Taking an entire decade full of history and trying to distill it into a two-part, four-hour miniseries is a formidable task. If that decade is the 1960s, that formidable task becomes all but impossible.
But "The '60s" executive producer Linda Obst tackled the project with great enthusiasm, if not great success."I loved making this miniseries more than I've loved doing almost anything in my entire career," Obst said. "I was going to say in my entire life, but I think living the '60s was more fun."
The two-part, four-hour TV movie, which airs Sunday and Monday at 8 p.m. on NBC, Ch. 5, mixes archival footage from the decade with the fictional stories of a pair of families -- the white, middle-class Herlihys in Chicago and, in Mississippi, the black Taylors, who are caught up in the civil rights struggle.
Obst, who has developed and/or produced such theatrical films as "Contact," "Flashdance," "Risky Business," "Beetlejuice," "Sleepless in Seattle" and "Hope Floats," said the goal of the miniseries was to tell the tale of the 1960s through the lives of "simple, regular people."
"Not to tell every story of the '60s, but to just tell one slice, one story of the '60s, by finding two families whose characters naturally, organically went through the process of civil war that America went through," she explained.
"The process of division of parent against child . . . of brother against brother, of anti-war activist versus Vietnam combatant. Of civil rights leader/father versus militant son. Of looking for what it all meant in the wake of tragedies we all experienced as a nation during the '60s."
And the lives of these two families are directly affected by the major events of the decade. (Directly and a bit too conveniently to be believable.)
In Chicago, family patriarch Bill Herlihy (Bill Smitrovich of "Life Goes On") is the traditional sort -- a conservative Democrat and former Marine. He's proud when his oldest son, Brian (Jerry O'Connell of "Sliders"), joins the Marines and horrified when his 16-year-old daughter, Katie (Julia Stiles), gets in trouble for doing the twist at a high school dance. And Bill never knows quite what to make of his second son, Michael (Josh Hamilton), who becomes quite a social activist.
The parallel story is also one of generational conflict. Rev. Willie Tyler (Charles Dutton of "Roc"), a follower of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., believes in peaceful protest. However, his son, Emmet (Leonard Roberts), takes a more radical approach.
"This is not a historical treatise," Obst said. "This is not an academic treatise. This is a visceral, emotional family story."
Emotional, certainly. But the characters play out as little more than cardboard cut-outs. When the characters are first introduced, you know exactly where they're going to end up.
Still, Obst said she felt "incredibly responsible to get the backbone of history right, without being a documentary."
"The '60s" is, however, full of film footage you'd expect to find in a documentary. Historical footage of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Lyndon Johnson, Robert F. Kennedy and Malcolm X. Of the Vietnam War, the freedom riders, the Columbia University student protests, the flower children in Haight-Ashbury, the Watts riots.
The news clips set the stage for the stories of the two families -- or, more accurately, the family members are devices used to hurl the script from news event to news event. (The story flies by at a pace that's dizzying, even for viewers who remember the events of the '60s. Younger viewers may find it all a bit confusing.)
Brian heads off to Vietnam a gung-ho Marine and -- you guessed it! -- he returns a shell-shocked veteran. Katie goes from kissing a boy to getting pregnant to becoming a San Francisco flower child to living in a commune.
Michael just happens to end up with activist Father Daniel Berrigan (Cliff Gorman) as one of his teachers at Northwestern. This, en route to becoming a major anti-war activist and volunteer in, first, Eugene McCarthy's and then Bobby Kennedy's presidential campaigns. That's after, as a freedom rider, he just happens to run into Emmet Tyler in Mississippi.
That's before the Tylers move to California, where they come to tragedy in the Watts riots. And before Emmet gets close to the leaders of the Black Panther movement.
And you can see it coming a mile away when the Herlihy siblings are miraculously reunited at Woodstock.
Plus, this being television, there's a heart-warming, if not entirely convincing, happy ending.
"I try not to idealize the things that are extremely romantic to me, because 30 years have passed and it's clear that some of the excess of the '60s is silly in retrospect. But not all of them," Obst said.
She and scriptwriter Bill Couturie and director Mark Piznarski do, however, definitely romanticize many of the events the TV movie portrays.
"The '60s" is both too short and too long. Four hours isn't enough to tell the story of the '60s, but what with the script's skimming of history, many of the scenes seem bloated.
To its credit, however, "The '60s" does try to provide some balance. Not all the anti-war activists are heroes -- far from it. And not all those in the pro-war faction are demons. The Black Panthers are shown both as a rather threatening presence and as community activists -- which should come as no surprise, given that David Hilliard, who was chief of staff for the party from 1968-74, was a consultant on the TV movie.
"The anti-war radical movement and the radical aspects of the Black Panther movement are shown in both extremes," Obst said. "There is no effort to either only portray the Black Panther party as a self-defense party or only present the Black Panther party as a community service organization. Same thing with the campus radicals. There are idealists and there were abuses of power among the radicals."
On a far less serious note, a couple of other small roles went to actors with ties to the '60s -- through their parents. Donovan Leitch, son of singing sensation Donovan, plays -- you guessed it! -- a singer who gets involved (briefly) with Katie Herlihy. And Carnie Wilson, the daughter of Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys (and former member of Wilson Phillips), plays Mama Earth, a hippie who takes Katie under her wing.
Most of the actors not only go through dozens of costume changes -- through all those hideous fashion statements -- but seemingly dozens of hairstyles. And, not surprisingly, the men go through the worst of it -- this was the '60s, after all.
There's also plenty of period music, topped off by Bob Dylan's 1964 anthem "Chimes of Freedom" -- a tune he re-recorded for the miniseries with Joan Osborne. Other songs in the two-part movie (and the CD) include everything from "My Boyfriend's Back" and "My Girl" to "Say it Loud, I'm Black and I'm Proud," "Winds of Change" and "Chicago/We Can Change the World." (It's a bit ironic, given the anti-establishment tone of "The '60s," that the miniseries is being used to market a CD.)
A great deal of attention went into the details of "The '60s" -- but a bit more could have gone into the script. Still, Obst and her team do their best to call up echoes of what the '60s meant -- at least what they think it meant -- to younger generations.
"To have the whole panoply of the '60s played out for them, I think it's going to be not only entertaining but a great teaching tool to open them up to themselves and their history," said '60s figure Wavy Gravy, who appears briefly as himself in the miniseries. "And I'm very excited about that."
"We were that generation that was truly involved in that period where America itself, I would like to think, was evolving to a better society," Hilliard said.
And Obst really hit on the theme of crosscurrent generational divides.
"I think there's great beauty in trying to reimagine what it felt like to be engaged in a world without apathy," she said. "And I want more than anything for this miniseries to be an invitation from my generation to my son's generation to 'Come on, people now.' Just give it a feeling. See what it's like to be involved in speaking up and finding out that your voice does make a difference."