Covering Media

Paul Goodman, author of The Empire City, looks over his beloved New York. PAUL GOODMAN CHANGED MY LIFE. A film by Jonathan Lee. A Zeitgeist Films release. Photo credit: Sam Falk for The New York Times.

Paul Goodman Changed My Life (2011)

Opened: 10/19/2011 Limited

Trailer: Click for trailer

Websites: Home, Facebook

Genre: Biographical Documentary

Rated: Unrated

Synopsis

Paul Goodman was once so ubiquitous in the American zeitgeist that he merited a "cameo" in Woody Allen's Annie Hall. Author of legendary bestseller Growing Up Absurd (1960), Goodman was also a poet, 1940s out queer (and family man), pacifist, visionary, co-founder of Gestalt therapy--and a moral compass for many in the burgeoning counterculture of the '60s.

Paul Goodman Changed My Life immerses you in an era of high intellect (that heady, cocktail-glass juncture that Mad Men has so effectively exploited) when New York was peaking culturally and artistically; when ideas, and the people who propounded them, seemed to punch in at a higher weight class than they do now. Using a treasure trove of archival multimedia--selections from Goodman's poetry (read by Garrison Keillor and Edmund White); quotes from Susan Sontag, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Noam Chomsky; plentiful footage of Goodman himself; plus interviews with his family, peers and activists--director/producer Jonathan Lee and producer/editor Kimberly Reed (Prodigal Sons) have woven together a rich portrait of an intellectual heavyweight whose ideas are long overdue for rediscovery.

Paul Goodman Biography

Born in New York City in 1911, Paul Goodman labored in obscurity as a writer and freelance intellectual until 1960 when the publication of Growing Up Absurd made him famous and a significant moral force of the decade.

SOCIAL CRITIC & PHILOSOPHER OF EDUCATION

Grace Paley says in her interview that Paul Goodman "was not ahead of his time but in his time." A brilliant and imaginative social thinker, Goodman's "utopian essays and practical proposals" inspired the leaders of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the Berkeley Free Speech Movement--as they inspired him. His Compulsory Mis-education and Community of Scholars were important texts for educational reform efforts in the 1960s and beyond.

RETHINKING CITIES

Communitas, co-written with his architect brother Percival Goodman and published in 1947, became a classic in community planning that is still in print and widely used in architecture and community planning courses.

GESTALT THERAPY

Gestalt Therapy (1951), co-authored with Fritz Perls, launched a new school of psychotherapy that now flourishes worldwide--far from the Esalen Institute in California where it first attracted media attention.

GAY LIBERATION PIONEER

Paul Goodman's unabashed frankness about his bisexuality was costly to his career and reputation: he was never in a closet that he had to come out of--but it won him the admiration of some of the activists who created the modern gay rights movement.

PACIFIST

Goodman's outspoken support for young Vietnam War draft resisters, along with Grace Paley, Noam Chomsky, Marc Raskin, Mitchell Goodman, and Dr. Benjamin Spock, earned him the FBI classification of "subversive homosexual"--and made him a beacon for young men facing conscription, including his own son.

POET

Some of America's best-known poets and critics admired Paul Goodman's poetry: John Ashbery, Adrienne Rich, Hayden Carruth, Susan Sontag. Composer Ned Rorem set many of his poems to music. And despite the remarkable achievements and unusual life of this 20th century man of letters, Goodman's work has almost completely disappeared since his death at age 60 in 1972. Most of his books are out-of-print and people under fifty know almost nothing about this man "whose influence, if not name, is all around us," according to Noam Chomsky.

This documentary introduces the life and work of this exemplary citizen-poet and free spirit as seen through the eyes of some of those who have said, "Paul Goodman changed my life."

Director's Statement

In 1970, I helped organize a teach-in on the Vietnam War at the Choate School. Richard Nixon had sent troops into Cambodia, thereby widening the war he had campaigned on having a "secret plan" to end and hundreds of colleges and some high schools went on strike in protest.

One of the anti-war speakers suggested Paul Goodman's Growing Up Absurd as a book that could help us make sense of what was happening in our country. I got it, read it and liked it enough that I started reading Paul Goodman's other books and frequent pieces in the New York Review of Books.

I'd never read books like his. Goodman was a learned, rational yet passionate writer-thinker-poet who offered support for my feelings that my country was a mess, but that it could be different--and that ideas mattered. His voice radiated not only intellectual authority--which I craved--but his intense yearning for human contact and love, a yearning that echoed my own. He became my hero, an "alternative father/teacher/wise elder."

I chased after his books, absorbed his ideas and used him as my moral compass. And that was all before I learned that he was an out bisexual as well as a married father of three. As a young gay man coming of age during the time of Stonewall, I'd never read anyone write so frankly and unapologetically about being queer as Paul Goodman did in his book New Reformation: Notes of a Neolithic Conservative (1970); and that he did not focus one-dimensionally on sexual identity was very important to me because I didn't feel that being gay should limit me to only caring about gay identity and my own distinct tribe. I wanted to be part of what he called "the Grand Community" and he was my proof that it was possible.

That was when I was in my early twenties. In my mid-thirties, I was overtaken one day while at my desk at work with an unexpected urge to write about Paul Goodman. I needed to "get him out of my system" and reflect on what my Goodman infatuation had been about. I wrote, or should say, gushed out a 10- page letter and sent it off to historian-social critic Christopher Lasch, a Goodman admirer, for his feedback.

