May 2023

This is Your Life: The Truman Show

Photography by Melinda Sue Gordon, SMPSP and Peter Biziou, BSC This article was originally published in AC, June 1998. Some images are additional or alternate. In today’s media-saturated world, cohabitating strangers are ceaselessly documented in vivid detail on MTV, continuous video feeds from the bedrooms of young women are available to anyone with Internet access, and an unending stream of people seem willing to reveal sordid aspects of their lives on tabloid television talk shows. This alarming set of real-life circumstances has inspired accomplished director Peter Weir (Witness, Dead Poet’s Society) to “broadcast” The Truman Show, an endlessly inventive feature film about a man whose entire life, 24 hours a day since birth, has been...more