Jonathan Lee Admits Paul Goodman Changed My Life

Written by Brad Balfour Sunday, 25 December 2011 09:32

Film and the Arts - Interviews

When The Protester hits the cover of Time Magazine as The Person of the Year, it's a good time for revisiting the works of social critic, author, poet and thinker Paul Goodman.

Ever heard of him? If you're younger than 55, probably not, which why novice director Jonathan Lee set out to reveal the impact that the late teacher/philosopher (1911-1972) has had on your -- and his -- thinking. That is, if you've ever thought about the gay rights movement, student rebellion or educational reform, to mention but three '60s battle cries that Lee's documentary Paul Goodman Changed My Life addresses in light of its subject's heady struggles.

Goodman's hallmark book, Growing Up Absurd, was a baby boomer gospel. Younger generations are just as influenced by his prolific churn, but inadvertently they have lost touch with his writings and activities and don't know the direct line from Goodman to now.

This film not only seeks to rescue Goodman from undeserved oblivion, but also to champion a larger issue -- that as generations seek social change, they often don't know where to turn to for source material. And thanks to Lee's brisk doc, it not only brings Goodman to the fore but several of his contemporaries worth keeping in mind as such as progressive composer Ned Rorem, avant-theater innovator Judith Malina and activist writer Grace Paley.

Q: What motivated you to make a film about Paul Goodman of all the people who are important for new generations to know and older generations to remember?

JL: When I interviewed [linguist/left-wing activist] Noam Chomsky, the most salient thing he said was that while he thinks that Paul Goodman has been forgotten as a person, his influence is all around us.

His literary executor and longtime friend Taylor Stoehr says that [Goodman's] ideas are in the air, but that people don't necessarily know that they came from him.

When Ned Rorem wrote a small kind of obituary piece that the Village Voice published right after Goodman died, Rorem made the comment that people would quote Paul Goodman's ideas to him without knowing that they had first come from him.

The Occupy Wall Street insurgency -- not only in New York City, but in more than a hundred cities around the country -- those protestors are all children of Paul Goodman, whether they know it or not. They think they're reinventing it, but they simply don't know where these ideas came from. That’s the way I've been putting it.

The point isn't to make these claims to show what a big guy he was. It's just that he had very useful, relevant ideas about how you make change, and he was a real democrat with a small "d". He described himself as a Jeffersonian anarchist, so he was very much trying to teach young people how to be citizens. Very all-American in terms of his embracing our political ideas.

Q: What made you choose to make a movie? What were you doing at the time?

JL: I started reading Paul Goodman when I was 16 and going to the Choate School, a boarding school in Wallingford, Connecticut, near New Haven. I had gotten elected president of the junior class.

It was a year when all these angry political students got elected to the student council; normally it was the captains of the sports teams that were automatically the class officers. All of a sudden, this year there were all these angry activist types, and when President Nixon sent troops into Cambodia triggering hundreds of college strikes in opposition, we decided we were going to do teach-ins on the war.

I was the one who brought the speakers in from Cambridge. Peace activists Noam Chomsky and Dr. Benjamin Spock came and spoke, and one of them suggested Growing Up Absurd as a great book for us to read. So that's how I heard about Paul Goodman.

They also suggested we read the New York Review of Books. I went to Cambridge. Somehow I made contact with the people that used to book Dr. Spock's anti-war speaking engagements, and they found some speakers. One of them was John Froines, one of the Chicago Eight, who came to the campus.

I read Growing Up Absurd as a result of that recommendation from the speaker and it really grabbed me. I was hungry for someone who could teach me about this other world of political ideas and ideas about education. I found Goodman very intellectually stimulating, and was eating this stuff up.

So when I'd read his writing and he'd mention other writers or thinkers, he did so in such a way that made me feel like I’d have to go read that. It opened up this whole world for me. He had a way of writing about these people that made them come alive.

