A self-confessed "closet hippie" and champion of the '60s, when her own sensibility was shaped, producer Lynda Obst has made a huge, panoramic miniseries about the era that shows how the seeds of revolution and change were sown
Interview by Graham Fuller
NBC's miniseries the Sixties is the event of the February sweeps. Driven by pop music and enfolding documentary footage, it's a sprawling drama of social, political, and generational upheaval in America that roves from JFK's Camelot to Dealey Plaza, from Birmingham to Black Panther Chicago, from Greenwich Village to Woodstock, from Haight-Ashbury to Altamont. Its main protagonists are four kids - impressionable female radical, nice-guy activist, his hippie-chick sister, demonic male radical - and its patron saint is Bob Dylan.
During the '60s, the age-old conflict between men and women was sharpened, even as they marched together, and it's one of the key sub-texts here. Interview discussed with the show's executive producer Lynda Obst how that particular war is manifested onscreen - and asked her what she thinks the fallout has been.
GRAHAM FULLER: Why did you want to make The Sixties?
LYNDA OBST: I think the '60s saw the beginning of all the gender issues, all the cultural wars, all the apathy and cynicism, and all the progressive breakthroughs we now take for granted. Amazingly to me, that whole era has been under attack from the remnants of the old moral majority and also from the generations we're raising now, so when NBC came to me with the idea of doing a miniseries I felt we were ready for some kind of reappraisal.
GF: How did you avoid nostalgifying the subject?
LO: I like to do stuff straight. To show kids waking up to social awareness - as one of our characters, Michael Herlihy [played by Josh Hamilton], does when he sees [on TV] "Bull" Connor's police hosing black children in Birmingham in 1963 - without comment, without grotesque underscoring, without reading ideology into it, feels powerful and poetic to me.
GF: How does the series depict the birth of feminism?
LO: Through the emergence of individual consciousness of characters, which led eventually to bra-burnings and the founding of women's groups. The idea was to show how the women's movement grew out of such '60s contradictions as men dominating the activist meetings where women. instead of creating policy. were being used as a blunting force. "Chicks up front!" was a familiar rallying call at the protests because no one thought the troops would fire on women. We show that in a march on the Pentagon in the film.
GF: The male-domination theme also emerges in the scene where the New York student activist Sarah Weinstock [played by Jordana Brewster] is rudely and dismissively treated by Kenny Klein [Jeremy Sisto], the SDS [Students for a Democratic Society] leader who's running the anti-Vietnam teach-in.
LO: Yes, and later Kenny puts Sarah on the mayonnaise committee during the Columbia University strike and she gets pretty pissed off. [laughs] Sarah fights for the megaphone and finds her voice, but it takes a while. The movement was very testosterone-driven, but by the end there were a lot of women leaders.
GF: Do you think the step-up of American troops in Vietnam was a major factor in the politicization of women?
LO: Yes. As women saw the need to fight the war and protect their sons, brothers, and boyfriends who were being drafted, they became stirred by political activism and then used what they learned on their own behalf - especially when they found themselves being made assistants, secretaries, and mayonnaise-committee members. Once you start to think politically, the onion starts unraveling.
GF: In his book The Sixties [Oxford University Press, 1998], Arthur Marwick raises the issue that sexual liberation for women may have opened the door for their more ruthless exploitation by men. Do you agree with that?
LO: That's complicated - because women did achieve sexual autonomy with the pill. Obviously, though, there were moments when the sexual revolution went awry and excesses occurred that led to all kinds of wrinkles in the culture: from AIDS, obviously, to child pornography. License allows wonderful things like gay liberation, but it causes darker things to emerge. Once you lift up the rock of puritanical repression, everything crawls out. It's like Pandora's box.
GF: Why do you think some branches of feminism became more accusatory in the late '70s?
LO: That accusatory instinct never felt like feminism to me; it felt like an expression of anger that had accumulated over years of date rape and violence against women. Often a protest has to take its most radical form to be heard. There was also what I consider a misidentification of feminist reasoning with Marxist reasoning in the '70s. It feels like we're going through a series of corrections to that right now.
GF: Some early feminists - among those in Italy, for example - argued that women's realization of their own autonomy would lead, in turn, to the emancipation of men. Do you think that was a valid argument?
LO: I think it's been borne out in small ways. I certainly see more active fathering in this decade than I ever could have dreamed of; more men participate in birthing and stay home to take care of children. As an expression of freedom for men, I think that's very moving. When I produced Sleepless in Seattle [1993] thinking it was a chick's flick, I got tons of letters from men saying, "Why do you think this is a woman's movie? It's a movie about a man mourning his loss of love and searching for his emptiness to be filled. It's a man's movie."
GF: Do you think men are being true to themselves when they relinquish their hunter role to take on the traditionally feminine responsibilities?
LO: Some parts are social and some parts are hardwired and biochemical. And the hardwiring is hard to beat. Testosterone is testosterone.
GF: And it has its place, right?
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