suburban shopping plaza where the bank had installed the first two stainless-steel Docutel automatic tellers. Vandervoort, whose clothes looked like they were from the "fashion section of Esquire" and who had the "mannerisms a la Johnny Carson", was not at all like the classical solemn, cautious banker in a double-breasted, dark blue suit. Peacock compared him to the new ATMs which embodied modern banking. The history of the real Docutel was traced in a New York Times magazine article. The breakthrough came when Don Wetzel, Vice President of Product Planning at Docutel, was waiting in a long line for a teller at a bank in Dallas, Texas in 1968. Wetzel had seen cash dispensing machines in Europe and was inspired to adapt Docutel technology, which was originally used in airport baggage handling, to create Docuteller, an American version. By 1969 work began on the prototype and the first working Docutel ABM was installed at Chemical Bank in New York. The bank is very loosely based on the Bank of America, although it is located in a Midwestern American city loosely drawing mostly from Cincinnati, Ohio. During the first 5 chapters of the book, it only describes the bank's location as a state in "the Midwest" and the state itself is never identified. Miniseries The novel was adapted for television as a -hour NBC miniseries of which its four parts aired on December 4, 1976 and each of the subsequent three Sunday evenings through December 19 as part of the network's “Big Event” format. Ross Hunter and Jacque Mapes were the producers and Boris Sagal directed. The cast: Kirk Douglas as Alex Vandervoort Christopher Plummer as Roscoe Heyward Timothy Bottoms as Miles Eastin Susan Flannery as Margot Bracken Anne Baxter as Edwina Dorsey Percy Rodrigues as Nolan Wainwright Ralph Bellamy as Jerome Patterton Joan Collins as Avril Devereaux Robert Loggia as Tony Bear Marisa Pavan as Celia Vandervoort Jean Peters as Beatrice Heyward Hayden Rorke as Lewis Dorsey James Shigeta as Wizard Wong Amy Tivell as Juanita Nunez Patrick O'Neal as Harold Austin Lorne Greene as George Quartermain Helen Hayes as Dr. McCartney Roger Bowen as Fergus Gatwick Leonardo Cimino as Ben Roselli Yxta Murray as Estella Nunez Scott Ellsworth as the Treasury Secretary John J. O'Connor of The New York Times raised concerns about the violence portrayed in the miniseries. He described the scene that concluded Part 1 involving the