Then I learned that he was a poet. I think it was in a bookstore in Santa Cruz [California] when I was 19. That summer I went traveling with friends and ended up in Santa Cruz, and saw this book called The Lordly Hudson and Other Poems. It was Goodman's first book of collected poems. I got it and read them.

I was doing my Jack Kerouac imitation [having On The Road adventures]. A lot of us did. It was in Santa Cruz, actually, when he published his last book of social criticism, called New Reformation: Notes of a Neolithic Conservative. I was skimming through it before I bought it, and the end part is called "Notes of a Neolithic Conservative."

He started a sentence that says something like "My homosexuality has made me a nigger."h en he described the price he paid for being open about his bisexuality. I didn't know that he was bisexual until I read it then and there.

Q: There’s a difference between being fascinated by somebody and saying, "I'm going to make a movie" that takes eight years to finish.

JL: He became this alternative father and wise elder and meant so much, I felt like [he] opened many doors for me. So when I was in my mid-30s at my job working for this fund-raising company...

Q: Were you still living in Maine?

JL: No, I was in New York City. I came here when I was 19 and went to college. Suddenly, unexpectedly, I felt this urge to write about Paul Goodman. I thought of it as away to get him out of my system, to try to make sense of what that had been about 10, 15 years before.

I spontaneously wrote this 10-page letter, proposing to write a book actually, and sent it to Christopher Lasch, the social critic and historian, because he had written favorably about Paul Goodman. I said I’m just going to send it to him at the University of Rochester.

Q: Did you know Lasch?

JL: I didn't know him but he answered me soon and said, "Based on your letter, it seems like you have a pretty good fix on Goodman. You should write a book on him."

Then he mentioned that what he valued most about Goodman was Goodman's attention to the importance of meaningful work. That was a big theme of Goodman's, and Lasch felt that it was something missing in our society.

So I started running around New York seeking out people that had known Paul Goodman: his former therapist, Laura Perls, who was Gestalt Therapy’s founder Fritz Perls' wife; Elliot Shapiro, who had started this school up in Harlem. [Social thinker/jazz critic] Nat Hentoff wrote a book about him. He was part of the therapy group that Laura Perls ran which included Goodman -- she called it the "genius group.”

This led me to his brother, Percival, who was still at Columbia University where he had taught architecture for many years. He said to me, "If you want to write about my brother, you should go see his literary executor in Cambridge, Taylor Stoehr, because he's been working on a big biography for years and talk to him."

This was in 1988. I went to meet him, and loved meeting this guy that was the connection to Paul Goodman and knew more about him than anyone in the world. Taylor said that he had interviewed hundreds of people working on the biography. He said, again and again people would tell him, “Paul Goodman really changed my life."

Taylor said some of these people never knew [Goodman], that it was through his writing or public stances [that] they felt close to him. Taylor then paused and said, "You know that could make a really fascinating film, to interview some of these people and find out how did Paul Goodman change their lives and how his influence has played out 10, 20, 30 years later from the time you first met him?

[When] I left that lunch in '88, I had no training as a filmmaker. I was working as a fundraiser. I said to myself, I want to make that film. Somehow I'm going to find a way to make that film.

Q: It was much harder to make a film in '88 than it is now -- thanks to digital technology.

JL: Right. I eventually ended up going back to Maine and getting hired to do fundraising for a gay rights campaign that was fighting an anti-gay ballot initiative. The one film experience I had [was] in 1990. I volunteered to help someone named Phil Zwickler, who had made a short video with [the late artist] David Wojnarowicz called Fear of Disclosure. It was aimed at the gay community, promoting open talking about having HIV. At that time, there was a lot of shame.

Gay people were reluctant to reveal to someone else that they had HIV because they might be stigmatized or rejected. So I saw this screening of the film at the Public Theater and Phil was there. He said he would like to get other filmmakers to make similar short videos about real people doing exemplary things with the fact that they had AIDS.

