In 1968, a bankrupt classical music station in Boston went back on the air with a new format and essentially one rule: play whatever you want, say whatever you think. Peabody Award-winning filmmaker Bill Lichtenstein and producer Robert Sennott both share a mutual passion for the station, radio’s power and the passion for change in the middle of the 20th century.
Producers Bill Lichtenstein and Robert Sennott share their deep, personal perspectives on the station, on radio as a medium and the similarity in political circumstances between the mid-20th century and today. Lichtenstein is also the author of the companion book, WBCN and the American Revolution: How a Radio Station Defined Politics, Counterculture, and Rock and Roll (MIT Press ). Executive producers include Richard Barna, Mitchell Kertzman, Jay Rooney, and Robert Sennott.
WBCN gave Bruce Springsteen his first radio interview and his first live in-studio radio performance, and Patti Smith her first live radio broadcast with her band. The film also has the night Springsteen played the Harvard Square Theater in Cambridge in 1974, opening for Bonnie Raitt — the show that made critic Jon Landau write "I saw the rock and roll future, and its name is Bruce Springsteen," and that led Landau to become his manager and producer. David Bowie, Lou Reed, Jerry Garcia, Jane Fonda and Abbie Hoffman all came through the station's studios.
But the music was only part of it. WBCN ran the phone lines for Boston's antiwar movement, broadcast from the middle of demonstrations, and gave a platform to the civil rights, women's and gay rights movements when almost no commercial outlet would.
The film is built from more than 100,000 pieces of archival audio, photographs, film and ephemera from the era, much of it donated by the people who were there, including never-before-exhibited footage shot by Andy Warhol.
The Airwaves Belonged to the People: WBCN and the American Revolution had a successful festival run in 2018, won Best Documentary at the DC Independent Film Festival, and was distributed to PBS stations nationally. An initial theatrical release in 2020 was cut short by the COVID pandemic.
The Airwaves Belonged to the People: WBCN and the American Revolution screens at the Ellen Theatre in Bozeman Friday.
