. I'm proud of the show and the message it delivers. As the years have gone by production styles and social behaviors have shifted, that's just the way it is. So be it, the show still seems to have legs. :>>

"The Wave" is based on Ron Jones's experiment in a high school class that he taught. He had been teaching his students about the Third Reich, and the students refused to believe that the people of Germany couldn't have known what the Nazis were doing. So, he started a club called The Wave that called for discipline among the students, and punishment for anyone who stepped out of line. Sure enough, everyone went along with it.

Bruce Davison plays a fictionalized version of Jones, tricking the students into following a totalitarian entity. The point is that people will go along with the evilest acts without realizing that anything bad is happening. And you can't stop the descent into malevolence until it's too late. A lesson for everyone everywhere.

I saw this on Australian TV as a teen in the early 1980s. I just watched it again in 2019 - the second time I have seen it. It was amazing just how much of it I remembered clearly: the characters and various little moments.

I'd say this was a highly effective memorable little movie. It gets the story across economically but it is believable.

I saw this movie when I was in my teens, so it might be cheesy if I saw it now. Part of some after-school special. Have not seen it since. I remember it though, vividly. I just went through "diversity training" at work. We got to do a bit of talking..."Hi, I'm Taj, and I'm not yet diverse..."

I think it was some sort of cynical effort by my company, to avoid lawsuits, but, whatever, it was manditory. There were a few things that got my attention. We saw two films, both of which were disturbing. one had a teacher who conducted an experiment in the 1960's (right after Martin Luther King's assasination). She had blue-eyed students as the alpha-group the first day, and the brown-eyed students the second day. These kids got a first-hand view of discrimination at its finest, and it changed their views radically by the end of the experiment. The second film had two friends(one black, one white) uproot from a major metro area to a small town and the film crew trailed them for a bit to see how they dealt with day-to-day transactions. The results were frightening and pathetically sad. I had to rethink some of my own ideas. I would like to think that growing up in the east-coast, in major cities, that some stereotypes would be dead and buried. But, unfortunately, I'm no longer think that is the case. I wish I could see this movie again, I haven't seen it in a long time, but I remember it. The whole mob mentality thing stuck with me.

I'm sure I would find it cheesy now, but for some reason, I keep thinking about it every once in awhile. And I wish it wasn't a true story.

It's 2019, and sad to say, there are still Nazi's nowadays. So this special's concept isn't far fetched at all like it should be. Personally, I don't think I would have been so easily sucked into it. I think I would have been that one girl who realized it was bad and wrong. But 2019's society as a whole has become about following trends, social media, and being a sheep so I can see Nazi Germany happening again in full force now, and that's scary. This special really needs to be shown to students nowadays.