Writer and director Barak Goodman joined us this morning for a talk about his new American Experience PBS documentary “Clinton,” which looks at the life and presidency of the 42nd president Bill Clinton and revisits the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
The two-part, four-hour documentary began last night and finishes this evening (Feb. 21)
The first part is currently up on the PBS site in case you missed it last night.
In his review on the Daily Beast, Lloyd Grove writes the film “…dives deeply into both emotional currents in its splendid chronicle of the talented, charismatic yet wounded boy who rose from the watermelon patch of Hope, Ark., to become the 42nd president of the United States.”
And on the show this morning, Goodman said the point of the film wasn’t about embracing political nostalgia but that “What we’re doing is history,” he said. “We’re trying to tell things as they were. And I felt that nostalgia going into this project, but we’re trying to do character studies. We’re really trying to understand people in their times. Why they made the decisions they did; how it reveals who they are. So when you go back and you put yourself back in those times it was obviously a very mixed bag. It was a very successful presidency in some ways, and a very unsuccessful presidency in some ways.” Our interview with Goodman began with footage from Clinton at the 1988 Democratic National Convention in Atlanta, and you can watch a clip of that below:
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