Documentary miniseries
The Movies is a documentary miniseries that premiered on CNN on July 7, 2019. Produced by Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman's studio Playtone, the six-part series chronicles the cinema of the United States, ranging from the "Golden Age of Hollywood" to the present day. It is a spin-off of Hanks and Goetzman's retrospective miniseries for CNN (including The Sixties and its sequels).
Production
Owing to the costs incurred with licensing the required film footage, episodes on cinema were not included in past Hanks/Goetzman miniseries projects such as The Sixties.[1] In an interview with Deadline Hollywood, Goetzman remarked that "it cost a fortune, and some is fair use, depending on how you guys talk about it, and some isn't, but within it, it's an insane undertaking because the licensing is a very tricky business in this type of thing, and you know, you set out thinking, hey, this is going to be great, right? And then you realize you have approvals, you know, beyond belief with estates in a lot of the situations, too."[2]
He went on to explain that the episodes, in their opinion, would present a "pretty good outline of what those decades are", and that they had managed to obtain every interview they had aimed to include—including John Singleton prior to his death in April 2019,[3] as well as Martin Scorsese and Robert Redford almost immediately before a production deadline.[2] Mark Herzog explained that "most directors like Singleton are really historians of film, and they know film, they know the impact of films, they study it, and so it was like talking to historians, all of them."[2]
Owing to their complementary nature, Variety stated that CNN planned to incorporate The Movies' respective episodes into its marathons of past Hanks/Goetzman miniseries in the future.[1]
The episode "The Sixties" was intended to air on August 4, but was delayed for coverage of mass shootings which had occurred that day in El Paso and Dayton.
