Slideshow
PLAYING IN THE FM BAND: THE STEVE POST STORY
6:00
PRODUCED AND DIRECTED BY ROSEMARIE REED
“Just when you think you’ve scraped the bottom, you find you’ve only scratched the surface,” opined Steve Post (1944-2014), the brilliant, sardonic WBAI (and later WNYC) radio host whose voice was a familiar tonic during Watergate, the Vietnam War, the Nixon era, and beyond. Like Capote and Mailer, creators of the nonfiction novel, Post personalized the political and politicized the personal – pioneering freeform radio by improvising self-deprecating stories drawn from his childhood, page one of the New York Times, or (his personal nemesis) Richard Nixon (“Give him the shaft”). Some of his favorite guests: Abbie Hoffman, Paul Krassner (publisher of The Realist), Marshall Efron, Marilyn Sokol, and John Lithgow. Filmmaker Rosemarie Reed recreates a time when this curmudgeonly comic genius turned radio into a medium that was of the moment: both endlessly entertaining and profoundly enlightening. Plus he was very, very funny.
Presented with support from the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation Fund.
2021 90 MINS. USA