United States Bicentennial

You know more about bikes than I do.

Going through to the West Coast, I had left my resume with Bicentennial not knowing anything about anything.

And they had a big meeting that I did not go to about whether they would continue as an organization or not.

And when they decided to continue, since I had so much secretarial experience and stuff, they hired me as the membership director.

They made us feel special being 76ers.

For sure, you are special.

We've also talked about how for the 250th anniversary, there's no event that came anywhere near the magnitude or sense of community of Bicentennial.

very sad but in 2016 when I rode I got a lot of reassurance that people are still the people that they were 40 years ago now 50 years ago so I have hope for us when I got back from that trip I spent five years writing my book about I wrote a memoir about that

Not long after watching the fight live in a Los Angeles movie theater via closed circuit, a young aspiring actor named Sylvester Stallone was moved to begin writing a screenplay.

Completing his initial script in little more than three days, Stallone told the fictional story of Rocky Balboa, a backstreet boxer from Philadelphia who gets the opportunity to challenge the flamboyant heavyweight world champ, Apollo Creed, in an exhibition match during the United States Bicentennial.

Stallone wrote the part of Rocky for himself, and to ensure that he played the lead, he rejected an offer for the film rights from United Artists, reportedly worth $360,000.

The production company, wary of casting an unknown, ultimately paid Stallone a lower price, then green-lighted the movie with a shoestring budget of around $1 million.

Right.

Wasn't that associated with the Bicentennial?

Wasn't that? Yes, I think it was.

So that was the flagship cultural event that I remember that later went nationwide and was really a very beautiful program celebrating all of the different cultures that make the U.S. what it is.

At least in the theatrical version, Rocky and Adrian celebrate their ninth wedding anniversary, meaning it is definitely 1985.

And Robert Jr. is eight years old since he was born in the nine months between the first and second fights with Apollo on New Year's Day and Thanksgiving of 1976 for the Bicentennial.

You can't move the Bicentennial.

Now, Stallone's younger son, Sergio, portrayed Robert Jr. as a baby in film two, produced in 1979 but still set in 1976, and being only a month old himself, Sergio performed impeccably.

He then grew up to be bought the robot that was in Rocky IV, to help him with autism in a period when people just didn't understand it.

It comes out of their historical collection, and it's a collection that turned 50 this year.

It came out in 1976 for the Bicentennial.

So Benjamin Moore went way back to the archives to pull out a green that's already proven it can last.

It's timeless, this color.

It's a book co-written by my two guests, Elisa Marni and Katy Siegel.

entitled What Was America? Art, Culture and Politics in the Bicentennial Era, which many people, I think, in America, especially progressives, are rather nostalgic for.

1976, more than 50 years ago.

And I'm joined by the two authors, Elise Amani and Katy Siegel.

Nostalgic is perhaps not the best way to put it.

Myself was not around in 1976, but the book came out of actually a sort of coincidental observation that Katie and I made in our individual research projects, which cross the 70s in the US and sort of starting to notice this odd reference to the bicentennial not necessarily as a subject matter for artists, but for some a subject matter and for many an occasion for participating in exhibitions or receiving cultural funding.

And so we became interested in the sort of structure of the Bicentennial as an event, as something that seemed to touch many, many artists in a way that we had never sort of read about or came across and investigating that realized that it was quite an influential event in terms of touching the arts and cultural world and prompting a lot of artistic production.

And so that was sort of the genesis as an investigation.

You know what? Honestly, I was just thinking that.

I remember the Bicentennial train, and it was exciting.

It was 200 years.

I only

She's living in the post-civil rights era.

It's the American Bicentennial.

She is a modern woman with modern expectations of equality and agency.

And then, like we just visualized, she's inexplicably ripped through time and space, pulled from her safe modern life directly into the height of American slavery.