68 school year: That was the year of student demonstrations and the fateful Democratic convention. He met I. F. Stone for the first time that year at a student press meeting at Valparaiso University, just before the convention. And the idea of making a movie about him gradually took hold.
To warm up, Bruck said, he did an unsuccessful short documentary named “Celebration”: “It was about Rennie Davis’ unsuccessful attempts to turn the Nixon inaugural into a shambles.” He made enough mistakes on that one to form some notion of how he wanted to approach the Stone project, and once Stone agreed, Bruck kept the project alive (he frankly explains) by “milking rich liberals.”
When the film was finished, Bruck recruited New York Times columnist Tom Wicker to narrate it, mostly because of Wicker’s regard for Stone. And since the movie’s successful launching, Bruck says, he has gone around the country with a print under his arm: “Any movie can work if you put in a large enough investment of time and love.”
