Films from Past Years

/ Paul Goodman Changed My Life

Documentary Feature | USA | 2011 | 89 min | Website

Director: Jonathan Lee

Paul Goodman was once so ubiquitous in the American zeitgeist that he merited a cameo in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall. Author of legendary bestseller Growing Up Absurd (1960), Goodman was also a poet, 1940s out queer (and family man), anarcho-pacifist, visionary, co-founder of Gestalt therapy-and a moral compass for many in the burgeoning counterculture of the ’60s. Paul Goodman Changed My Life immerses you in an era of high intellect (that heady, cocktail-glass juncture that Mad Men has so effectively exploited) when New York was peaking culturally and artistically; when ideas, and the people who championed them, seemed to matter. Using a treasure trove of archival multimedia-selections from Goodman’s poetry; plentiful footage of Goodman himself; plus interviews with his family, peers and activists-director/producer Jonathan Lee and producer/editor Kimberly Reed (Prodigal Sons) have woven together a rich portrait of an intellectual heavyweight whose ideas are long overdue for rediscovery.

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“Paul Goodman Changed My Life …has a passionate, almost prophetic sense of the impact that a writer and thinker can have on his time and the future.” —A.O. Scott, The New York Times