Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project - Matt Wolf Q&A

Landmark Theatres Q&A Podcast

Filmmaker Matt Wolf discusses his new film RECORDER: THE MARION STOKES PROJECT with moderator Adrian Chen.

Recorded at Landmark's NuArt Theatre on 11/29/19.

For over 30 years, Marion Stokes obsessively and privately recorded American television news 24 hours a day. A longtime resident of Philadelphia (though she once considered emigrating to Cuba), she was a civil rights-era radical activist who became wealthy and reclusive later in life. Her obsession started with the Iranian Hostage Crisis in 1979—at the dawn of the 24-hour news cycle. It ended on December 14, 2012 as the Sandy Hook massacre played on television while Marion passed away. In between, Marion filled 70,000 VHS tapes, capturing revolutions, wars, triumphs, catastrophes, bloopers, talk shows and commercials that show us how television shaped the world of today and in the process tells us who we were. A mystery in the form of a time capsule, Recorder delves into the strange life of a woman for whom home taping was a form of activism to protect the truth (the public didn’t know it, but the networks had been disposing their archives for decades into the trashcan of history), and though her visionary and maddening project nearly tore her family apart, her extraordinary legacy is priceless. Directed by Matt Wolf (Teenage).