Cohosted the 45 minute event. Callednext panel is documentaries, style and the use of archives. A University Professor of the school of communication at American University and washington, d. C. She founded the School Center for social media and impact. She coordinates the fair use and free speech project at the center. Take it away. What a great pleasure it is. I feel like my entire life is passing before me as i look around the crowd. To be on a panel with these people is really extraordinary. Each of the people here has been make great merely documentaries, but create a future for a different kind of documentary than was ever possible on any kind of television to be made. Contributed has that, andy to doing in some cases, supporting each which i dont know if im giving away secrets, but that does not always happen in Public Television. Had the pleasure of working with some of these people as well because over the last decade, pedro and i have been working with different organizations to make fair use more available, particularly in archival ways, to makers and including someon of these people who have been incredibly supportive and early adopters in being able to make ,etter use of material thirdparty material to tell americas story in so many different ways. I want to start first with clayborne carson. He is the founder and director of the Martin Luther king jr. Education and research institute. He was the Senior Advisor for eyes on the prize, at a time when no one thought it could be made. I would like to ask each of you, starting with clayborne to talk about did you have in mind for series that ended up providing a template for how to do things in the future that had not really been done . , one of the things that is so interesting to listen to the Previous Panel is that just yesterday, i was lecturing at stanford to my students who were born well after all of this had happened, and i think that they periodelling me about a before i came on the scene and i suddenly felt younger than the folks. I got a call from Henry Hampton who should be here, but unfortunately he passed away, way too early but he was the prize. Ry of eyes on the i just accepted an invitation to edit Martin Luther kings papers. It was not like i was looking for work. I realized that this was going to take decades to edit and publish his papers, but what he was he talked about his idea for a series and i think one of the things that i see running through discussions this afternoon is about informationion of and the interpretation of , ifory, the way in which you think back to the days before pbs, before npr, before the modern documentary style, most information about the past came from a few sources. Documentary, it was usually made by they did not have a largescale documentary made by anything other than large corporations. , wherelike cbs reports they were done by the commercial networks. What he was proposing was to do something very radical, and that is to get away from the notion of history as a master narrative told by a handful of people and written in textbooks and everyone kind of took that as authoritative. One of the first things he said was there is not going to be any now what we call talking heads in eyes on the prize. Our job was not to go there and pontificate. The four of us who the who were the senior advisers were all really young and i dont think you we would have welcomed that role in the first place. Our job was to go and find how history was made during the 1960s, and to go to the sources and find those people and let them tell the story of how they made history, not to interpret it. It was a breakthrough. It was, because even now when you look at documentaries, you see that many of them go back to that notion, by having the authoritative historian kind of give this interpretation that is going to guide you through and there is this other story of these ordinary people who make history. Wasthe real joy of doing it that for us as historians, we were in our own work. About king, it was about a counter king story. I welcome that kind of an approach. I think that has influenced the documentaries that have been made since then, that many of them do take up that mantle of allowing ordinary people to tell the story of making history. , from what you are telling me so one characteristic is this is ordinary people telling the story and also in a oral history way. There is so much rich oral history that would have escaped us forever. And now it is interesting because i can go into my classroom as i did just this week and use those interviews. Prizely use eyes on the in the classroom, but i use the interview that we used. I get it to the point where it fits what i want to talk about. There is this wonderful interview we did where maybe we used at most five minutes of it over the eyes on the prize. Then i find that my students are so drawn to just seeing her talk about ordinary things. What was it like talking to the president of the united states, when your husband is in jail and you have never spoken to him before and he calls on the phone and your young son answers the phone and starts babbling away, and you have to get him off and he says the president is there. The kind of story is going to get through the minds of students far more than simply me giving a lecture about Martin Luther king and going to jail and writing the letter from birmingham. Something that was so important about eyes on the prize. I think it was john ls arguing that every single image had to be exactly what you claimed it was. It could not be like something that looks sort of like that. Which was very common. There was no reconstruction. When thereis is a story that kind of illustrates that. Ralphe interviewing abernathy about the march on washington. It told this wonderful story about coming back after that day of the march. I was there, too. When he talked about coming back after all the people had to be parted had departed and seeing the rustling of the capers and all the leftover things and then he says it was the most Beautiful Day of my entire life. Gero saying the same thing, but it could not have happened that way. Why . Where ralphnow abernathy was every moment of that day. Whetherhis debate about to trust his recollection as opposed to our historical decideduction, and we to use it. We said history might not have happened