Following Sean

Filmmaker Ralph Arlyck first met Sean while living as a graduate student in San Francisco's Haight Ashbury neighborhood at the height of the 1960s. The city was awash with the trappings of America's cultural revolution-the San Francisco State University campus flooded with cops in riot gear, the Haight filled with drifters and idealists, and, on the third floor of Arlyck's building, a come-one-come-all crashpad apartment. It was from this top floor commune that the precocious 4-year-old Sean would occasionally wander downstairs to visit and talk-and one day Arlyck turned on his camera.

Sean's casual commentary on everything from smoking pot to living with speed freaks was delivered in simple sincerity throughout the soon-to-be famous 15-minute film. This First Child of the notorious decade may have shaken the audience with his simple sentence -- "Sure, I smoke pot" -- but it was his barefoot impishness which would encapsulate the hope that lay in front of the nation: a promise of infinite possibility.

Thirty years, three generations, and a lifetime later, Arlyck has returned to San Francisco in search of who the adult Sean might have become. And what he finds, to his surprise, tells him as much about his own east-coast migration as it does about the Californian life he left behind-that the choices we're handed and the choices we make are, very often, quite odd bedfellows.

This program is not currently scheduled for broadcast.

Filmmaker Profiles:

Resources

• P.O.V. - Following Sean
• Purchase a copy of Following Sean at docurama.com.

Following Sean: Crew & Credits

Written and Directed by Ralph Arlyck

produced by
Ralph Arlyck
Malcolm Pullinger

Consulting Producer
Lance Bird

Executive Producer
Steve Leiber
Steve Wax

Editor
Malcolm Pullinger

Camera
Ralph Arlyck
Tom Tucker

Sound Recording
Dan Gleich

High Definition Post-Production
Hi-Wire

Colorist
Oscar Oboza

Online Editor/Fire Artist
Tony Mills

Post-Production Sound
Sound Lounge

Sound Designer
Marshall Grupp

Re-Recording Mixer
Keith Reynaud

Original Music
Eric Neveux