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Lincoln Journal Star
An ‘exceedingly dangerous woman’:Emma Goldman’s story
BY L. KENT WOLGAMOTT
An oft-jailed anarchist firebrand, Russian immigrant Goldman was one of the great American orators of the first two decades of the 20th century, crisscrossing the country to deliver speeches on topics from the labor movement and anarchism to birth control and women’s emancipation, drawing more than 40,000 people to 120 lectures in a six-month period.
Police officers were usually in the crowd when she spoke, ready to haul Goldman off to jail for something she might say. A New York speech during the 1893 financial panic landed her in prison. In 1919,Goldman’s refusal to stop speaking out against World War I resulted in her deportation.
A feminist long before the feminist movement, a free speech crusader and a political radical who plotted to kill industrialist Henry Clay Frick, Goldman was reclaimed by the leftist movements of the ’60s and ’70s and made a brief return to popular culture in Warren Beatty’s 1981 film “Reds,” in which Maureen Stapleton won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar playing her.
Monday, her story will again be told in “Emma Goldman: An Exceedingly Dangerous Woman,” a documentary on the PBSseries “American Experience” written, produced and directed by Mel Bucklin of Nebraska Educational Telecommunications.
Bucklin became interested in Goldman while working on another “American Experience” documentary about pioneer female journalist Nellie Bly, who worked in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.But she says that “Reds” is one of the things that motivated her to make her documentary.
She wasn’t the only filmmaker who wanted to do a movie about Goldman. During one of her early research trips to New York City, where Goldman lived and did much of her work, Bucklin learned that Hollywood heavyweight Harold Ramis, who starred in the “Ghostbuster” movies and has written and directed hits like “Caddyshack,””Groundhog Day” and “Analyze This,” had been trying to do a Goldman picture, too.
“He had pitched Goldman relentlessly to all the movie studios as the subject for a movie,”Bucklin said.”He’d been very predictably turned down flat by everyone. His best pitch – he says it was the best pitch of his life – was to Disney, with Bette Midler as Emma Goldman.”
Ramis wasn’t able to get his Goldman movie made. But he was able to help Bucklin with hers, introducing her to his New York location manager who had worked with Martin Scorsese on “The Age of Innocence” and helped Bucklin to find appropriate filming spots on New York’s Lower East Side.
Bucklin’s meeting with Ramis came in 1999, when she was working under a PBSresearch grant.Two years later, Bucklin had put together financing, anchored by a $500,000 National Endowment for the Humanities grant, to make her documentary.
Then came Sept. 11.
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