Tell Me Everything Gets Down and Dirty with Life of Barbara Walters

Barbara Walters was and still is the interview standard for many women host/broadcasters.

In the ABC News/Hulu documentary ‘Barbara Walters:  Tell Me Everything,’ audiences are taken behind the veneer of this news titan from her beginnings doing weather and fluff pieces at The Today Show to her meteoric rise at ABC News to creating a template for celebrity driven news like Entertainment Tonight and virtually every daytime and nighttime show currently on air.

Her father, Lou Walters (owner of The Latin Quarter) was a well known and respected staple of the New York City entertainment scene and was partly responsible for the drive and meticulousness Walters became known for.

The intimate conversations with women colleagues Oprah Winfrey Katie Couric and  Connie Chung, who divulged her insecurities surrounding her looks and jealousy over Diane Sawyer, as well as, choosing a life that was so career driven it left little time for relationships personal or otherwise.

Having watched most of these interviews in real time, it was a nice blast from the past to revisit that iconic interview with Monica Lewinsky and see the woman she has blossomed into. Not to mention her style of interviewing which garnered honesty, tears and surprise from even the most controversial of subjects.  Walters was known for drafting no less than 200 questions per subject that could be seen in her lap during every interview unless she was doing something a little more active like horseback riding with President Ronald Reagan, walking in the park or taking ot the ocean in a speedboat.  The woman was fearless in more ways than one. and had the innate ability to humanize movie stars, dictators and politicians adding to her infamous reputation in the broadcasting landscape.

It wasn’t until she and the late Bill Geddie developed and brought ‘The View’ to network television did audience really get a sense of her not so serious side.  Dressing up for Halloween episodes, speaking frankly about sex and many other events gave America a glimpse into an America icon making her just one of the girls.

Chock full of celebratory life/career ups and downs, ‘Tell Me Everything’ is a cinematic tribute to a woman who changed broadcast television forever giving women a voice at a table that never wanted us to be there in the first place.  Barbara Walters was the pioneer of normalizing that women can and will succeed at nearly everything men dared us not to accomplish.  This uplifting,eye-opening doc is anything but dull – just like Barbara Walters would have wanted it.