The Movement and the Madman / FIlm School Radio interview with Director Stephen Talbot

Award-winning documentary filmmaker Stephen Talbot’s THE MOVEMENT AND THE MADMAN shows how two anti-war protests in the fall of 1969 — the largest the country had ever seen — pressured President Nixon to cancel what he called his “madman” plans for a massive escalation of the U.S. war in Vietnam, including a threat to use nuclear weapons. At the time, protestors had no idea how influential they could be and how many lives they may have saved. Told through remarkable archival footage and firsthand accounts from movement leaders, Nixon administration officials, historians, and others, the film explores how the leaders of the antiwar movement mobilized disparate groups from coast to coast to create two massive protests that changed history. Director and Producer Stephen Talbot (The Best Campaign Money Can Buy, Sound Tracks: Music Without Borders) joins us for a lively conversation on an untold, but very important chapter in American presidential history that, had it played out as the Nixon Administration wanted, would have doomed hundreds of thousands Vietnamese people to nuclear annihilation, dramatically lower the world’s threshold for the use of weapons of mass destruction and set off a catastrophic reaction in the US population, already veering towards a domestic civil war. For more: pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience For more on the filmmaker go to: movementandthemadman.com