It earned an
Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature nomination. After self-releasing
The War at Home, Barry Alexander Brown co-founded the distribution company
First Run Features. Dialogue from
The War at Home was used as
samples in the song “Thieves” by the band
Ministry on the 1989 album
The Mind is a Terrible Thing to Taste. Viewing the film after its recent restoration, Peter Canby writes in
The New Yorker:The film covers the period from 1963—when the earliest demonstrators wore jackets and ties, in some cases smoked pipes, and attended
teach-ins—to 1973. Along the way, there is extensive footage from dramatic Madison developments, including a police attack on antiwar demonstrators who had seized a campus building to protest the visit of
Dow Chemical recruiters to campus. (Dow was the maker of
napalm.) In that episode, the police clubbed—pretty much unprovoked—anyone they could get their hands on. In an unintentionally humorous moment, captured on film, a sociology professor named Maurice Zeitlin remembers students rushing in and asking him to talk sense to the police. Zeitlin runs out of his office, only to be clubbed from behind.
Bill Siegel, director of
The Trials of Muhammad Ali, was inspired to become a filmmaker after seeing the film. ==Availability==