Woodstock

Barak Goodman and Jamila Ephron's Woodstock commemorates the fifty-year anniversary of the legendary festival. Produced for the PbsAmerican Experience series and in limited theatrical release in the summer of 2019, the film offers a trip down memory lane, with the network's baby boomer audience very much in mind. For the record, and as you consider my take on the film, this is relevant: I was fourteen when Woodstock happened, too young to make the 130-mile trip north and west. My sister, then nineteen, was at the show. It was not until the following summer, after I saw Michael Wadleigh's 1970 documentary that I fully appreciated what I had missed. She got Woodstock and all I got was a T-shirt, so to speak. Around the midpoint of Woodstock we see the dairy farmer Max Yasgur on stage, looking out over his land—the once-peaceful rolling hills occupied by hundreds of thousands of half-naked, mud-soaked festivalgoers. “You've proven something to the world,” he tells the crowd, “three days of fun and music. God bless you for it.” The speech is well worth remembering as we ponder the lofty claim made in the film's title. There is Woodstock the festival, of course, and the generation defined by it ... but we are talking really, finally, and only about three days in August 1969

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