that way, maybe it should have. Fascinating. Let me jump to david, if you dont mind. I remember when he was the brash Young Australian South African, sorry. Us americans, what is the difference. We draw the line there. [laughter] this brash South African here to bring us a new format that was possibly too challenging for Public Television. Ima creature of Public Television. I am a creature of Public Television. I walked into a station by way of london with the bbc and i volunteered, got my hands on the tools and began working. Iner mcgee found me there 1977 and brought me in boston to start his series called world which was a International Documentary series. The idea was to do a series about the world as others see it. It was this wonderful idea and i came there to find a place that was a that was an extraordinary institution that was dedicated to ideas. Each of the people that were working in the genres from , even juliahistory child who was in the backorder corner of our offices, we were doing things because they cared about the ideas and it was an extraordinary privilege and it is, to this day, this amazing privilege that the reason there is a frontline is because we were trusted with enough resources for long enough to work it out, to try to figure out how to do the best work in the privilege of being able to give them that resource and say how are you going to spend it and justified it and if you could not make the best film you could make about the subject, then dont make it. It was as simple as that. It was all the talented people that i could go and ferret out and bring to Public Television. We did over 60 films along the way. There was a moment when i sat in a meeting at the corporation of public broadcasting. Head ofiedman was the programming. He had walked into it and said he was inundated with thousands of proposals and he just couldnt sort through it all and you made the decision to to do three big strands. One was going to be drama, the american playhouse, one was children and it became wonder works and the other was news and documentary ideas and i walked in with world, looking for funding to do eight shows for the next season and he made me sit down at his table with a sandwich and figure out what the budget for a 26 week series would look like and we counted up to 3 million at the time. Figure andwith that said we could probably do it for that much money. He said great, i will put out a request for proposals. He got proposals from various people. We proposed it and we got the money. The guarantee was that we would have the money for three years if we could persuade the stations to match the money progressively over the course of the three years. It was visionary. He left us the freedom to do that. We made our mistakes. And we didur heads some good things and we found some smart people and slowly this idea grew. A crew off that idea. To peter mcgee who found me on the beach in huntington and brought me to boston, they are the people i think for frontline. That is what made it happen. It has been a simple and complicated is that. And frontline developed a brand, almost. You really did put your stamp on a kind of documentary. That there were lots of different styles of films without them. They were observational, reportorial. Theye films like were extraordinarily different films that came about and i always thought that we needed to young anderies that older producers, reporters and filmmakers would look at and say i can learn from that. The people who come to me and say how do you make these films, i would like to get into documentaries. I would watch a lot of them and try to deconstruct them and look for the ones that suit you and the kind of film you make because ultimately, these are works of authorship. If you encourage authors because they do good work, then you begin to build a body of work. , initially, judy was anchoring the series after just establishing the first season. There is a certain point we felt like we would take the action at time and we began to use as a voice and we made that decision that you would they would be something in the quality of the words, and the quality of the storyline where you would say that is that show. There was a value to that. There were people that question that will is kind of and the patriarchy and all kind of reasons that people would say we should be using other voices, and we do, but ultimately we needed to have some kind of connective tissue that would hold a string through the films. You are arguing that if you could have some of these marking features than you could have a lot more freedom in other areas. It would be something other than a Anthology Series and the most important thing was it was going to be a work of journalism. It was not going to be an Anthology Series made by independent filmmakers with films per to made and we would do it. We would initiate it and subject them to the rigors of editorial process which meant that the journalism had to be transparent. We needed to go right into it and be able to understand the source materials inside that film. Margaret train, American Experience. I also wanted to add that. There is another binding agent in frontline. When i came to gbh, i discovered it. Worked at cbs reports and a couple iterations of medic is of magazine shows. Cbs reports closed, shut down ran ae tv guide frontpage story saying the documentary is bad and this is in 1985, i think. That is when documentary was a bad word. Everybody went scurrying and i got a great job offer from wgbh from your mcgee from peter mcgee who needs to be mentioned as much as possible. Peter and judy were the original executive producers, they wanted to do a history series but the binding agent in the series was good storytelling. It had to have a beginning, middle and an end. Constructede documentaries in acts. It was something that most documentarians had not been doing. On commercial television, you had a lot of documentaries like nbc white paper and abc and they were surveys. Mostly surveys from the top down. They were not actual stories. A i think that was an element that was in for size that gbh. Emphasized at gbh. As we were talking before, you want to hear from as many people as possible who says close to the subject as possible, then construct it very carefully to have a story arc. What happened next . What happened