Filmmakers Flash Back on the ‘20th Century’

Pity the beleaguered TV executive: Every broadcast outfit on earth is expected to come up with some sort of program to mark the end of the millennium. How to provide a satisfying overview, when no two people seem to agree on the significance of any part of it? One approach might be to embrace the personal, to combine several idiosyncratic views into a “Rashomon”-style mix of viewpoints, with the subjective element built in.

According to Paul Villadolid, senior vice president of specials and reality programming at Touchstone Television, the company began looking three years ago “for a project to commemorate the end of the century.” The intent was to avoid the traditional historical surveys typically undertaken by the networks: the Mike Wallace and a feast of platitudes model.

Villadolid perked up when producer Sandra Itkoff suggested something different: recruiting feature film directors to take a more personal, essayistic look at “a big, high-concept subject they were passionate about,” as it had played out across the decades.

The finished product, the six-part series “In the 20th Century,” will begin airing on Showtime tonight, focusing on the institution of marriage, according to Garry Marshall (“Pretty Woman”). A new episode by a different director will run each month into the fall.

It took more than a year and half to boil down an initial wish list of 10 or 12 subjects--faith, violence, sex, entertainment, among others. And there was an even longer roster of interesting directors--”just about anybody you could think of,” says Villadolid--from which to pick a final set of six, which include Norman Jewison (“Moonstruck”) on the commercialization of comedy and Gregory Nava (“Selena”) on immigration. For the most part, Villadolid says, the “first one in” got dibs, although the final lineup was shaped at least as much by the directors’ conflicting schedules. Some topics, like religion, were bid on by several candidates, but went begging in the end because of logistical snags.

Other installments were reshaped during production. Barry Levinson (“Wag the Dog”), whose episode began as an examination of the concept of utopia, of how visions of a perfect society had changed since 1900, became entranced by some of the wacky old archival images that turned up during the research phase.

What struck him, Levinson says, was how far off the mark most of the predictions were: “I used to read in Popular Science about all of these amazing future inventions, the rocket packs and the automated highways. And none of them ever happened. I thought I’d prefer to look at how we view the future from a 20th century perspective.”

Levinson believes that what gets overlooked most consistently is the most obvious factor of all: human nature. “We thought of all the great inventions that will be coming,” he says, “and forgot that not only will the world change, but cultural changes will occur as well. There’s always the kitchen of the future in these old movies--forgetting that the whole family of the future is going to be different.”

What the futurists forgot, observes comedian Martin Mull in the documentary, is that “America’s greatest resource, still, is the moron.” The prognosticators came up with beautiful designs for airborne highways, but forgot road rage and air pollution.

The Law of Unforeseen Consequences emerges forcefully in installments about issues or morality and culture. Robert Townsend (“The Meteor Man”), for instance, chronicles changing attitudes toward sex, charting succeeding waves of permissiveness and repression.

Research Yields Cultural Surprises

Like Levinson, Townsend was surprised by much of what emerged from his research, “like the fact that homosexuality was much more accepted in the early decades of the century.” His episode documents a vogue for drag entertainment in the 1920s, at specialized boites like New York’s Pansy Club. In retrospect, the sexual frenzy of the ‘60s looks less like a revolution than a reversion, to a mood that prevailed before the Depression and World War II clamped on the lid.

Young people now, Townsend says, are flooded with mixed messages. Despite all the dire warnings about disease, “they are bombarded with sexual images, and they are made to feel that they missed out on the fun of the sexual revolution. They feel they ought to have a lot of choices, but they really don’t.”

Similar trajectories emerge in a study by Robert Zemeckis (“Forrest Gump”) of the chemical pursuit of a rough and ready substitute for happiness. Experts testify that human beings seem to have an inborn urge to alter their consciousness. Will society come to terms with this and embrace moderation, or will strategies continue to seesaw back and forth between prohibition and indulgence?

“What interested me,” Zemeckis says, “is that I kept bumping into spirituality. I don’t think it’s any accident that intoxicating chemicals are often used in religious ceremonies. As human beings we are on a quest to know something beyond our physical presence in the universe. Chemicals can look like a quick and easy way of getting to that.”

It was “the genius of Alcoholics Anonymous,” Zemeckis suggests, to address the spiritual hunger at work in addiction, “to replace the missing piece with something else. This may be why AA is the only thing that works, and why medical science and psychology haven’t sobered anybody up yet.”

Common themes emerged between various episodes of “In the 20th Century” almost by accident, Touchstone’s Villadolid says. There was some contact and cooperation between the filmmakers. “If one of them came across some footage that might be of use to one of the others they would pass it along,” but no actual collaboration.

The series opens with Marshall’s personal take on marriage. The filmmaker, who has been married for 36 years, narrates his exploration of relationships that have largely held together.

Next up will be Townsend’s treatise on sex in July. Levinson’s vision of the future will air in August. Zemeckis follows in September, Jewison in October, with Nava wrapping up the series in November. In December, the cable channel will rebroadcast all six films.

* “In the 20th Century” premieres at 10 p.m. tonight on Showtime with Garry Marshall on marriage: “In Search of a Happy Ending.” The network has rated it TV-14 (may be unsuitable for children younger than 14).