Lasch encouraged me to pursue my interest in writing about Goodman, so I did. Soon I met his literary executor, Taylor Stoehr, who knew more about Goodman than anyone in the world since he'd been working on a biography for years. He told me that again and again people he interviewed for the book-- hundreds--would say to him, "You know, Paul Goodman changed my life." Taylor paused, and then said, "That could make a fascinating documentary film: to ask some of these individuals how Paul Goodman changed their lives and how that influence played out ten, twenty, even thirty years later."

I left my first meeting with Taylor in 1988 and thought to myself "I am going to make that film." I had no training in filmmaking and, being 34, wasn't about to go to film school. So I kept the idea in the "to do some day" part of my brain for the future.

In 2003, when I was 50, I turned my attention to making this film. I went back to Taylor Stoehr and he gave me the names of about ten people from various walks of life who'd been deeply influenced by Paul Goodman, and put me in touch with his widow Sally and his two daughters, Susie and Daisy.

Doing these interviews opened up a fascinating window on the world of 1950s--1970s America. Goodman was a seminal thinker in the late 1950s when he was writing his future bestseller about disaffected youth, and he became a one-person brain trust for the early New Left. His wide-ranging interests--educational reform, anti-war pacifism, sexual freedom, poetry, psychology, and community planning--made for a very diverse group of subjects to interview.

Speaking with his family and a few longtime friends, what began to emerge was a complex picture of a man of genius whose open bisexual life (in the 1940s!) made for a complicated domestic situation not without its price for his wife and children. Here was a brilliant man who always felt "on the outs," against the grain, and who yearned desperately for "contact": a key term in Gestalt Therapy, the founding text of this school of therapy that he co-authored in 1951 with Fritz Perls.

Because Goodman was so perceptive and because he had so many unacceptable impulses, he felt he never could fit in. Instead he discovered his vocation as a social critic and public intellectual, beholden to no one. In fact, no sooner did a group embrace him than he began to criticize their shortcomings and blind spots. Not an easy mentor, to say the least!

I am convinced that Paul Goodman's ideas are as relevant today as when he first advanced them. I hope Paul Goodman Changed My Life excites the idealism and curiosity of young people who face a world at least as complicated and threatened as the one Paul Goodman worked so hard to change.

My film can help restore a missing piece of an exceptional moment in our history. The broken threads of tradition and experience need to be rewoven so we are not continually losing our past and starting over. And so young people can connect to a rich cultural, social, political, and moral legacy that is theirs to inherit and to use.

Paul Goodman always wanted to be useful, to be used. My film can, as Adrienne Rich wrote me about her hopes for the film, "bring Paul Goodman back into the conversation." It will be a richer conversation--that's for sure.

-- Jonathan Lee

Film Interviewees

Epi Bohdi was Mathew Goodman's girlfriend at Cornell University.

Noam Chomsky is a world renowned linguist, intellectual and political activist. He is an Institute Professor and Professor Emeritus in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT.

Jason Epstein, former editorial director of Random House, was Paul Goodman's editor on Growing Up Absurd.

Zeke Finkelstein is a writer and English teacher at City College NY.

Richard Flacks, a sociologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, was one of the founders of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).

Frieda Gardner, a long-time friend of the Goodmans, is a poet and peace activist in Minneapolis.

Geoff Gardner is a writer and English professor who knew Paul Goodman for many years.

Daisy Goodman, the youngest child of Paul and Sally, lives and works in Farmington, Maine, as a nurse and midwife.

Naomi Goodman was married to Goodman's older brother Percival, and was a past president of the Jewish Peace Fellowship and a published poet.

Sally Goodman was Paul Goodman's second common-law wife. For much of their thirty years together, she supported their family by working as a secretary at the Magnum Photo Agency.

Susan Goodman, Paul Goodman's first child, is a psychologist in New York City.

Jacqueline Gourevitch, a New York City painter, studied with Paul Goodman at Black Mountain College during the summer of 1950.

Allen Graubard, author of Free the Children, is an assistant to the Chancellor at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell.

Neil Heims is a writer and editor who lives in Paris.

Judith Malina is an actress, writer, and co-founder, with her late husband Julian Beck, of the Living Theatre.

Deborah Meier is the founder of Central Park East School in East Harlem, the Mission Hill School in Roxbury, Massachusetts, and a MacArthur Fellow.

Ed Nevis was, along with his wife Sonia, a co-director of the Gestalt International Study Center in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, and a trainee of Paul Goodman, Fritz and Lora Perls, and Isador From, the founders of Gestalt Therapy.

Grace Paley is best known for her short stories and peace activism, which included many acts of civil disobedience.

Tom Rodd, a convicted Vietnam draft resister who did time in prison, is a lawyer who clerks for a justice on the West Virginia Supreme Court.

Ned Rorem is a Pulitzer-prize winning composer who is also well known for his intimate diaries that he began in the 1960s and continued into the early 21st century.

Michael Rossman was a leader in the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, and is a writer and a public school science teacher in Berkeley, California.

Taylor Stoehr, a retired English professor from the University of Massachusetts in Boston, was a close friend and literary executor of Paul Goodman.

Jerl Surratt, originally from a small Texas town, is a poet and an advisor to non-profits who resides in New York City.

Nicholas von Hoffman, a former student of Paul Goodman at the Manumit School in Pawling, New York, is a writer who lives in Tenant's Harbor, Maine.

Michael Walzer is a well-known political philosopher, member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and the senior editor of Dissent.

Burton Weiss, an independent book-dealer in Berkeley, California, was Mathew Goodman's best friend at Cornell University and a draft resister.

Gordon Wheeler is a psychotherapist, writer and president of the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California.

Vera Williams is an alumna of Black Mountain College, where she studied with Paul Goodman; and a well-known children's book illustrator.