A Movable Scene

I wondered to myself why they got Robert Mitchum to do the voiceover on this anti-drug film. His reading sounds like he's reading it off the script, carefully, not without understanding what he's saying, but as if he doesn't really care. Given that he spent a lot of his career in the movies playing guys who didn't care, or who tried to act like he didn't care, this must have been a deliberate choice. Then I heard Jack Webb in my head, saying "Just the facts!" and I realized that was the attitude they wanted: the attitude that the person who was telling you these things didn't care one way or the other. Here are the facts. Do with them what you want. Of course, Mitchum had his own story. He had been busted for smoking marijuana in 1948, and had spent five months in jail. They wanted that back story: here's a man who's done this thing, and he's speaking from experience.