Robert Wilson and the Civil Wars (1987)
Directed by Howard Brookner

Film Synopsis

In the early 1980s, the avant-garde theatre director Robert Wilson conceived a twelve-hour long opera entitled The Civil Wars, to be staged at the 1984 Summer Olpympics in Los Angeles.  Inspired by the American Civil War, this ambitious project did not come to fruition as planned owing to a lack of funding, but segments of the opera would be staged by Wilson in various cities around the world, including Minneapolis and Rome.  In this revealing documentary, director Howard Brookner (Burroughs: the Movie) shows Wilson's unique creative processes at work and follows his project through its fraught stages of development, a likely masterpiece that was to be cut down in its prime.