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Courtesy
of Steven Latham
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Celebrating
Extraordinary Lives
Steven Latham
was intrigued with the idea that there were people alive today
who’d gone from the horse-and-buggy days to seeing the Pathfinder
land on Mars. That was the impetus for the television series he
created, The Living Century: The Extraordinary Lives of Ordinary
People (www.TheLivingCentury.com).
The series, which runs on PBS through 2002,
profiles people 100 years of age and older who still lead active
lives, and features one centenarian per 30-minute episode. “These
are people who have either touched history or made history,”
Latham says. “They were born before plastic, before Communism,
before zippers. Amazingly, each centenarian we’ve met never
thought about aging.”
Latham, who received a public relations degree
from the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, created
the series after a long apprenticeship in various facets of the
West Coast entertainment industry. He accumulated experience by
working in public relations, advertising, feature films, television
and theater production, and producing an Academy Award-winning
short documentary, Dolphins: Minds in the Water. “After
10 years of working for studios, I wanted to develop projects
I was passionate about,” he says. “I began thinking about what’s
important.”
Realizing there are more than 70,000 people
in the United States who are at least 100 years old, he located
some and began talking with them. “I was absolutely amazed at
their humor, their agelessness,” he marvels. “They’re old only
in body. In spirit and mind, they’re magnificent and incredibly
young.”
He and his producing partner, co-presidents
of Reverie Productions, interested filmmakers Barbra Streisand
and Cis Corman of Barwood Films in producing the project with
them. With Latham as creative director, they put together their
first two programs, each a carefully crafted mix of interviews,
archival photographs, historians’ perspectives, home movies,
and original music of the time.
The first two programs, hosted by Jack
Lemmon, featured 107-year-old Rose Freedman, who was the last
remaining survivor of the infamous 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist
Factory Fire in New York City that killed 146 women; and 100-year-old
farmer Ray Crist, who helped develop the first atomic bomb.
“The critical and public response has been
overwhelming,” Latham says. “This project and others that we
are producing have been indescribably rewarding. For me, work
and life are inseparable. We do this as our work, our fun, our
everything.”
—Carol
North Schmuckler
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