If controversial Denver radio talker Alan Berg were alive to see this, his ex-wife says, “he’d never shut up about it.”

Berg, who was killed in a gangland-style execution in the driveway of his Congress Park home in 1984, is resurrected by actor Marc Maron in the opening scene of “The Order,” a new film based on a book co-authored by journalist-turned-Denver City Councilman Kevin Flynn. It is at least the sixth movie or stage play to draw on the details of Berg’s horrific death at the hands of what Flynn calls “the most heinous domestic terror group in our nation’s history.”

“The Order,” starring Jude Law, will get the full red-carpet treatment from the Denver Film Festival with a Nov. 8 screening at the Ellie Caulkins Opera House, followed by its national theatrical release on Dec. 6.

“Alan was such an egomaniac that I would not deprive him of the joy of being in the spotlight again,” joked Judith Berg, who had dined with her ex-husband in the hours just before he was ambushed. “Alan needed attention from everybody: Black, White, green, blue, criminal, Catholic, Jew, honorable, dishonorable. It didn’t matter. So, I think he’d get a kick out of it.”

Berg was a pot-stirring, volatile and emphatically liberal Jewish pioneer of anger radio whose rising national profile had been boosted on “60 Minutes” just a few months before his death. Morley Safer called Berg’s shock-jock act “a mixed bag of mayhem and malarky, political science and pop psychology, common low and uncommon sense — all of it laced with aggression, abuse and sarcasm.”

• Caller: I’m pretty upset about what the government is doing as far as bringing in all the refugees. You know, like people –

• Alan Berg: “Like, they’re showing a work ethic that’s better than most Americans? God bless ’em!”

Berg got under every nerve he touched. And it was driving record profits for 850 KOA, the 50,000-watt blowtorch that wafted Berg’s antagonizing, righteous and largely performative rants to at least 30 states. Including Washington, where five members of a Neo-Nazi terrorist organization called The Order came to Denver, Flynn said, “to silence his over-the-air railings against their cause,” which was to overthrow the U.S. government.

“Right-wing extremists killed Alan Berg because he didn’t just challenge them on the radio,” 9News Anchor Kyle Clark said on the recent 40th anniversary of Berg’s death. “He mocked them.”

But it was not KOA’s uncommon reach that first put Berg in the crosshairs of supremacists festering a thousand miles away. The threat turned out to be much closer to home.

A brief history of hate

Hate was not new to Denver in 1984, when The Order descended on Denver from the Pacific Northwest and executed their carefully crafted plan to assassinate Berg. A century ago, the Ku Klux Klan held sway in Denver with a membership that numbered 25% of all White men living in the city.

After all, how many know that Richard Butler, founder of the Aryan Nations and spiritual godfather to the White supremacy movement, was born just east of Denver in Bennett in 1918 and grew up at 725 S. Lincoln St.?

And it would turn out that the Iowa-born David Lane, who largely planned the Berg execution, was adopted by a Lutheran minister at age 4, grew up in Aurora and graduated from Aurora Central High School. Lane, it was later learned, engaged in his own verbal fisticuffs with Berg. One on-air exchange went like this:

• Lane: “I think the Jews are still firmly in control of the Soviet Union. I think they are responsible for the murder of 50 million White Christians.”

• Berg: “You think so, huh?”

• Lane: “Yes, I do, and I think – ”

• Berg: “I think you’re sick, I think you’re pathetic, I think your ability to reason … any logic is – ”

• Lane: “Why don’t you put a Nazi on your program, and then you’ll have somebody that can –

• Berg: “You are Nazi by your very own admission, thanks so much. That’s right – you heard it.”

In a remarkable podcast for History Colorado, longtime KOA producer Anath White later confirmed that caller was, in fact, Lane.

“He had been listening to Alan Berg for years and was known to lay on his bed listening and screaming at the radio,” White said. “But he would continue to listen, sometimes calling in and arguing with Alan.”

Lane kept recordings of his calls to Berg’s show.

