‘Mike Wallace Is Here’ on Hulu: This Compelling Documentary Focuses On The ‘60 Minutes’ Newsman’s Considerable Influence

For decades, the phrase “Mike Wallace is here” was one that you’d never want to hear. It meant that the venerable and probing 60 Minutes pioneer correspondent has shown up at your door (usually a place of work), about to expose your ill deeds to the entire country, and ruin your life in the process. And you probably deserved it.

Mike Wallace Is Here is also the name of an excellent and concise documentary by Avi Belkin, spraying bullet points of Wallace’s life’s work (and a little bit about his actual life) and how it ties into today’s media landscape, a monster which he helped to create (but don’t blame him!!!). The doc was crafted using only archival footage – Wallace’s interviews and outtakes from them + interviews WITH Wallace. As you can imagine, he didn’t really enjoy it when someone turned the tables and asked him the hard-hitting questions.

Before Myron Leon Wallace became Mike Wallace, he was just a kid with a dream, who thought he had a face only for radio. The self-conscious, bad-acned boy grew his golden voice over the AM dial (he was the announcer for The Green Hornet!), but when the new medium of television came a-calling, he jumped at the chance, and television welcomed him with open eyes and ears. He was not only an announcer, but a game show host, actor, and a smooth talking pitchman, hawking everything and anything from lipstick to cancer sticks, which, ironically, would be an industry he would later set about trying to topple.

Wallace hit his stride and found his life’s purpose when he started working in the news and conducting one-on-one interviews with his late-night mid-1950s show Night Beat. Honing his craft for over the next decade, he became a permanent household fixture when he and Harry Reasoner co-hosted the CBS newsmagazine show 60 Minutes, which debuted on September 24, 1968. 

The rest is, as they say, history. Wallace investigated history in the making, and sometimes even made it. His interviews with the likes of Ayatollah Khomeini (“he calls you, imam, forgive me, his words, not mine, ‘a lunatic.’“), Bette Davis, Salvador Dalí, Johnny Carson, Vladimir Putin, Anwar Sadat, General William Westmoreland, Richard Nixon and all his “men,” and so on and so on and so on (the list goes “so on” forever), became almost as memorable as the subjects themselves. A lot of these interviews are covered in the doc, but so many more couldn’t be squeezed into the tight film (WE WANTED EVEN MORE!!). And when Mike wasn’t roasting the famous and infamous, his gotcha journalism was bringing down and handing out just desserts to the dastardly people who were wrongfully deceiving others.

His due diligence and hard-hard-pressed approach would sometimes lead him (and the network) down litigious and psychological paths no one before had ever had to deal with. It took its toll on Wallace – he suffered from deep bouts of depression, but in the end, he persevered through it all.

Wallace first appeared on television in 1949 and called it a day with a final interview of Roger Clemens in 2008, and so, for 59 years, Mike Wallace gave it his all, and the medium and the viewing public greatly benefited from his work. The TV landscape has never been the same since he left the airwaves (he passed away in 2012).

There are now more voices than ever in media, but in a time where trust truly matters, and mistrust of the media is being bandied about daily, the “trusted newsman” — like Wallace, and Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow before him — is sorely missed. Luckily, 60 Minutes is still with us, and Wallace’s fingerprints and finger-pointing can still be seen and felt all through it.

Spend 91 minutes in Mike Wallace’s world. Be Here now!

Michael Palan is a New York based writer and multimedia producer. He got an A+ in bowling at a midwestern university, and once handed Kurt Vonnegut his coat. In his free time he enjoys Edward Hopper paintings and eating fried chicken.

Where to stream Mike Wallace Is Here