First Run Features Presents New Immersive Documentary, MOYNIHAN

First Run Features is pleased to announce the Los Angeles theatrical premiere of Moynihan, a new documentary directed by Joseph Dorman and Toby Perl Freilich. Following its U.S. premiere at New York's Film Forum on October 3,the Los Angeles premiere will take place at Laemmle's Music Hall on October 12, 2018.

Lawrence O'Donnell, host of MSNBC's The Last Word, will attend opening night in Los Angeles to introduce the film and participate in a post-screening Q&A.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1927-2003) did not just live in the twentieth century, he strode across it: a colossus of ideas and a man of deeds. He was a seminal public intellectual and sociologist, policy specialist, ambassador and long serving senator. Moynihan was a moralist in a political world where morality - the urge to do good - is often overcome by the desire to do well. He had, as one friend, recalled, a "mystical belief in public service." In an age of rigid ideologies and political sloganeering, he was a man who embraced the contradictions and complexity of public policy without ever despairing of the role of government in the lives of its citizens. A decade after his death, the first feature length documentary about his life captures Moynihan, the man, the thinker and the doer as never before.

Over the years, Moynihan's work has frequently been misinterpreted by both the left and the right. InMoynihan, a remarkable array of figures, including Ta-Nehisi Coates, Eleanor Holmes Norton, George Will, and Henry Kissinger - along with narration by award-winning actor Jeffrey Wright (Westworld) - give insight into this "connoisseur of statistics" who served four presidents, anticipated the breakup of the Soviet Union, and was as comfortable writing about philosophy, ethnicity, and architecture as he was rethinking the Social Security and welfare systems. By clarifying Moynihan's thought and offering it to a new generation - for whom he largely remains unknown - the film offers an all-too-timely perspective on today's debates over the issues that Moynihan began tackling over 50 years ago.

"Daniel Patrick Moynihan...was always more a man of ideas than of legislation or partisan combat... For more than 40 years, in and out of government, he became known for being among the first to identify new problems and propose novel, if not easy, solutions, most famously in auto safety and mass transportation; urban decay and the corrosive effects of racism; and the preservation and development of architecturally distinct federal buildings...
In the halls of academe and the corridors of power, he was known for seizing ideas and connections before others noticed... a bold, often brilliant synthesizer whose works compelled furious debate and further research... [His wife Elizabeth] often said she
married him because he was the funniest man she ever met."
- From Moynihan's New York Times obituary by Adam Clymer

Featuring an array of luminaries including:

Former Vice President Joseph Biden
Senate Democratic Leader Charles Schumer
Former Senator Trent Lott, R. Mississippi
Former Senator Robert Kerrey, D. Nebraska
Former Senator Bill Bradley, D. N.J.
Henry Kissinger, former U.S. Secretary of State
George Will, Washington Post and Syndicated Columnist
Norman Podhoretz, former editor Commentary Magazine
Norman Orenstein, American Enterprise Institute
Lawrence O'Donnell, MSNBC commentator
Elizabeth & Maura Moynihan, the Senator's wife & daughter
William Julius Wilson, Professor, Harvard University
Robert Katzmann, Chief Judge, U.S. Court of Appeals, Second Circuit
Eleanor Holmes Norton, Representative, District of Columbia
Ta-Nehisi Coates, author

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