Fall
2004: Oct. 4
RFK went through some changes
Though his story came to a tragic end when he was a Democratic candidate in 1968, Robert F. Kennedy gets the presidential treatment in American Experience’s season-opening doc RFK.
The film, slated to air Oct. 4, has the look and feel of the series’ acclaimed bios of American presidents. David Grubin, who previously helmed docs on Lyndon B. Johnson, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln for American Experience, wrote and directed RFK.
“RFK is one of the great ‘what if?’ candidates in American history,” says Mark Samels, executive producer of American Experience. “We knew from doing The Kennedys that Bobby’s story is great, and we thought he deserved his own documentary.”
RFK follows Kennedy’s path from his red-baiting arrival on the national scene in the 1950s through his time as JFK’s attorney general to his own campaigns for Senate and the White House after his brother’s 1963 assassination. RFK himself was assassinated in June 1968 in a Los Angeles hotel after winning California’s Democratic primary.
Grubin says the doc, culled from archival and family footage as well as newly unearthed network tapes from the era, was finished in July 2003. However, American Experience brass opted to delay broadcast until closer to this year’s presidential contest. Samels says the goal was to take advantage of election season interest in political history, as well as to anchor the series’ 17th season.
If anyone thinks the project is designed to influence the 2004 election or the prospects of another Massachusetts Democrat with the initials JFK, they would be wrong, Samels says. “It’s not a partisan story. RFK transcends parties because his politics changed dramatically over time.”
Grubin sees that change as the central theme of the film. Kennedy evolved from a hawkish anti-Communist into a champion for civil rights and peace. “You don’t see politicians going through that sort of transformation today,” Grubin says.
RFK inaugurates a season in which American Experience will undergo a transformation of its own. The series will offer 16 hours of new programming, up from 13.5 last season; series manager Jim Dunford expects the number of new programming hours to increase annually. And while RFK fits the mold of the presidents films and other traditional historical docs, American Experience is tackling more controversial topics. Fidel Castro, scheduled to air in January, promises to explore a distinctly non-American experience, and Dunford calls the non-narrated doc Guerrilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst, a Sundance favorite slated for May broadcast, “history with a rock ’n’ roll soundtrack.” Perhaps more provocative: a February doc about the work of famed sex researcher Alfred Kinsey.
“There’s so much going on in the world of documentary filmmaking,”
Samels says. “The field is wide open right now for experimentation and
people are receptive to it.”
Producers haven’t decided exactly how they’ll handle more controversial
content in the post-Janet Jackson broadcast environment. Audio of a memorably
profane quote will be edited out of RFK. Samels says saving it wasn’t
worth the effort of offering an alternative unedited feed. But for programs
whose controversial content is more central to the story, the producers will
have to consider a different approach.
The series hopes to increase its use of partnerships with stations — the Kinsey doc was produced with Twin Cities PTV and last season’s Emma Goldman with Nebraska ETV—to add more hours in coming seasons. American Experience didn’t receive any special grants or extra funding to increase its programming hours this fall, Dunford says.
Web page posted Aug. 30, 2004
Copyright 2004 by Current Publishing Committee
RFK is the season's first topic for American Experience and others will also have a political edge: Castro, Kinsey, Patty Hearst. (Photo: Bloomington Herald-Times.)
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