The new documentary by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, “American Masters: The Boomer List” premieres on Tuesday, September 23rd on PBS. The film is a compilation of baby boomers talking of their experiences, their influences and the obstacles they had to overcome. The boomers in the film are artists like photographer Dave LaChapelle and singer songwriter Billy Joel; writers like Amy Tan and Tim O’Brien; innovators like Steve Wozniak and Virginia Rometty; and actors like Samuel L.
Jackson and John Leguizamo.There is one person who speaks for each year of the boomer generation, from 1946 to 1964. The film is celebrating the turning 50 of the last boomers (born in 1964), and the contributions the Baby Boomer Generation has made to American culture.
<
div style=”text-align: center;”>
The Boomer List is a riveting account of the difficulties and successes the Baby Boomers overcame and achieved. One after another, over a simple gray background, each individual explains how they grew up, what they faced, and gives a slice of their own philosophy, and how they view the their life in retrospect. But what makes the film so interesting is not each account so much as all the accounts one after the other, and taking it all in as a way to capture the ‘feel’ of an entire generation. The non-scripted flow of the film and the individuals speaking to the camera, makes for quite an emotional ride. From Samuel L. Jackson speaking of the civil rights movement to Tim O’Brien talking about Vietnam to Kim Cattrall talking of her journey into acting and ultimately accepting in midlife the role of Samantha in Sex in The City.
Each person speaks of moments that changed or affected them personally, but that were also milestones that helped shape the world during the baby boom years.
They discuss topics such as the environment; the arts, science; civil, LGBT and women’s rights; politics; and technology and media. For some of us, watching the Boomer List is like a trip down memory lane, for others it can be like oral storytelling. History explained in bits and pieces by people who lived it.The Boomer list is a powerful film that reminds us that each generation has a debt to the previous generation and a responsibility for the next one. That change does not come easy and is never popular at the beginning. But it is also a film that encourages and gives us hope. It gives us reality bites of what the Baby Boomer generation did for America: fight stereotypes and break molds.
Also Read: On the Arrogance of Youth and the Wisdom of our Elders
The intimate interviews by filmmaker Timothy Greenfield-Sanders (The Black List, The Latino List, The Out List) make us feel close to the actors, sports figures, activists talking to us. We see history, we watch the years go by, and feel the emotional tug we might have felt watching the news on TV during the Vietnam war, or experiencing the Civil Rights movement. But there is something else going on in the film, we get to see the individual people who had to manage in a world that needed to change. We get to grasp the emotion of events and movements like AIDS and Women’s Rights that at the time seemed almost mysterious and shoved away in a corner of our culture.
“When I learned about this year’s boomer milestone, I came up with the idea for The Boomer List,” says Greenfield-Sanders, whose past films include About Face: Supermodels Then and Now and American Masters – Lou Reed: Rock and Roll Heart. “The film captures the boomer generation’s dynamic spirit through 19 distinct ‘American Masters’ who had a profound effect on our world.”
The film in the end gives us hope and makes us wonder what the next generation will hold for us. A must-see for all generations but, especially, for the Boomers themselves.
<
div style=”text-align: center;”>