The First Angry Man

Join us for a screening and conversation with the film's director Jason Cohn and Lafayette's own Laney Whitcanack, moderated by Ariella Markowitz, KQED documentary producer.

The First Angry Man looks at Howard Jarvis, whose 1978 ballot initiative, Proposition 13, changed everything in California and beyond. The film unpacks the dramatic campaign, its quirky characters and its enduring consequences, exploring how the great public ambitions of postwar America collapsed into Reagan era parsimony and the permanent tax revolt.

Featuring lively archival footage and interviews with first-hand witnesses to the events, including Governor Gray Davis, Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz and anti-tax firebrand Grover Norquist, The First Angry Man puts a bracket around the last four decades of American political life, inviting viewers to see our era as an anomaly in American history, at odds with some of our nation’s deepest underpinnings.