What did it all mean? Was all this youthful idealism just fashion? These were some of the issues Lawrence Kasdan addressed in his screenplay for The Big Chill.ĭespite warm responses to the script Kasdan wrote with his lawyer’s wife, Barbara Benedek, plus a commitment from Body Heat star William Hurt to play a major role, the story was turned down as uncommercial.

People cut their hair, traded public sector jobs for the more lucrative private sector, got married, had families. Somewhere along the line, however, much of the Woodstock generation slipped away from its utopian quest and joined the establishment. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, college students embraced the Civil Rights movement, the antiwar movement, drugs, sexual freedom and women’s liberation. The sixties were a time of collective rebellion. Then with the critical success of his first directorial outing, Body Heat, the time seemed right for him to write the story he had wanted to film for years-the story of his generation. After spending a few years as an advertising copywriter, Kasdan broke into film, writing scripts for the highly commercial Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi. Like the characters in his film, he attended the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor in the late sixties. The Big Chill, Lawrence Kasdan’s second directorial effort, is his most personal movie.