After I finished writing Furious Improvisation, I discovered that eight short films had been made about the Project during its four-year existence in the 1930s. It occurred to me that the movies could provide a vivid accompaniment to my talks. So, without knowing much about them, I ordered the eight movies from the National Archive in Washington, and had them transferred to DVD.

They turned out to be a rich mix which provided a new dimension to the story. There was beautifully filmed footage, for instance, of the arrival and unloading of a circus train in Brooklyn, and the raising of a circus tent, with the help of a cluster of little boys. There was a lot of footage of backstage workers, sewing, fitting costumes, building sets. There were wonderful scenes of tap dancers and old vaudevillians, and of theaters in remote places. There was charming film of a marionette version of Don Quixote, and a great sequence of an actor turning himself into a terrifying but seductive witch. Much of the film was silent. But there was one wonderful clip of an all-black group, led by Juanita Hall, singing “Ezekiel Saw the Wheel.” And there was a longer clip of the final moments of the Federal Theater production which became known as “voodoo Macbeth,” an all-black version of the Shakespeare play which premiered in Harlem under the direction of Orson Welles. Most remarkable, perhaps, there was a vivid technicolor movie from the final days of the Federal Theater Project, taken in San Francisco during the Golden Gate International Exposition in 1939.

With the help of documentary film editor Gretchen Hildebran, I have turned the eight films into a sequence of clips, tailored to go along with my telling of the story of the Federal Theater Project. The movies illustrate the hard times in which the Project began, the early sensation of the Living Newspapers, and the later successes, and controversies, surrounding the nationwide production of It Can’t Happen Here and the incendiary The Cradle Will Rock. I examine the underlying motives of Martin Dies, the Texas Congressman who founded the House Un-American Activities Committee and who brought the Federal Theater down by claiming it was a dangerous Communist operation. My talk ends with the vivid footage of Hallie Flanagan, the remarkable woman who led the Federal Theater Project and whose very last triumph occurred, and was documented in color, at the Golden Gate Exposition of 1939.