After spending a lifetime writing screenplays and historical fiction novels, Jon Boorstin never thought he would take on his own family as a subject. The filmmaker’s younger self wouldn’t quite believe it.
“I would have sworn on a stack of Bibles, I was never going to talk about this stuff,” Boorstin said from his home in Los Angeles.
But, rifling through his papers during the COVID-19 pandemic, he discovered an eight-page reflection that his father wrote in his 70s — the same stage of life Jon is in now. It was the only time Daniel Boorstin, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian who wrote 20 books and served as Librarian of Congress between 1975 and 1987, wrote about his memories growing up in Tulsa during the city’s boomtown heyday.
The pages were part of a proposal Daniel drew up with his friend and one-time University of Chicago colleague, the famed Black educator and historian John Hope Franklin. They hoped to pen a book, “Two From Tulsa: Tale of Two Cities,” about their experiences coming of age on different sides of their deeply segregated hometown…