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An odd 30-minute TV infomercial that director Francis Ford Coppola produced in 1980 and that "effectively ended California Gov. Jerry Brown’s campaign for president" has been posted by the Calbuzz political website. "For Brown, the production was a hideously embarrassing political disaster. It not only crashed his Democratic primary challenge to President Jimmy Carter, but also reinforced his Governor Moonbeam reputation and marked the start of a decade-long decline in his once-meteoric political fortunes," the site says.
Titled “The Shape of Things to Come,” the bizarre half-hour show was seen only by Wisconsin viewers who happened to tune in to the statewide broadcast, a pot-hazed crowd of 3,000 who showed for the event and a small group of political reporters who panned it the next day.Dubbed “Apocalypse Brown,” after Coppola’s Vietnam War epic “Apocalypse Now,” the program has never been seen by most Californians, including even some of Brown’s closest associates. Now Calbuzz has obtained one of the few known, converted-to-digital copies of the broadcast.
As a video artifact, the show offers both an extraordinary snapshot of a 41-year old, second-term Gov. Brown, and an intriguing glimpse of the times and culture that provided the backdrop for the rapid arc of success and failure that defined Act I of his long career in politics.
Calbuzz says its copy came from TV consultant Peter Shaplen, a freelance network news producer "who now teaches video journalism at the Art Institute of San Francisco." At the time, he was covering Brown’s campaign as an ABC News producer. Here's the link to the video clips.