New Moon Edition May 2026
Have you ever made a documentary? Have you ever tried to make one and maybe it didn’t work out? Me either. Well, let me hip you to a little secret: the folks at Radio Active, the Freeform Radio Project we have housed at our website (HERE), have big dreams about telling our story. We think it’s worth doing because it’s a story that hasn’t been told. We’d like to make a documentary about all the amazing people who made freeform radio happen when it suddenly swept the FM dial all across the nation.
It ain’t easy, telling that story. Making a doc of any type is no small undertaking. Making one about freeform radio has it’s own special set of challenges. One is that radio is an auditory experience and documentaries are a visual medium. That’s one. Another is that cameras in the Sixties and Seventies were rarely present to record what was happening back then. Not much of that awesome activity at the stations was captured on film. Then, too, so many of those people are no longer with us.
The biggest of the hurdles though is paying for the soundtrack that was the essence of the experience. Every needle drop into the groove of the next song is many tens of thousand of dollars in royalty payments. A lot of songs by a lot of different musicians are needed to tell the story. Even if they were agreeable and wanted to see it happen, few of them own their songbooks anymore, if they ever did. They’re the property of hedge funds and other capitalists, and it’s all about the money, right! So? What to do?
There are always ways to skin the cat, cats in this case and very cool cats, indeed, those famed and fabulously wealthy superstars of yore and the superstructure that supported their rise to the stratosphere. Those sweet singer-songwriters, amazing musicians, and their very smart managers, record company execs, company A&R men (and they were mostly if not all male), concert promoters too brash to be tamed, and all the people who wrote about them in newspapers and magazines.
What all of them wanted, every single one of them, was air time on the radio. And we mean FM radio, the newly born alternative to Top 40, where the music was played the way the musicians wanted it to be heard and the audience wanted to hear it. Freeform radio was the connective tissue of this new phenomenon. It sold record albums, lots of them, and concert tickets, too. It generated readership. And people listened. Really listened. Communities of loyal listeners gathered around those stations. Radio was their voice. It was happening all over the country. And it changed the world.
That change began with broadcasting. The listening audience in a few short years migrated from the AM to the FM band. So did the attention of the record companies. They weren’t about selling single 45s anymore. Record albums were the venue and that’s what Freeform Radio played. The concert promoters bought ads on those stations. It’s where the bands that mattered were being played and where the ticket buyers could be reached. Before too many years went by, those little stations, most of which had never made a dime, became very valuable properties. A lot of people made a whole lot of money, the deejays not among them, and suddenly Freeform was over.
How to tell that story? We’ve archived a tremendous amount of material on the website, interviewed some 60 deejays and other folks who made freeform radio happen (HERE), produced an in-house trailer with Steve Postell (HERE), a pitch deck with a hot video by a couple of very good art directors at BeCause Communications (HERE), and we were gifted an excellent treatment for a four part documentary by Patrick Netter (HERE). So we have a lot of pieces in place. That documentary? Big picture? $5 to $10 million. Gulp! I mean, big Gulp! It’s a lot to swallow.
Maybe there’s an interim step? Something within our means to move the effort ahead. Something to help us reach the folks who have that sort of money to spend if they take an interest. We don’t know any of them personally and if you do please give us a call. Otherwise, we need to find a platform where we might capture their attention. Give them something deeply immersive as a keen taste of what the full story could be. The heart of the story within the serial novel, as it were.
The hottest trend on the film festival circuit is the short documentary. A tale brilliantly told in fifteen minutes or less. It takes a passionate director who edits like DaVinci paring away at the block with a chisel until the angel within the marble emerges. In the right hands, it can illustrate the pure essence of an elaborate, beautiful, and soulful moment in time that changed history. Writ large, it may be the greatest story never told. Telling it succinctly seems like an excellent place to focus our attention. Lights, camera, act … uh, getting ahead of ourselves here but it’s very intriguing.