editors from universities across the country – Harvard, Yale, UCLA, and others – to publish a daily student paper covering the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. She was the only woman on the team. “Me and nine guys in one room at the Sheraton Blackstone Hotel, which overlooked everything,” Lacy said. “McGovern gave us his press headquarters to type our stories, and the Chicago Daily Defender printed us.” One day she went out to watch the police mobilize. “It was the scariest thing I’ve ever seen in my life,” she said. “They started beating people over the head. I saw them drag a nun across the street and throw her into a paddy wagon. Then they got me.” A fellow journalist pulled Lacy from the mayhem, so she escaped the truncheons while whetting her appetite for a future in journalism. “But I don’t know that I was a good enough writer,” she said. “I dreaded a lifetime of having a knot in my stomach about a deadline and not knowing if I had anything interesting to say. Film seemed a better option.” Her interest in film got a jolt a few years later in Washington, D.C., where she was sharing a house with college friends while earning a master’s degree in American studies and working for the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts. At the NEA, she was in the architecture and design division, where she ran a historic preservation program that focused on saving old rail stations. As part of the project, she commissioned a 30-minute film called Stations, and she was hooked. “I got the bug,” Lacy said. Marion Blakey ’70, former FAA administrator who is now president and CEO of the Aerospace Industries Association, was one of those Washington roommates and has remained among Lacy’s closest friends. During those D.C. days, Blakey said, “We did crazy things like decorating by stapling sheets together. We couldn’t sew. But we thought we were quite sophisticated.” Blakey added, “Susan has an infectious ability to laugh at things that people tell her and be genuinely interested in who they are. That is why I think she’s become such a great documentary filmmaker and storyteller.” Lacy moved back to New York City in 1976 and got
married a year later. Her husband became head of the American Academy in Rome, and they lived in Italy for much of the next few years. They settled once and for all in Manhattan in 1979, and Lacy began working for WNET Channel 13 that September. She’s been there ever since. Lacy’s first job at WNET was in fundraising, but Jac Venza – who ran the station’s arts division and produced the Great Performances series, among others – made her a producer. “And after a couple of years in other people’s editing rooms, she began to direct,” said Venza, who retired in 2005. Lacy’s reputation for high standards, he added, is what has made American Masters “the showcase” for the best documentary films on the arts being made today. Early on, Lacy made a dream list, the five names she “absolutely, desperately” wanted to make a film about – Leonard Bernstein, Bob Dylan, Martha Graham, Walt Disney, and Frank Sinatra. Disney and Sinatra are the only ones that haven’t yet worked out. “I’ve spent 12 years trying to get Sinatra to happen,” she said. “I think I’m closer than anybody’s ever been to making that happen…but it’s very expensive.” She’s confident that with persistence it will work out with Sinatra and Disney, as well as with others on her ever-growing wish list – Barbra Streisand, Steven Spielberg, and Philip Roth among them. “There are very few people that I really want to make a film about that I can’t get to the point of having a pretty serious conversation with them about it. But that doesn’t mean it’s going to happen right away. When making these major films, the artist or the estate has to be ready for that to happen.” With the popularity of reality television, competition for viewers’ time, and filmmaking costs all on the rise, Lacy is in no position to rest on her laurels. “Despite all our awards and all our prestige and reputation, I am concerned about the future,” she told me. “There’s a hell of a lot of competition out there, so I’m putting more attention on how to make sure we’re on people’s radar. If people know we’re there, they’ll come. I absolutely know that.” She’s also focusing on the archive she’s created. “I want to make sure that the library I fought so hard to build doesn’t just sit on the shelves and die. So my