Using Real-Life Experiences to Rebuild ‘ ‘60s’

It was one of the seminal moments of an already explosive year. On April 29, 1968, shortly after the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., thousands of students staged a strike at New York’s Columbia University, putting their academic careers on the line to protest what they considered the school’s unjust racial policies. Students seized five buildings and took over the office of the president.

Filmmaker Lynda Obst was there, though only on the edges, she says, as a “groupie.” But when Obst, who wrote “The Rolling Stone History of the ‘60s,” set out to build a miniseries for NBC around the era, she knew that moment, in some way, would need to be there.

Ultimately, in “The ‘60s,” which begins its two-part run on Sunday at 9 p.m., the Columbia incident became just one of the many watershed historical events that Obst turned to in telling the story.

Using two families--one black, one white--as a thread running through the events, the drama opens on the eve of change. Over the four-hour production, their relationships absorb and reflect the movements within society, shifting, evolving and in some cases, ultimately tearing apart. It is a story Obst, who serves as the project’s executive producer, chooses to tell through the eyes of the kids rather than the parents, following the characters to school, to war, to the streets and finally, back home again.

Interweaving newsreel footage of the era with dramatic re-creations--a devise used to inject the characters into historical scenes, starting with black-and-white images then slowly fading to color as the story moves from fact to fiction--the intent was to take this complex time in U.S. history and make it personal.

And, for Obst, it was a chance to look back at a time in her own life.

“Once I got to college, I fully took part in the antiwar movement,” says Obst, who has gone on to produce such films as “Sleepless in Seattle” and “Contact.”

As a concept, “The ‘60s” went through several incarnations, according to Obst.

“I came from journalism, so my inclination was to be documentarian [in approach],” she says. NBC, however, wanted the film to have a strong dramatic element. They eventually decided to focus on fictional families--an Irish Catholic family from Chicago and a black family from the South--and depict how they were both transformed by the decade.

“It was not the family story,” Obst explains, “but somehow a symbolic family who managed to be real rather than representational and have them grow and change against the backdrop of these amazing times.”

Obst wanted to create characters whose trajectory would place them in the center of the most pivotal events of the decade--and in that way bring the audience along. Vietnam is told primarily through the eyes of the Herlihy family in Chicago, headed by former Marine Bill (Bill Smitrovich) and his increasingly outspoken wife, Mary (Annie Corley). As the family moves through the decade, brother Brian is the road to Vietnam, the son who joins the Marines in search of his father’s approval and is quickly shipped overseas; daughter Katie (Julia Stiles) is the link to tie-dyed, acid-laced San Francisco, dropping out and becoming part of the music and street scene; and Michael (Josh Hamilton) provides the template of the good son, who stuns his parents by joining the ranks of student antiwar protesters.

Meanwhile, Obst picks up the civil rights story on the streets--first with nonviolent protests and later with riots--through the Taylors. Charles S. Dutton portrays the Rev. Willie Taylor, a man cut from King’s peaceful protest cloth, while in son Emmet (Leonard Roberts), Obst traces the ambivalence of African American youths about replacing nonviolent protest with force and the rising popularity of Malcolm X.

“Of course, when you have four hours as opposed to 12 hours, you have to be really selective in terms of sensibility and point of view of what you are going to cover and how much you can cover it,” she says.

Obst knew “The ‘60s” had to be rich in archival footage of the decade’s defining events--the space race, the Vietnam War, the antiwar movement, the civil rights movement, the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy and King.

From that foundation, it became a matter of choices--not which moments to include, but rather how to incorporate them without derailing the story.

“We knew we could never shoot all of history and our family,” Obst says. “So we might miss the moon landing except for on TV, but we would go to Woodstock. We would go to the march on the Pentagon. We would go to a college demonstration because part of the essence of our piece was the antiwar movement and how the kids stopped the war.”

Director Mark Piznarski, though, didn’t want audiences to assume the archival footage was being used because the production couldn’t afford to shoot certain scenes due to TV budget restraints.

“I didn’t want to sell our project out like that and show that we couldn’t do a full-blown production,” Piznarski says. “I really didn’t want to say, ‘Here is the part of the ‘60s we couldn’t afford to do.’ ”

So, Piznarski says, he decided to use a variety of filming techniques with different film stocks. “I shot black-and-white 16mm. We shot color 16mm. We shot 35mm. I used stock that was actually used in the ‘60s.”

He and his editor, Rob Frazen, were able to blend the archival footage with their own footage to the point, he believes, nobody can tell precisely where the newsreel clips end and their footage begins.

Obst also went to the mat to get an extensive collection of songs she wanted for the soundtrack. “Getting the music right was so critical for this movie because the narration of the decade is music,” she says.

Indeed the music immediately emerges as one of the most powerful elements of the miniseries. The soundtrack, released late last month on Mercury Records, includes such classic tunes as the Band’s “The Weight,” “Somebody to Love” by the Jefferson Airplane, “Sunshine of Your Love” by Cream, the Byrd’s “Draft Morning” and a new recording from Bob Dylan of his seminal 1964 tune “Chimes of Freedom.”

Obst’s biggest coup was convincing Dylan to give his blessing to the project. After he read the script, the artist who reflected the issues of the day in such songs as “The Times They Are A’ Changin’,” quickly lent his support. With Dylan on board, Obst says, it was easy to get other artists involved.

She engaged Graham Nash of the Hollies and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young to write the liner notes to the CD.

Like Obst, Nash still retains his love of ‘60s music. “I am completely wrapped up in the passion of music,” Nash says. “It has been an incredible journey for the last 30 years.”

Rock music, Nash recalls, metamorphosed quickly in the ‘60s. “Bobby Rydell and Fabian lasted into the early ‘60s,” Nash says, “but after Kennedy got killed and the Beatles came, man, that blew those doors right off the hinges.”

Obst credits NBC with giving her a feature-scale music budget. “They recognized the value of it,” Obst says. “We just started building a little train of ‘60s people who cared so much about the time and saw that our intentions were honorable. We didn’t mean to cartoon it or demean it, but just try to get it right and get the feel of what it was like to be there.”

* “The ‘60s” airs on NBC Sunday and Monday nights at 9. The network has rated it TV-14 (may be unsuitable for children younger than 14).