{"id":8236,"date":"2015-05-13T15:24:27","date_gmt":"2015-05-13T20:24:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.wnpt.org\/mediaupdate\/?p=8236"},"modified":"2015-05-13T16:39:04","modified_gmt":"2015-05-13T21:39:04","slug":"1971-documentary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.wnpt.org\/mediaupdate\/2015\/05\/13\/1971-documentary\/","title":{"rendered":"‘1971’ documentary premieres May 18 on Independent Lens"},"content":{"rendered":"

Premiering Monday, May 18,<\/strong> on Independent Lens, 1971<\/strong><\/em> is a suspenseful documentary with all the intrigue and tension of a classic heist movie. The film airs at 9 p.m. on NPT<\/strong> and has two Nashville connections: Producer Katy Chevigny recently relocated here and much of the archival footage used in the film was found through Vanderbilt University\u2019s Television News Archive.<\/p>\n

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Keith Forsyth (played by Daniel S. Taylor) reads a stolen document. Courtesy of Andreas Burgess<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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The caper<\/strong>
\nWhile most people have heard of the Watergate break-in that eventually took down a president, it wasn\u2019t the only significant Mid-Atlantic burglary in the early 1970s. On the night of March 8, 1971\u2014as Muhammad Ali battled Joe Frazier in a much-anticipated bout\u2014eight people broke into an F.B.I. field office in Media, Penn., and stealing every one of the agency\u2019s files. The documents revealed that the F.B.I., then still led by J. Edgar Hoover, was engaged in illegal surveillance of American citizens and was also attempting to infiltrate and\/or discredit organizations involved with civil rights, women\u2019s rights and other issues deemed problematic.<\/p>\n

Calling themselves the Citizens\u2019 Commission to Investigate the F.B.I., the burglars sent copies of their findings to members of Congress and the media; one recipient was Washington Post<\/em> reporter Betty Medsger. Though the Post<\/em> reported on the documents and there eventually was a congressional hearing based on them, the Media, Penn., burglary never became part of the nation\u2019s collective memory the way Watergate and other events of the turbulent late-1960s and early-1970s did.<\/p>\n

This is partly because though the F.B.I. launched a massive manhunt, the people involved in the burglary were never caught\u2014that was one aspect of the story that appealed to filmmaker Johanna Hamilton.<\/p>\n

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