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“What’s Remarkable To Me About the Story of the American Public Library is How Much of It Cuts Across Political Lines”: Lucie Faulknor and Dawn Logsdon on Free for All: Inside the Public Library
Free for All: Inside the Public Library Nearly 12 years in the making, Lucie Faulknor and Dawn Logsdon’s Free for All: Inside the Public Library is a heartfelt journey into the history of an institution that went from a radical idea (the “Free Library Movement”), to an entity taken for granted, to a present-day site of ginned up controversy. It’s also a contemporary cross-country celebration of the (overwhelmingly female) librarians then and now who fought, and continue to fight, for the right to knowledge for all.
A few weeks before the doc’s April 29th debut on PBS’s Independent Lens, Filmmaker reached out to the co-directors, both lifelong library lovers (indeed. Logsdon had visited over 100 libraries in nearly every state by the time she was 12 thanks to her road-tripping teacher-parents) to learn all about their thorough chronicling of what the duo deem “the last truly public commons.”
Filmmaker: Since you began working on this film during the Obama administration — and started thinking about it right after Hurricane Katrina) — I’m curious to hear what your initial idea was, and how that might have changed over the dozen years you collaborated on the project.
Logsdon: Almost the only thing that our initial idea and the final film have in common is that the subject is still public libraries! My first idea was to do a largely observational film, in one big urban library, that would include one very short historical chapter somewhere near the beginning. Instead I fell in love with the history, and the unfolding of a historical story became our primary structure.
We also decided to center the challenges that small and rural libraries face. That led me to include the multigenerational experiences of my own family in rural and small town Midwestern libraries.
Faulknor: Since we were going to focus on one big urban library, we checked out (no pun intended) San Francisco, Chicago and Queens because they serve so many different communities, speaking so many different languages.
We ultimately chose the main San Francisco library because it was a fascinating confluence of people from the neighborhood — in the immediate vicinity is City Hall, UC Berkeley Law School, methadone clinics, homeless shelters, and the former Twitter headquarters. In addition, because we live in San Francisco it was a lot cheaper in terms of travel costs.
We filmed enough to get a solid sample reel. Then we convened a panel and showed excerpts at the big annual American Library Association (ALA) conference. People loved what they saw, but many in the audience pointed out that the San Francisco library has a very robust “friends” organization and dedicated financing from the city, so it is well funded. They let us know that many small and rural libraries are struggling. We decided to learn more, and discovered some amazing stories — libraries don’t just hold stories in books. Every day stories are unfolding inside libraries, from the people who are working in them and the millions who use those libraries.
We locked picture in February 2020, right before the pandemic. There are over 700 archival items that we had to clear and/or get hi-res copies for, but everything closed down. While we waited for places to reopen things started to change. The earlier version’s major drama was the closing of the whole library system in Douglas County, Oregon; but then book challenges increased, as did attacks on libraries and librarians. So Dawn opened it back up and the final story started to emerge, with Dawn’s personal family story surprisingly holding it together.
Filmmaker: How did you decide which characters and locations to focus on?
Logsdon: Very early on, I decided that I wanted this story to be about the people who use libraries rather than about the library buildings themselves, or the administrators in charge of running them.
What surprised me was discovering all the forgotten women in library history, especially the on-the-ground librarians who directly serve the public. There are thousands and thousands of other dramatic stories unfolding in libraries every day, and we’ve got a ton of them on our cutting room floor. The contemporary stories that stuck are the ones that most resonated with the larger historical themes we wanted to bring alive.
Faulknor: We did a lot of research. We talked to a lot of librarians and library historians, read a lot of history books, and spent a lot of time digging through library archives. We visited dozens of libraries and sat through four years of ALA conferences to discover all the amazing things that are happening in libraries today.
Filmmaker: Considering the political climate, did anyone you reached out to decline to participate? Which characters or storylines were left on the cutting room floor?
Logsdon: No, no one declined to participate, but lots of people only wanted to push their particular political agenda when we interviewed them. Those all ended up on the cutting room floor because that’s not the kind of story we were trying to tell.
What’s remarkable to me about the story of the American public library is how much of it cuts across political lines. So I was particularly attached to a section in which several famous people from wildly different political or cultural camps told their own childhood library stories: Sonia Sotomayor next to Clarence Thomas. Ronald Reagan with Barack Obama. Janice Joplin and Warren Buffett. Sadly, that section ultimately had to get cut too.
I hope someday someone takes all our outtakes and shapes them into something, because I’m still attached to a bunch of the stories and forgotten heroes that didn’t make it into the final cut.
Filmmaker: Could you talk a bit about balancing the archival footage with the contemporary? What was the editing process like?
Logsdon: I love working with archival materials. When libraries shut down for awhile during Covid, I got even more obsessed with tracking down materials using all the great free digital archives that were still open online.
By the end of the process we had a database with thousands of images from hundreds of little archives and libraries. It definitely is one of the main reasons the edit took as long as it did. Though I think that wealth of imagery that hasn’t been seen much before is what makes the film rich and surprising.
Filmmaker: I’m also curious to hear about your impact campaign, especially with PBS now in the crosshairs of the current administration.
Logsdon: Because the fate of public libraries is so timely and fraught right now, we made the decision to get the film out in a non-traditional way. That meant that when we didn’t get into Sundance, we had to make a choice between holding the film back while we waited to hear from other important festivals versus agreeing to participate in a different, more grassroots opportunity to bring the film directly to public libraries.
One of the reasons we made this film was for people across the United States to gather in person, at their local library, to watch and then talk about what was happening to the library in their own community. This has been made possible by our broadcaster Independent Lens/PBS through their Indie Lens Pop-Up community screening program.
We’ve been thrilled by how much the film is resonating. We were told to expect about 30-40 screenings, and instead we’re already at more than 400 – with more calls coming everyday. From the feedback we’ve gotten so far, it’s sparking dialogue across the political spectrum.
So while it’s been humbling as a filmmaker not to get the prestige of the big festivals we’ve gone to in the past, this has been way more exciting. And I think more important for public libraries and librarians, who are so under siege right now.
We want to continue on this path of offering local in-person screenings/conversations at libraries after the broadcast on April 29th. With almost 17,000 public libraries in the US, it’s a huge project. We had a big proposal pending with the National Endowment for the Humanities to fund our effort to keep traveling to libraries with the film for at least another year. Now the NEH budget has been slashed. Many projects have been retroactively defunded, and it’s not clear whether any new NEH grants will be awarded this coming year. We’re currently talking to foundations and private donors about helping us continue our tour.
