After documentarians David Heilbroner and Kate Davis were commissioned by WGBH Boston to make Stonewall: The Birth of the Gay Rights Movement for PBS' American Experience series, the first obstacle they encountered almost upended the entire effort: there was no filmed footage of the event.

When New York City police entered the Stonewall Inn on June 28, 1969, as part of what had come to be a routine series of raids, the unforeseen explosion of violence that ensued—four days of citizens and police clashing in the streets—galvanized the gay community into taking a more aggressive stand for its civil rights.

“The riots were all but ignored by the press,” Heilbroner says. “There were plenty of iconic events in that year that were filmed, but nobody bothered sending a camera down because, some speculate, it was a 'gay event.'”

Aside from present-day commentary and the recollections of those who were there, Heilbroner and Davis had but seven photographs (courtesy of the estate of Village Voice photographer Frank McDarrah and the New York Times) to work with. A live reenactment was briefly considered, but the costs proved prohibitive.

Instead, Heilbroner and Davis approached New York photographer Heather Gude to shoot some photographs with young actors around Manhattan's Greenwich Village neighborhood. Gude used Adobe Photoshop to edit her photos, matching grain with the archival stills, as well as desaturating and throwing them slightly out of focus.

The filmmakers amassed a collection of timely and relevant but otherwise unrelated media of citizens versus the police. Through the Miami-based Wolfson Archives, they uncovered some photographs and motion footage of a bar raid in Florida and similar establishments across the country. The images depicting confrontations with the police were intercut with Gude's stills and the seven stills from Stonewall.

For historical context, Heilbroner turned to San Francisco's Oddball Films. “We were looking for the petri dish in which everybody was raised in that era, and Oddball in particular had some incredible bits of homosexual Americana,” he says.

One clip features a young Mike Wallace speaking in what the director describes as “the most blithe fashion” about the dangers of homosexuality. “This was at a time when the news was all about an omniscient white male handing down information as if it were undeniable fact,” Heilbroner says.

The result is a compelling mix of real, re-created and contextualized footage, indistinguishable from one another, affecting a truthful account of an important civil rights event. “Our goal is to make gay history American history,” Heilbroner states.