Now 94 years old, the still-active Norman Lear is considered by many to be the most influential television producer of all time. Legendary sitcoms All in the Family, Maude, Good Times and The Jeffersons changed the television landscape. They also changed America's dialogue on race, gender and sexuality. No one pushed the envelope more boldly than Lear.
All in the Family, Lear's first big television hit, is perhaps his greatest work. Lear somehow managed to make right bigot Archie Bunker (Carroll O'Connor) appear likable even as the character spewed non-stop racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, and xenophobia. In scenes that are still shocking today, Archie sparred with his liberal, hippie son-in-law Mike (Rob Reiner). Lear and his writers intentionally threw offensive barbs at viewers in order to underscore the ignorance of prejudice.
Lear was the first showrunner to put LGBT people on the tube in a positive light. In the courageous "Judging Books by Covers," a 1971 episode of AITF, Mike's effeminate friend turns out to be straight. It's Archie's macho, beer-drinking buddy who ends up being gay. In "The Gay Bar," a 1977 episode of Lear's series Maude, uber-feminist Maude Findlay (Bea Arthur) takes her bigoted neighbor Arthur (Conrad Bain) to the local gay bar in order to show him that "homosexuals are just regular people." The screamingly funny episode features both characters making embarrassing faux pas as they attempt to "educate" each other.
Perhaps the most daring of Lear's LGBT-themed episodes was "Edith's Crisis of Faith," AITF's 1977 Christmas show. After her cross-dressing friend Beverly (Lori Shannon) is gay-bashed to death on Christmas Eve, Archie's wife Edith (the always sublime Jean Stapleton) refuses to go to Midnight Mass, saying that going to church does no good. Lori Shannon, who died of a heart attack in 1984, was then a popular San Francisco drag performer and a B.A.R. columnist.
In Norman Lear: Just Another Version of You, a new documentary by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, Lear's immense influence on American culture is recalled. Lear never backed away from controversy �" he had no qualms about inserting words like "fag" and "n-" into his scripts. Suits at CBS were so horrified that disclaimers were placed at the beginning of some of Lear's shows. But audiences ate it up. Lear made it possible for Americans to engage in honest dialogue about important issues including race, sexuality, abortion, women's rights, and people's perceptions of other religions and cultures. Ewing and Grady's film recalls this era, alternating 30-year-old interview clips with newly shot footage of Lear talking about his life.
Lear came from a broken home. His dad served a long jail sentence for stock fraud. He speaks eloquently about the influence of his own parents in the creation of Archie and Edith Bunker. He sees those characters, and the black families seen in Good Times and The Jeffersons, as extensions of each other. "I'm just another version of you," he says. "We're all versions of each other."
The film also spends time on Lear's third act. In the mid-1980s he retired from producing so he could devote his time to People For the American Way, an organization he formed specifically to challenge attempts by the far right to make their conservative religious beliefs the law of the land.
Lear has lived an amazing life. He's come a long way from his humble beginnings as a joke writer for The Colgate Comedy Hour during the early days of live TV. The filmmakers tell the whole story in a fast-paced 90 minutes. It's a story as breathtaking as anything that Lear has put on the screen.
Norman Lear: Just Another Version of You opens on Fri., Aug. 5 at the Clay Theatre in SF and the Shattuck Cinemas in Berkeley.