I said to myself, "Gee, if I volunteer to help him to raise money to do that, I could learn something about filmmaking and also do something good for the cause."

I was in my mid-30s at that point. I volunteered the next day. He worked at the People With AIDS Coalition. I called him and jumped in.

I ended up producing three short documentaries called Fear of Disclosure series. Ellen Spiro did one on Latina women and AIDS, Marlon Riggs did one on black gay men and AIDS, and Christine Choy did two short films on Asian Americans. I ended up inheriting what became this series because Phil soon after that got too sick to work on it.

Q: He died of AIDS?

JL: He died soon after. So did Wojnarowicz. He said to me, "Jonathan, if you can keep this going, please do." I didn’t get to know David well, but they were good friends. David had done the images and Phil had done the narration of that five-minute film.

That was a four-year project that I did along with a full-time job, but I loved it. I didn’t direct any of these. My job was to raise the money and to get them out, to distribute them to community based programs. I went to Maine and did this gay rights work, and stayed there from 1994 to 2002. Then I went to Brazil for five months for a sabbatical.

While there, I received news that my father had rearranged some of his businesses in Maine -- he was a car dealer -- so he had given me and my three siblings partial ownership of his business. My income increased rather suddenly, and this was a huge change for me. I'd always had these non-profit jobs and was not supported by my family.

Q: Those jobs didn’t exactly give you a lot of money.

JL: No. Then I came back to the States in 2003 and I wanted to make that film about Paul Goodman. So I moved back to New York in 2003.

Q: That was the start really -- in 2003?

JL: But I’d carried the idea around since '88.

Q: It's a shame you weren't able to start it then. I’m sure there’s a lot of people who died between '88 and 2003.

JL: Yeah, but I wasn't ready. I couldn't have done it then. The financial picture made a huge difference, because I was able to do this as a full-time job once my income increased. I tried to raise money for the film. I went back to see Taylor in 2003. Fortunately, he's healthy -- he's now 80 -- and he gave me about 10 people's names and said, "These are people it would be great to start with." They were people from different walks of life: Judith Malina, Rorem, and Michael [R].

Q: Making the film must have offered a great opportunity to meet all these people.

JL: It was fascinating. Michael [R] was a leader in the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. Tom Rodd was a draft resister who spent a couple years in federal prison, was a clerk for a Supreme Court judge in West Virginia, and became a lawyer after that experience of being in prison for two years.

But the best known ones were Rorem, Malina, and Paul's widow, Sally, who was living in Chelsea when I started working on the film. She subsequently moved up to Maine to live with her youngest daughter Daisy. And Susie Goodman, his first child from his first common law marriage, lives in [Greenwich] Village.

The other person was Jason Epstein, the former director of Random House, because he was Paul Goodman's editor on Growing Up Absurd. [The noted writer] Grace Paley was another. I pursued these people and it took quite a while.

Q: Grace Paley was in the movie.

JL: Yes, there were some very funny things that she said.

Q: You have a lot of great voices in there.

JL: I interviewed 42 people. There may be about 15 in the film. Finding the balance was tough. That was one of the big challenges in the editing: who do we leave out entirely? We didn't want to have too many people because then it doesn't become riveting. You don't start to bond with anyone if there are too many people.

I've seen really good documentaries that have just three people in them, but we didn't want to do that either. What was a little hard was, there were wonderful things that we said in these interviews that did not get into the film.

That’s why I made the announcement that I'm going to make the entire interviews publicly available, because they're so rich. We didn't want to make him look like this flawless hero. We didn't want to make a film that made him look like a terrible shit.

We were trying to get the right balance, and that was a real challenge, too, of getting the right balance about his sexuality. There are lots of anecdotes we didn't put in.

I wasn't making the film about him because he was a randy bisexual. but because I thought that he was an important thinker, an activist, and a rare individual.

