Paul Goodman Changed My Life (DVD), Zeitgeist Films, Documentary

Paul Goodman was once so ubiquitous in the American zeitgeist that he merited "cameos" in Woody Allen's Annie Hall and Richard Linklater's Slacker. Author of the legendary bestseller Growing Up Absurd, Goodman was also a poet, 1940s out-queer (and family man), pacifist, visionary, co-founder of Gestalt therapy-and a moral compass for the burgeoning counterculture of the 1960s. Paul Goodman Changed My Life immerses you in an era of high intellect (that heady, cocktail-glass juncture that Mad Men has so effectively exploited) when New York was peaking culturally; when ideas, and the people who propounded them, seemed to punch in at a higher weight class than they do now. Using a treasure trove of archival multimedia-featuring Susan Sontag, Martin Luther King, Jr., Noam Chomsky; and poetry read by Garrison Keillor and Edmund White-director/producer Jonathan Lee and producer/editor Kimberly Reed (Prodigal Sons) have woven a rich portrait of an intellectual heavyweight whose ideas are ripe for rediscovery.