In August 1969, Nina Simone took the stage at Mount Morris Park in Harlem for a remarkable performance in which she sang “To Be Young, Gifted and Black” and recited a poem that asked, provocatively, if her audience was ready to “kill if necessary,” “smash white things” and “give yourself, your love, your soul, your heart, to create life.”
Ms. Simone was one of many artists, mostly African-American, who appeared that summer at the Harlem Cultural Festival, a series of six free Sunday concerts. Stevie Wonder was there, as were other popular music acts, each of which could have attracted a big crowd on its own: the 5th Dimension, Abbey Lincoln, B. B. King, Sly & the Family Stone, Herbie Mann, Hugh Masekela, Gladys Knight & the Pips, David Ruffin, Mahalia Jackson and the Staple Singers.
The series, partly overlapping with another music festival being held in upstate New York that summer, became known as “the Black Woodstock.”
All six concerts — at what is now called Marcus Garvey Park — were videotaped under the direction of Hal Tulchin, a television veteran. He compiled an estimated 40 hours of music, dance and comedy (by Moms Mabley and George Kirby).
But unlike the Woodstock festival in Bethel, N.Y., a countercultural milestone that spawned an Academy Award-winning documentary film and a No. 1 soundtrack double album, the Harlem series was destined for near-obscurity. Little of Mr. Tulchin’s project has been seen publicly.
He tried, unsuccessfully, to interest networks in using his footage for a documentary; another plan to make a documentary ended a decade ago. Until he died at 90 on Aug. 29 in Bronxville, N.Y., he was still hoping that a film or a series would be made, his daughter, Sasha Tulchin, said.
By 1969, Mr. Tulchin had been working in television since the 1950s, directing entertainment specials, commercials (including some for Timex, in which its watches were advertised as so durable, they could “take a licking but keep on ticking”) and game shows (including the short-lived crossword-puzzle-themed “Across the Board” in 1959).
Mr. Tulchin used five portable videotape cameras to record the concerts and, according to his daughter, designed the set.
“It was a peanuts operation, because nobody really cared about black shows,” Mr. Tulchin bluntly told Smithsonian.com in 2007. “But I knew it was going to be like real estate, and sooner or later someone would have interest in it.”
The Aug. 17 concert, the one at which Ms. Simone sang and famously read the incendiary poem, overlapped with the Woodstock festival in Bethel, where Jimi Hendrix, the Who, Janis Joplin and Crosby Stills, Nash & Young and many others performed.
Mr. Tulchin’s footage did not fully disappear. Some of it was used in two television specials shown that summer. And some of it was seen in two Nina Simone projects: the “Soul of Nina Simone” (2005), a combined CD-DVD, and “What Happened, Miss Simone” (2015), a documentary by Liz Garbus.
One of the few people who have seen all the footage is Joe Lauro, the president of Historic Films, an archive of music and entertainment film that restored, digitized and licensed Mr. Tulchin’s tapes for a while.
“The material is amazing,” Mr. Lauro said in a telephone interview. “He used all his expertise to film something extraordinary.”
Mr. Lauro began working with Mr. Tulchin in 2004 and teamed up with the filmmakers Morgan Neville and Robert Gordon in a plan to turn the videotapes into a documentary film. But within a few years the deal had unraveled over financial issues.
Harold Monroe Tulchin was born to Jewish immigrants from Ukraine in Elizabeth, N.J., on Dec. 23, 1926. His father, Leo, was a machinist and a supermarket manager, and his mother, the former Clara Fisher, was a homemaker. He graduated from the University of Iowa with bachelor’s and master’s degrees and studied acting and directing at the Dramatic Workshop in Manhattan.
From a job in programming with Sterling Television, a syndicator, he went to the advertising agency Young & Rubicam, where he worked for President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 1956 re-election campaign, his daughter said. He then began directing live commercials for shows like “The $64,000 Question” and “The Philco Television Playhouse.” He became an expert in the use of videotape, especially in commercials.
In the years after the Harlem festival, Mr. Tulchin directed TV specials with Wayne Newton, Noel Harrison and Lesley Gore, and a rock ’n’ roll revival special starring Chubby Checker and Little Richard. He also formed a commercial production firm.
In addition to his daughter, Mr. Tulchin is survived by his third wife, the former Janine Scarola; another daughter, Ava Seavey; three grandchildren; and two half sisters, Joanne Dolgow and Anita Gibbs. His marriages to Billie Jean Holt and Doreen Soraci ended in divorce.
The documentary might still be made. A producer, Robert Fyvolent, said he had lined up a director and had an offer to finance a film that would ideally be released in 2019 for the 50th anniversary of the festival. In a telephone interview, Mr. Fyvolent said that until a month ago Mr. Tulchin was pitching ideas for marketing the concert footage, such as turning some of it into webisodes.
“He was thinking outside the box,” Mr. Fyvolent said, “and had strong opinions about what he wanted to try.”
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