Woodstock’s 50th Anniversary Festival May Be Canceled, But a Documentary Has Just Premiered

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The film’s movie poster.Photo: Courtesy of PBS

In the summer of 1969, about 400,000 people congregated at a dairy farm upstate in Bethel, New York, for three days of peace and music. Barak Goodman’s Woodstock: Three Days That Defined a Generation documents what exactly unfolded 50 years ago. It was only fitting that the film premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival, just a few hours south of the famous patch of land where the festival occurred. In the audience was a group of nostalgics and perhaps even an eyewitness or two.

Director Barak Goodman, producer Jamila Ephron, and editor Don Kleszy

Photo: Getty Images

“I’ve heard about it for years—now I know how it felt,” explained Joel Rosenman, who co-organized the iconic festival with John Roberts. Though he was certainly present at Woodstock, Rosenman’s production responsibilities prevented him from actually experiencing it. As the film’s director, Goodman was interested in just that: the logistics of the festival and the organizers who grossly underestimated the number of attendees. Admirably, the film didn’t shy away from these major challenges; it showed how adversity could unite people even more.

During one of the most turbulent times in modern history, people were looking for answers, and for some those answers were in the politically conscious music they were listening to. It offered a sort of escapism from the issues surrounding sexual politics, civil rights, and the Vietnam war. The soundtrack in the film became a seamless backdrop for the rich film footage that had been sitting at the Warner Bros. studio all this time. The film’s score made the audience fully embody what it felt like to be young in 1969, unaccepting of the status quo.

Cocreator of the Woodstock Festival Joel Rosenman (left)

Photo: Getty Images

None of this, however, would have been possible without the generosity of dairy farmer Max Yasgur, who welcomed crowds to his land. “He was a symbol of what the festival was about,” said Rosenman. “His politics were conservative, and yet his heart was huge. He thought the potential of humanity is in all of us.”

An after-party followed at Locanda Verde, where people were in high spirits, mostly from overhearing the fiction-like firsthand stories being shared around the room. Rosenman mused, “The Who and the Grateful Dead were not going to play. Somebody had floated this absurd rumor that we were in financial trouble.” (And because they had no other choice, Rosenman sent a chopper for his banker, Charlie Prince, and he was helicoptered to pick up some checks.) “At the end of it, I had my cashier’s check in my hand, was on a motorcycle heading up to the stage . . . It was dark, and a light was shining on Janis Joplin, and I had solved a big problem!”