Putnam Documentary

I am currently co-producing (with my sister, Rebecca Davis) a documentary on the life and work of social scientist, civic guru, and Bowling Alone author Robert Putnam.

The feature-length documentary, funded by grants from the Sloan Foundation and Lilly Endowment, follows the half-century story of America’s civic unraveling through the eyes of the one man who has dedicated his life to studying it. Join Harvard social scientist and Bowling Alone author Robert Putnam — the “poet laureate of civil society,” one of the most influential academics of the past quarter century, and the civic guru to the Presidents— on his decades-long quest to understand what happened to America and to figure out what it will take to weave us back together.

The documentary will chart Putnam’s life and work as he attempts to solve a civic mystery: what makes democracy work and why is American democracy in crisis?

In the 1980s, Robert Putnam was an obscure academic when he happened upon shocking social science data out of Italy that would propel him on a three-decade quest to investigate a hunch he had about his own country’s civic decline. It would lead the tireless Midwestern detective on a winding tour through the major social trends of the past 50 years, from community engagement in the 1990s, to the culture wars of the 2000s, and to ethnic diversity and economic inequality in the 2010s.

Along the way, the unassuming, quirky professor would rocket to national fame. His best-selling book Bowling Alone, which argued that Americans were becoming increasingly isolated from one another, would be a watershed in the history of popular social science, spurring debate in newspaper op-eds and on popular talk shows. He would become the favorite social scientist of three Presidents and the first “adult” invited onto Facebook, earning him the monikers “the poet laureate of civil society” and America’s “Old Testament prophet with charts.”

In the film, we will join Putnam in the final years of his quest. We follow the veteran sleuth as he looks back at all the evidence he has gathered over his career and presents his full theory of the case to the American people. But as we do, we flash back to bring the audience along on Putnam’s decades-long social science detective story about the nation’s most important whodunit: What unraveled America?

To learn more and follow along with production, visit PutnamDoc.com and follow the doc on twitter and instagram.