“He played one of his interactions with Berg to those other guys in The Order,” Flynn said, “and that’s probably more than anything the reason he got on the hit list.”

On June 18, 1984, after dinner with Judith and a stop at the grocery store, Berg pulled into the driveway of his townhouse at 1445 Adams St. As he exited his Black Volkswagen carrying a bag of groceries, Lane pulled in behind him. Robert Jay Mathews, founder of The Order, jumped out of the front passenger-side door and opened the rear door for co-conspirator Bruce Pierce, who ran up the driveway and opened fire, riddling Berg with 36 entry and exit wounds from a MAC-10 submachine gun. Pierce only stopped firing, he later said, because the gun jammed.

After the murder, Lane became even more of an icon in the Aryan movement when he penned the 14 words that would become the go-to slogan of the U.S. white supremacist movement: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for White children.”

He was sentenced to a total of 190 years for his crimes and died in prison in 2007.

‘There was something about him’

Berg moved here from Chicago at age 17 to attend the University of Colorado Boulder — in part, he said, to get away from his “hypocritical anti-Semitic father.” He met Judith Lee Halpern, then a 15-year-old student at Denver East High School, on a trip to Denver with his fraternity brothers.

“Well, there was something about him,” Judith said. “I mean, he was just smart. He was funny. He was clever. He knew every kind of music like you cannot believe. He knew everything. He was so screwed up, but he had a brain. I think his IQ was a million.”

There was “the most magnificent courtship, and a fabulous wedding,” she said — and yet, they annulled the marriage after just 30 days. But they remarried in 1958, divorced in 1978 and remained feuding friends until his death.

“I don’t know what it was that destroyed everything,” she said — but she mentioned affairs, the onset of Berg’s relentless epileptic seizures, alcoholism and a brain tumor.

“We had a weird relationship,” she said. “It was wonderful for a long, long time — and then it was very unhappy.

“But let me tell you a secret. Money can either make glory and happiness, or it’s a necessary evil. Alan was making money. And you cannot believe with all of these hoodlums he had around him. People with names like ‘Sneaky Louis.’ I never could figure it out.”

She responded to Berg’s death, she said, “by lecturing on the anatomy of the disease of hate.” For years, she was a popular speaker on college campuses.

‘One of my top three fears’

To play Berg in the new movie, director Justin Kurzel smartly  turned to Marc Maron, a veteran standup comedian and host of the pioneering “WTF with Marc Maron” podcast.

“It was a heinous murder,” Maron said at the time of his casting. “He was killed for his beliefs and point of view by domestic terrorists here in America.”

Maron, perhaps best known as an actor for “Glow,” an Emmy-winning TV series about a group of L.A. women who take up wrestling in the 1980s, often visits Colorado comedy clubs. He has upcoming dates in Fort Collins (Jan. 17) and Boulder (Jan. 18).

He said the thought of being shot for being “an instigating, loudmouthed, lefty Jew has always been a fear of mine. One of my top three, in fact.”

He added: “I know, I am paranoid, but there is precedent — and Berg is the most identifiable to me. So, the opportunity to play him enabled me to get into the skin of a guy not unlike me and live out a nightmare. Then play it out in fiction and hopefully keep it there.

“I took the role because I didn’t think anyone else should or could play the guy.”

The year Berg was murdered was the same year Rush Limbaugh made his transition from baseball announcer to political talk radio, creating his antithetical political character by building off the Berg model that paved the way for Howard Stern and dozens more who changed the tenor of talk radio forever.

Of his own style, Berg once said: “I stick it to the audience — and they love it. They can’t stand me, man, but they sneak back and listen because they don’t know what I’m gonna do next, and they want to be there. They don’t know when I’m gonna be funny or serious or blow my career or go off the deep end, because I don’t know that, either. That uncertainty drives them up the wall. It excites them. They don’t have much excitement in their lives. Compared to what goes on in Denver, I’m damned exciting.”

He left a complicated personal and professional legacy.

“I want to tell you that Alan was a good guy,” Judith Berg said. “He was not well — but he meant well.”