DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT

This film began with an accidental discovery. While researching real-world intentional communities modeled after behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner’s imagined utopia in his novel Walden Two, I came across an intriguing entry in the Harvard Film Archive’s finding aid. It said simply “unidentified Jerry Johnson film,” a description that turned out to represent tens of thousands of feet of film and audio saved from a 1970s biographical movie about Skinner.

The film turned out to be an overly ambitious project that resulted in a clichéd educational film that disappointed the producer and B.F. Skinner himself. Fortunately, the material was preserved and after many hours of archival work could be sent for digitization.

The film turns Skinner’s theories on himself and shows how the environment of the film production shapes his behavior as he is filmed, questioned and directed. All of the false starts, unused takes, edited facial expressions, and preparatory discussions are reconfigured and combined with personal photographs and notes, magazine covers, painted portraits, drafts of books and home movies, including a videotape documenting his home immediately after his death in 1990. The resulting film is a collage of image and sound that presents Skinner’s controversial ideas in an open format leaving the viewer to make their own interpretations.