The purpose of this paper is to analyze the television production components and to suggest the research hypotheses and designs that will yield a more systematic exploration of the importance of the use of facial closeups in television interviews. The first part of the paper discusses three potential factors that may influence a viewer's judgment of a screen subject's message: (1) the dissonance between facial and verbal sources and the apparently greater "trustworthiness" of the message from the face, (2) the ability of the closeup shot to strongly concentrate attention on a given face, and (3) the visual context in which the closeup appears. The second part of the paper discusses several possible scenarios concerning the relative influence of these three factors and offers both the hypotheses these scenarios suggest and an experimental design for testing the hypotheses. The conclusion of the paper examines the implications such research might have, particularly that the facial closeup shot is a powerful and potentially dangerous tool for eliciting specific viewer responses to television interviews. (RL)