Susan Sontag was quoted in the film as saying that there are very few people like this in American history and that Emerson was one of them, and in the 20th century Goodman was maybe the most interesting of these independent scholars, independent intellectuals. One of the ways I've been describing him is saying he was very much self-appointed. He was like a self-appointed guardian of the Republic.

Q: Since your career has been partially driven by your gay experience, were you ever worried about it being perceived too much as a gay film?

JL: What was important to me was not why Goodman mattered. What mattered were his ideas and his life and how he tried to live out his ideas and his absolute independence and integrity. His brother said to me, that he thought his brother Paul was the most honest person he ever met in his life. "The one time I thought he wasn't being honest was when he would put on this leather jacket and try to kind of butch it up when he was going to some of the clubs."

He said that was the only thing, and I thought that was so interesting. What I liked about Goodman -- and part of why he was important to me as a young gay man -- was that he said, "I want to be part of the one brand community, the one big world. I want to be in that one world," and that's what I felt.

I felt that just because I'm gay I don't want to be pigeonholed. I want to be part of the world, to be connected to politics, culture and to everything that should be everybody's birthright. I felt that he was an example.

While he described himself as bisexual or queer, I felt he was an example of someone who also was raising children, was a father, on the PTA, [who] wrote about education. That’s part of why he was so important to me. He was an example.

Q: He was more about political activism than anything else, and that's an important thing about Paul Goodman.

JL: The identity politics and setting up these walls. Talk about gated communities -- that's a gated community too. And that didn't appeal to me. I just felt that he was a model for me of how one could be gay without it subsuming the rest of your identity.

And I admired that he also had a respect for the mind, for ideas, for history. He loved the Western tradition. The dead white males were always being attacked by the radicals, particularly a part of the feminist movement, and that was part of why his relationship with Grace Paley was very interesting. She didn't take any nonsense from these self-centered women bragging about their orgasms. But she told me one of the things about Goodman's thinking she admired was his thinking about education.

Q: Did it play the festival circuit much?

JL: We got turned down in all the big festivals. I don't know why but one after another turned us down. The biggest 10 all turned us down.

We almost got into Tribeca, but they turned us down. One of the reasons may be that a lot of the programmers are too young to have ever heard of the guy, which shouldn't matter. So that was the irony. We got turned down, turned down, turned down, and then the Film Forum's Karen Cooper said, "I love it. I want it."

Q: The DVD is out on Zeitgeist?

JL: Zeitgeist will do the DVD, but we hope we have a long theatrical run. Zeitgeist is getting it out there. We're trying to sell it to television here and outside the US.

Q: How did it get sold to Zeitgeist?

JL: We opened in New York at the Film Forum. I sent the DVD to Karen Cooper and then a week later she sent me an email saying "Mike [Maggiore] and I looked at your film, we loved it, we want to give you two weeks." And she said, "Zeitgeist would be perfect for this. You should send them a DVD." So I sent did and they called me and said, "We love the film, and would love to distribute it."

Q: And now, you're setting up this organization in Maine -- which sounds like it's inspired by Goodman's ideas?

JL: It's going to be a non-profit residential center called the Mekhaye Center, which means "pleasure" in Yiddish, run by a little foundation I set up called the JSL Foundation. It's in New Gloucester, Maine, which is the home of the Quakers of Sabbathday Lake, and it's going to be a place for activists and organizers and scholars engaged with a range of issues from human rights, gay rights, sustainable agriculture, alternatives to war, labor and community organizing, public education reform.

New Gloucester is 45 minutes from the Portland airport. My mother lives in New York City, my youngest sister lives here, I have very good friends here, and I need to come here to develop connections, to raise money, to reach out to people. The Center will be very closely tied to groups in Maine, but from there to the rest of the world.

Q: Do you hope to make another movie?

JL: I might try, but right now I have to focus on getting this film out. And I have to raise a lot of money to do this Center. One thing I learned about making this film is how expensive it is to make a film, so I don't know if I'll have the money for another.