The Late Great Planet Earth (1979)

[Wellesnet]

Hosted by Orson Welles:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZzkvXp4eihU

[atcolomb]

From website Blu-ray.com:

U.S. label Scorpion Releasing will add to its Blu-ray catalog Robert Amram and Rolf Forsberg's documentary The Late Great Planet Earth (1979). The release, which will be distributed by Kino Lorber, will be available for purchase on June 12.
Synopsis: Events that are prophesied in the Bible are illustrated to show that civilization is headed for doomsday. Based on the best-selling novel by Hal Lindsey with Carole C. Carlson, and narrated by Orson Welles.

[atcolomb]

Blu-ray.com has a review of the Blu-ray release. It does give Orson some credit for his "booming voice to the effort, acting as a passionate narrator".

http://www.blu-ray.com/movies/The-Late- ... 36/#Review

[Wellesnet]

Here's a 1979 review of the film in the Village Voice.

The Late, Great Orson Welles:
https://www.villagevoice.com/2020/10/27 ... on-welles/

Many so-called “auteurists” believe that Welles’s career has essentially been in eclipse since Falstaff. These “critics” discount all of Welles’s recent work as a sellout by a burnt­out. But I believe that if an artist is a true auteur, as Welles undoubtably is, his entire life’s work can be seen in completist context. From this point of view, Welles narrating The Late Great Planet Earth — as well as por­traying the voice of God speaking to the prophet Ezekiel — is a logical step.

[JMcBride]

I wrote the press kit for THE LATE GREAT PLANET EARTH.
While doing so I ventured to ask director Robert Amram
if he had made the film with tongue in cheek, since the
prophecies in it are so ridiculous. It reminded me
of Welles's reports of Doom in "The War of the Worlds" broadcast. Amram eagerly agreed and
was delighted that I got what he was doing. He thought the book
was nonsense and had a ball spoofing it (as I assume did Orson). So I wrote the press kit tongue-in-cheek as well. I was surprised
to later find it used as the preface to an edition of that
wacky book published by a religious publishing company.
They didn't realize I was having them on.

[Le Chiffre]

I'd love to read that sometime.

Gore Vidal did a great South Bank Show in the mid-80s in which he accused then-president Ronald Reagan of being a big fan of Lindsey's book. I'll have to see if I can get that uploaded sometime.

I also stumbled on this interesting look back at Bob Dylan's Christian phase in the late 70s:
https://www.insidehook.com/article/musi ... an-trilogy

Some say Dylan got enthralled with the work of the apocalyptic evangelist Hal Lindsey, in particular his wildly popular 1970 How-To-Rapture book The Late Great Planet Earth, which sold 17,000,000 copies by predicting spectacular chaos and the Era of the Antichrist in the decade to follow. Lindsey is astonishingly entertaining for a man committed to the wrongheaded proposition that all life will imminently end, and it is easy to see Dylan getting caught up in this kind of thing. “Yes, I think it could be very easily done …” he once cheerfully mused in his own rollicking song about human extinction.