“Inherit the Windbag,” a new play by Alexandra Petri, was on the verge of opening at Mosaic Theater Company in March when COVID-19 abruptly shut it down.
Now the thwarted world premiere project is about to be reinvented as a film to stream at home. Filming begins next week. During the summer of 1968, then-lagging network ABC took a gamble on how to cover the Republican and Democratic conventions.
They hired American ideological opposites – arch conservative William F. Buckley and Gore Vidal, iconoclastic leftist, novelist and brilliant essayist – to increase ratings with provocative nightly debate.
Despite the patrician veneers and volley of five dollar words, this wasn’t polite conversation. Things got particularly hot when Vidal called