For its 22nd customer appreciation breakfast on Sunday, Alexander Street Press invited as keynote speaker Lynn Novick, codirector and coproducer with Ken Burns of the Prohibition documentary series.
Novick provided some insight into the life of a documentary filmmaker and showed a clip from the series that featured home movies of flappers and speakeasies taken in the Roaring 20s. “I have the best job in the world,” she said. “Besides meeting amazing people and working with talented editors and writers, I enjoy the challenge of finding a way to keep history alive, relevant, and immediate. There is a special moment when you realize that this actually happened, that these are real people whose lives were affected by these events.”
The Prohibition Era was driven by “idealism in the faith of the government to make our lives better,” Novick explained. Thousands of people thought that Prohibition as an amendment to the Constitution would offer the moral authority that local or national laws lacked. “Not only that,” she added, “people thought that Prohibition would solve not only drunkenness but most social problems as well—child labor, juvenile delinquency, prostitution, crime, illiteracy, and poverty.”
Soon it became apparent that Prohibition was a massive failure. When it ended in 1933, she said, H. L. Mencken famously wrote that he would celebrate its demise by drinking a glass of cold water, “the first water I’ve had for 13 years.”
Prohibition took place in a polarized and segregated society plagued by racism, Jim Crow laws, and lynchings. “Some proponents thought that the country needed Prohibition because certain segments of society could not handle their liquor—immigrants and minorities,” Novick said. “The coalition of the Dry Lobby also created some strange bedfellows: Booker T. Washington and the NAACP supported Prohibition, and so did the KKK. Industrialists like Andrew Carnegie supported the amendment, and so did the International Workers of the World.”
Novick is now working with Burns on a Vietnam War documentary that is slated for a 2016 release. She said it is one of the toughest she has attempted so far, and because “there is so much finger-pointing about what happened there, the subject brings out powerful emotions of the people who lived through it,” adding that “we are tiptoeing through minefields on this topic.”
Alexander Street Press announced at the breakfast its new round of upcoming or recent video launches, including The March of Time, 125 hours of newsreels from 1935 to 1967 sponsored by Time magazine that have been remastered by HBO for their exclusive use; VAST: Academic Video Online, featuring more than 10,000 documentaries on a variety of subjects; World Cinema in Video, which licenses more than 175 foreign films produced primarily after 2000; and MediaScribe, a tool that allows the user to annotate music and video synchronously, allowing for running translations, commentary, captions, scores, definitions, links, and illustrations.