PBS Documentary ‘Hard Hat Riot’ Spotlights Political Turmoil In 1970 New York

Marc Levin (director/producer/writer) and David Paul Kuhn (author/co-producer) collaborated on the new documentary Hard Hat Riot. Premiering tonight on American Experience, the PBS documentary spotlights how student protestors clashed with construction workers over the Vietnam War in 1970 New York. Check out our interview with Levin and Kuhn on the latest CinemAddicts podcast.

Question: Marc. David, how’s it going?

David Paul Kuhn: Good, good. Nice to meet you.

Question: This documentary is dense. This has a bunch in it. What what was it like cutting through footage and figuring out what to put in and what to leave out?

Marc Levin: That was, I would say the big filmmaking challenge is we wanted to create the sense of you living through this historic week.

David, what’s the quote about the week?

David Paul Kuhn:  I’m going to paraphrase the New Yorker, but basically (it was one of) the most tumultuous periods in more than a century. So to give perspective to that, this is two years after 1968. This is after RFK was assassinated and Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.

This is after Chicago happened. So for the New Yorker to feel that way at that time, it captures why this week becomes a microcosm for our story was so important and telling.

Marc Levin: And my point was that we wanted you to feel immersed in that week what it was like to live through that week from Nixon’s escalation of the war into Cambodia, to the colleges around the country going on strike to the tragedy of four students being shot at Kent State to finally this confrontation on the streets of downtown Manhattan.

Yet as, as David just mentioned, what happened in 68, help inform everything that was to happen this week. What was happening in Vietnam, what was happening in the lives, in the neighborhoods of the characters, especially the hard hat characters in our film.

That was the challenge, how to weave all that in, but not lose that momentum. David just mentioned Chicago 68. You asked what’s left out. Well, there’s one thing right there. You know, we, just, it’s in David’s book and it’s important, but we just couldn’t fit it in. So there are a number of things, but I think that was the real challenge of the film.

Listen to the interview on Apple Podcasts:

Question: I think that’s important too because like, a lot of documentaries they leave out certain contexts because they’re trying to do one agenda or another.

What would be the mission statement when doing stuff like this?

Marc Levin: That is a good question. I think it’s years of experience. I mean, obviously David spent years researching, so we had a tremendous help in somebody who was steeped in this who knew the history, had examined the primary sources. But in the end you got to rely on your own sensibility of what’s balanced, what’s fair.

I mean, we did have a, a minor conflict that, now is out in the public that you know, we can talk about, the final shot of the film. We thought was important. It’s in David’s book at, in the afterward – Ronald Reagan’s campaign stop in New York, September, 1980, where he ended his speech saying, Make America Great Again.

I had never seen that clip and I read about it in David’s book. It’s not in the version you saw – it’s in the festival version. And that was an issue with American Experience, which is a great, great you know, group of people. But they felt that that was not necessarily appropriate to put at the end of the film.

We felt it was, it was, a way to close the loop and the echoes to, you know, that reverberate right to today. So it’s a constant dialogue back and forth between us as the filmmakers, the executives of American Experience. And we do show rough cuts sometimes to small groups of people to get to see how’s it playing, how are they reacting?

I mean, one reaction and David, I don’t know if you were there, but you know, there was some push back we got at one point midway, where they felt we were too unfair to the anti-war movement. To the student movement, to the protest movement, which I found interesting ’cause obviously that was the world I was from and part of back in the sixties and early seventies.

David Paul Kuhn: And I think there’s gonna be that reaction because the story of the sixties and seventies has been told almost entirely from the student counterculture perspective. They’re the heroes. They’re the protagonists. And one of the many missions of my book was to show that (with) these righteous struggles to better America, mistakes happened.

Some of those mistakes are being relived to this day. To paraphrase Mark Twain –  history doesn’t repeat, but it does rhyme. And the mission of the book, and eventually this film, is to return to a very troubled time, a more troubled time than our own.

And with the distance that history allows, the beginning of empathy can perhaps help us cross certain divides today.

Listen on Spotify:

Question: It’s kinda scary and yeah, history shouldn’t repeat itself, but we’re humans, we’re stupid. That’s what we do.

David Paul Kuhn: But you gotta be better versions of that. That’s all we can do.

***Check out the full video interview on YouTube:

Question: Yeah. But you said you got some pushback. I, I, I think that it, it’s weird to say, but that’s almost a compliment for something like this.

Because if you’re trying to present all sides fairly, that’s gotta be and then to get pushback on something that you agree with, that’s gotta be kind of a thing to say that, Hey, I must be on the right path here.

Marc Levin: I think that as David’s made the point the story of the counterculture and that era had ignored this side of the story.

And to David’s credit, he dug deep. Certainly I knew about the event, but until I read his book, I didn’t realize the significance of the event. Again, I was a 19-year-old kid who was obsessed with the Knicks winning the NBA championship and working on a film about the Rolling Stones in the end of the sixties.

So I was lost in my own bubble but the significance is just so relevant to today’s discussions, and I think part of the the myopia is not just listening to the stories of others who you don’t agree with but also. We focus on the economic issues, which are absolutely fundamental, and David makes the point in the film that 1973 really was the peak earnings relative to the increased wealth in the United States of the construction workers.

They haven’t made progress. Since then, like they had up to that point. But it’s the cultural side of the equation that Nixon and then Reagan were able to realize, to speak to, to connect with in a real just human way that is very, very powerful. So I think that is especially important as we face the ongoing partisan crisis that we’re living with today.

Even you mentioned, look, when we saw the film two nights ago at the premiere, I hadn’t even thought about the Charlie Kirk tragedy and all the arguments going on about whether the flag should be at half-mast or at full mass. And then watching the film again there, it was the same argument going on at City Hall over whether the flag should be at half mast or full mast for this four students that were killed by the National Guard at Kent State – except the roles were reversed.

David Paul Kuhn: And that speaks to one of the challenges of filmmaking and certainly the book. This is something that can be much more easily done in a book.

But for making the film, we had to somehow get across very briefly that the flag burning then was much more shocking than it is now. We kind of grew up in an era where it’s, it’s just, we’ve had these debates for a half century, but at that time it had only just begun. And for World War II veterans, for Korean veterans, for Vietnam veterans, it was shocking.

And to help to quickly translate that and why it felt personal to them and why they had their own sense of standing up for those who could not stand up for themselves. Because when that flag’s burned to them, they’re seeing their dead comrades. From war. So they, to convey, what this other side also had their sense of, of righteous cause.

And to try to translate that very quickly in film, you know, that’s one of the challenges and we hope it succeeds.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by American Experience (@americanexperiencepbs)

Question: Yeah. Well, this was a really great documentary. Hard Hat Riot premieres Tuesday, September 30th at nine o’clock on PBS. Marc and David, congratulations on the documentary.

Marc Levin and David Paul Kuhn: Thank you.