"In 2005, Mr. Lapham wrote and appeared in 'The American Ruling Class,' a documentary-style film featuring fictional characters as well as interviews with real celebrities, including Bill Bradley, Walter Cronkite, Pete Seeger, Robert Altman and Barbara Ehrenreich."
Unfortunately as described it doesn't capture quite how unusual, innovative, and special this film is.
It's a "dramatic-documentary-musical." A mixture of dramatic filmmaking, documentary filmmaking, and even some elements of musical.
Its main topic/idea is to show two promising college students on graduation day, one pursuing a career of money and power (in high finance) and the other pursuing art (via writing). Lapham uses this lens to analyze all aspects of American society from a class and power direction. Mainly to show the draw of power and conformity for the college-educated elite, and the way a struggling working class subsidizes their ambitions with their labor.
In the film, Lapham himself is both a narrator and a principal, acting as a mentor to one of the two "characters," who are played by actors, but thrown into conversation with real people, including some people holding powerful positions, and some intellectual celebrities.
Ehrenreich, who had recently completed the book "Nickel and Dimed" (2001), in which she goes "undercover" as the working poor, has a role in the film, too. She "plays" the role of a worker at a restaurant, and she and the other workers, at one point, break out in song, a song titled "Nickel and Dimed." I read a review of this movie that called this scene "divine madness," and I agree.
This is one of a small collection of movies I have on DVD, because it's so small and interesting as a film, that I rewatch it from time to time. I sometimes struggle to find it on streaming networks or online. It acts as a little bit of a life decoder for me, since I grew up as a public school educated child of immigrants with not-that-much class awareness, graduated from a top college around the time the film was made, got recruited to work on Wall Street (much as the film portrays in its opening scenes), then left a Wall Street job after 3 years to co-found and work on a tech startup for many years.
Anyway, I was influenced by a lot of Lapham's work, especially his moral clarity in anti-war writing during the Iraq War years. But this one little film really stuck with me. RIP, Lewis Lapham.