BATHTUBS OVER BROADWAY: When Trade Shows Sold the American Dream.

Bathtubs Over Broadway begins as a snarky joke at the expense of a square, bygone America—after all, [Steve] Young’s discovery began with David Letterman, the gap-toothed king of irony. But something amazing happens about halfway through the documentary: it turns into something  surprisingly sincere and uplifting. Young’s obsession with collecting the records leads him on a detective search for the talent behind the industrials. He travels around the country meeting some of the performers and composers. They include composer Hank Bebee, actor Peter Shawn, and Patt Stanton Gjonola and Sandra Geller, two women who performed in the shows and who attended the American Film Institute screening of Bathtubs Over Broadway.

We watch as the writer becomes immersed in his research at the same time, 2014, that his job gets eliminated when Letterman decides to retire from television. “I had to find a job after having the same job for 25 years,” he says. A directionless Young finds himself taking solace in the un-ironic sunniness of the industrials. “The process of doing this made me a better person,” he told me. “It made it easier for me to connect with people in ways that I didn’t before.”

Bathtubs Over Broadway moves from camp and irony to depicting what became a second family for Young; and what began as a joke winds up saving a man in a mid-life crisis. He begins to appreciate that, as the film reminds us, Americans in the mid-20th century endured the Great Depression and World War II, and after these trials they were happy to have stable, lifelong jobs. They took pride in their work. Suddenly the cheering audiences in the vintage clips about toilets and Big Macs don’t seem like unhip dupes, but human beings who had good reason to love the companies that enabled them to advance up the economic scale from humble beginnings and achieve the American dream.

That puts him far beyond Letterman, who rarely if ever dropped the mask far enough to see humanity in middle America.