(ASBURY PARK, NJ) -- The trailer opens with Bruce Springsteen shouting "Good evening Asbury Park." The film is The Airwaves Belonged to the People: WBCN and the American Revolution and it'll run three nights at the Showroom Cinema in Asbury Park from September 25-27, 2026.
The film has two pieces of Bruce Springsteen history that went unseen and unheard for fifty years. Springsteen's first radio interview and his first live in-studio radio performance were both on WBCN-FM in Boston. And the film has the night he played the Harvard Square Theater in Cambridge in 1974, opening for Bonnie Raitt — the show that made critic Jon Landau write "I saw rock and roll future, and its name is Bruce Springsteen," a line that changed Springsteen's career and led Landau to become his manager and producer. Both were resurrected from more than 100,000 pieces of archival audio, photographs, film, and ephemera collected for the film, much of it donated by the people who were there — so audiences can hear and see for themselves what got Landau so excited.
A clip of that interview, posted on Instagram, drew 170,000 views in a matter of weeks.
Screenings take place Friday, September 25 at 7:30pm; Saturday, September 26 at 7:30pm; and Sunday, September 27 at 2:30pm. Tickets are available for purchase online. The ShowRoom is located at 707 Cookman Avenue in Asbury Park, New Jersey.
In 1968, a bankrupt classical music station in Boston went back on the air with a new format and essentially one rule: play whatever you want, say whatever you think. What followed was a radio station that became the center of a city's political and cultural life.
WBCN gave Patti Smith her first live radio broadcast with her band and early airplay to U2 and the Clash. David Bowie, Lou Reed, Jerry Garcia, Jane Fonda and Abbie Hoffman all came through its studios. But the music was only part of it. The station ran the phone lines for Boston's antiwar movement, broadcast from the middle of demonstrations, and gave a platform to the civil rights, women's, and gay rights movements when almost no commercial outlet would. It was the place a generation went to figure out what it thought — a generation that helped end a war and drove an unpopular president from office.
"At a time when many Americans feel powerless, the film is a reminder of how media, dissent, music and collective action can bring real social change," says Peabody Award-winning filmmaker Bill Lichtenstein, who started at WBCN in 1970, at 14, as a volunteer on the station's Listener Line and later became a newscaster and announcer with his own program.
The documentary had a successful festival run in 2018 and was later distributed to PBS stations nationwide, accompanied by a companion book from MIT Press/Penguin Random House, WBCN and the American Revolution: How a Radio Station Defined Politics, Counterculture and Rock and Roll. An initial theatrical release in 2020 was cut short by the COVID pandemic. The film has now returned to theaters and is booked into 35 theaters in 12 states — with a goal of 104, one for every point on the dial at WBCN's 104.1.
Critical response has been strong. Ty Burr of the Boston Globe wrote, "I watched the movie with awe." Jared Rasic of Source Weekly in Bend, Oregon, called it "timely as all hell." The Bridge in Vermont called it "a countercultural tonic for our times."
Lichtenstein's previous film, West 47th Street, aired on PBS's P.O.V. and was called "must-see" by Newsweek and "remarkable" by The Washington Post. Executive producers of The Airwaves Belonged to the People include Richard Barna, Mitchell Kertzman, Jay Rooney and Robert F. Sennott.
The ShowRoom Cinema opened in Asbury Park, NJ, in April, 2009, as a single-screen, 50 seat movie theater, with a goal of bringing provocative and relevant independent movies and engaging special events to the city’s budding downtown. In 2012 the theater evolved into a 3-screen, independent cinema and became the leading entertainment destination in Asbury Park’s eclectic, art-infused downtown shopping district.
Through its eleven year run, The ShowRoom brought an important selection of independent, first-run films — including critically-acclaimed domestic and foreign features, documentaries, festival winners and shorts — to the Jersey Shore. It also hosted a variety of special one night only screenings, live performances and community-driven special events. The theater closed in 2020, but new owners Daria Parr and family are excited to welcome The ShowRoom back to Asbury Park. As the last year and a half has shown, the simple pleasure of seeing a new release on a big screen with a roomful of fellow film fans is an experience many of us didn’t realize we would miss until it was gone.
The ShowRoom will continue to deliver the same high quality film selection and impeccable customer service that the theater has become known for while working toward the big picture goal: restoring some of what was lost during the pandemic by inviting our cherished guests to share the energy and fun of going to the movies again.
