A Letter From The Publisher: Oct. 24, 1983

As subscribers and newsstand buyers know, we are marking TIME’S 60th birthday with a just published Special Anniversary Issue. The milestone is also being celebrated on television, with a 72-minute documentary called The Time of Our Lives: The Most Amazing 60 Years in History. The show, which debuted last week on Home Box Office, the nation’s leading pay cable TV service and a subsidiary of Time Inc., will air several times in October and November. It looks at TIME’S reporting of the personalities and events of the past six decades.

The idea for the program came from Michael Fuchs, president of HBO’s entertainment division, who thought that the times covered and the way TIME covered them would make for a lively combination of film and words. The show was made for HBO by Bruce Cohn Productions and overseen by Fuchs and Bridget Potter, HBO vice president for original programming.

Using TIME as the basis for film reports was not unfamiliar to an earlier generation of TIME editors during the years (1935-51) when the MARCH OF TIME was a popular feature in movie theaters. For the current project, HBO staff members went out of their way to involve the editors as well as representatives of the publisher’s office. The show was even checked for accuracy by reporter-researchers, in the manner of TIME stories. “It was a collaborative effort all the way through,” says Potter. “TIME’s editors seemed very interested in the experience of working in our medium.”

With Academy Award-winning Actor Jason Robards as host, the fast-paced show uses film footage of events and quotes from TIME’S contemporaneous judgments. There are also a few behind-the-scenes looks at TIME’S own history, beginning with its somewhat shaky 1923 start under Henry Luce and Briton Hadden, when the first issue sold fewer than 9,000 copies. The program goes on to examine the origins of the Man of the Year and the phenomenon of early-years TIME style, with its backward-running sentences and punchy neologisms, like “tycoon” and “socialite,” which are now part of everyday English. It even displays some of the cover stories that were canceled because of late-breaking news, such as a Jack Benny cover that was scrapped for Winston Churchill and the outbreak of World War II. “In making this show,” says Fuchs, “we learned a lot about the role TIME has played in shaping the history of the past 60 years. At HBO, which is just eleven years old, we were thrilled to work with an organization that has so much tradition and history.”