First of a series
If you ever have entered your favorite clothing store and found that an outfit you have admired for weeks fits your lines perfectly, “Dare to be Different” may be the film analog to that happy scene.
Made by Ellen Goldfarb of Westchester and Roger Senders of Culver City, Dare to be Different throbs with is the unique, compelling story of a small radio station’s brief flirtation with fame and its abrupt, mysterious death.
Its secret – to living but probably not the cause of dying – was to unobtrusively serve as the unlikely but fabulously successful portal in this country for British and domestic New Wave rockers of the 1980s.
Packaged in pathos and surrounded by instantly recognizable entertainment personalities from the 1980s, Dare seeks to illustrate what may happen – good and bad – when you Dare to be Different.
Debuting on the West Coast next Friday night at 7 o’clock in the Regal Theatre at the Downtown Los Angeles Film Festival, at L.A. Live, Dare to be Different presently is negotiating for national and international distribution. Director-producer Goldfarb, who grew up on Long Island, was the catalyst for this documentary.
From its roots as a classical station in the calmness of the 1950s, WLIR was a low-wattage, little-noticed AM station out on Long Island. Changing with society, WLIR adopted a progressive rock format in the early ‘70s.
WLIR’s formerly modest reputation exploded all over the entertainment sky in the late ‘70s. Innocently, it seems, the programming director made a lifetime-worthy brilliant stroke.
Let Ms. Goldfarb pick up the narrative, explaining how the documentary was birthed.
“One day seven years ago when I was fiddling around on Facebook, I noticed there were dedication pages to WLIR, one of my favorite radio stations when I was growing up.”
Ms. Goldfarb said that WLIR “really changed my life. People were posting on Facebook how much they missed the radio station and how much it changed their lives.
“I was thinking it was pretty incredible for a radio station that went off the air in the 1980s.
“I started doing research,” said Ms. Goldfarb, who describes herself as the creator, director and a producer of Dare to be Different. “I found that one day it just went off the air. And nobody knew why.”
(To be continued)