time anybody says anything against anybody working for Senator McCarthy, he is declaring them and accusing them of being Communists!" Symington leaves and the hearings adjourn. McCarthy continues his passionate but repetitious defense of his staff and his attack on Symington, speaking to an increasingly empty chamber. The actual end to the hearings, in which McCarthy was cleared of any wrongdoing, does not appear in the film. Production Point of Order! was first imagined by Emile de Antonio and Daniel Talbot in 1961. De Antonio and Talbot thought a film about the Army–McCarthy hearings could be successful at Henry Rosenberg's New Yorker Theater. De Antonio persuaded Richard Ellison at CBS to help him find footage of the Army-McCarthy Hearings; Ellison informed de Antonio that the network held a complete set of kinescopes for the hearings. These kinescopes totaled nearly 188 hours. Talbot initially asked Orson Welles, then Irving Lerner to direct the film, but neither man agreed to do so. Talbot hired Paul Falkenberg to edit the film, and Falkenberg asked Richard Rovere to write narration for the film, to be read by Mike Wallace. However, when Falkenberg screened a rough cut of the film for the producers, they did not approve and decided to start over. De Antonio offered to direct the film for free, which Talbot accepted. De Antonio hired a young editor named Robert Duncan to help edit the film. Their plan was to remove any narration, music, or added scenes and create a documentary using only the footage from the kinescopes of the hearings. This approach to filmmaking—which de Antonio would use on later films—was similar to the use of assemblage in the works of modern artists like Robert Rauschenberg, who was a friend of de Antonio. De Antonio said that his two main decisions with regard to making the film were "only footage from the actual hearings would be used" and "no preaching." Exhibition The film premiered in New York City on January 14, 1964. It was first distributed by Continental Distributing in 103 theaters nationwide. In 1968 it was recut and shown on television, with an added introduction by Paul Newman, to provide context for audiences unfamiliar with the Army–McCarthy hearings. Several versions of Point of Order! have appeared on the home video market in the United States. The version with the Newman introduction was released by Zenger Video in 1984, with added instructional