While Oprah will be busy this year distancing herself from a TV movie based on Kitty Kelley's unauthorized biography, her fellow television icon and celebrity interviewer Barbara Walters will be busy notarizing, saluting, and altogether championing a TV movie about her life based on her own memoir, Audition. The 80-year-old former 20/20 host and part-time referee on The View ended 29 years of Oscar specials this last Oscar season, but the semi-retired newswoman remains keen on asking herself which tree she would prefer to be, as well as telling the “for-the-record” story of her own life. Now she hopes to do so with a film in the vein of previous HBO documentary Teddy: In His Own Words, according to Cinematical (via The New York Post).
Using news coverage, home movies, and interviews spanning Walters’ decades in the business, Barbara: In Her Own Words could be a bwief, fwank, weal, and weveawing portrait of and by the first woman co-anchor of network evening news—or it could turn out a self-aggrandizing ode to one woman's accomplishments with the feather-light weight and candor of a family photo album. Hopefully the input of other producers will tip it toward the former. And hopefully it will include a Gilda Radner clip like this one.