after that . Pat lets point out that Public Television is the real innovator of this character driven story model that is now standard expectation for documentary. Margaret i think so. I do not want to take the credit for it because i did not invent the narrative style, but it was something we embraced wholeheartedly by wgbh, and they gave all of us the resources to figure it out. When youre in the process of telling a story, you need time to figure out who the main characters are, where are the breakins, what will happen next, how to conclude it. You do not have to tell the entire story. Everybody used to agonize about what is left out. If you did your job properly, nobody would notice that you left anything out. Our philosophy is just go narrow and deep. Go narrow and deep and get characters. I do want to comment on something you said before about firsthand witnesses. I admired that in Henry Hamptons shop and it was terrific. We had a challenge because our mandate was to tell all american history. We had to go back to the 17th century and we were terrified. We actually avoided anything that was prearchival because we did not know how to deal with it in the beginning. You cannot find witnesses who are one of our first shows was the 1906ers. It was on the San Francisco earthquake. We barely got people to make an appearance. A soon as we got them we shot them immediately and put them in the bank. We did not even think we would make this story. It was a stretch for us and we had to challenge ourselves to go back into the 19th century, even back in to the revolutionary period. What we have relied on, since we are here talking about the archives, letters, diaries, firsthand accounts that could be employed in many different ways to recall maybe it was the donner party. There is no firsthand witnesses in the donner party. [laughter] david they ate each other. Margaret one of our most successful films. We relied on diaries and letters. Pat one of the things that is so impressive about what both of your series and all of your work in documentaries did was create a sense of trust among the stations, for something they have dreaded and feared test since before there was a pbs. Like the redlining show that nixon think he should be fun public broadcasting. Youve created a sense of quality, reliability and so on. Something else that is really interesting to me is that Public Television, in building upon that, has been able to foster as you describe it, anthology show for independent voices. Impressively, i have to say thank you to david for being so supportive of anthologies, as well as the executive produced journalism series. Stephen is here from the center for Asian American media, one of the minorities of cpb, is also a veteran independent filmmaker, and somebody who supports independent filmmakers and has also been involved in creative archives creating archives we can all draw on. I would love to hear you talk a little bit about the filmmaking that goes to fuel the big Anthology Series. Steven actually, if i could, i would like to make a reference to the panel. The seeds of the minority consortia independent, and diverse filmmakers goes back to the same era of the great society. So many of these entities were founded in the 1970s. It came out of postcivil rights and on the rapidly changing demographics of the country, which will start to be recognized even then. It was the hard seller act and the immigration act was rewritten in 1965. Even though it would take the generation, it has reshaped america. In this time period from the 1960s until now, the asianamerican community went from 1 of the population and now we are 6 , we are over 20 million and the fastestgrowing. And also the statistics for the latino community. So the premise that we had as the whole enterprise was getting underway was where were these voices of other communities. For whom our presence in media overall was an absence. For Asian Americans, entertainment media, we are only the villains in war movies, house boys, gangsters in chinatown or laundry men. Yet we have this inspiration of the Civil Rights Movement to recognize how important it was for us to be able to participate in society. The mechanism for us in the minority consortia, and the wisdom of the corporation for public broadcasting was to help ensure that there was a pipeline of programming by and about these minority communities. We have been doing this between 35 and 40 years, all of the five members of the organization. I wantede first points to yourwas in response question which is, we have learned something deeper in this construct that it was important to include the perspectives of people of color in telling diverse kinds of stories. Be it about history or social histories or our cultural histories. I think at first, we thought we were presenting authentic images that our communities could recognize. One piece that is important is that you cannot fully participate in a society unless you see yourself in your stories told in this in the stories told in the society. The second thing we came to understand was that the stories needed to be for all americans, not just for our own communities. The asianamerican community would be a good example because we are so diverse, different in language and cultural backgrounds, that in some ways in this construct of asian america. In the recent years, and this is where i want to end my thoughts on this, i think we now where we are today in this question of who is an american and what is it that makes america great, it is clear that we took for granted that there was an acceptance that diversity was an important and key factor of the American Experience. It is vital that we stand in for this notion of what this country could be and to that we are not just about our racial stories. Diversity is within each of our communities. I think that is the larger piece to reshift the way we talk about what is our common history the way we examine things. I think we are still exploring what these different points of you mean. Its a journey we will all need to be on because we dont have the guide stone of white maledominated through history. Pat jump in before me. Clayboren all of us in some ways are beneficiaries of the technological changes that have lessened the cost, and some would say even the skill level to get it to filmmaking so that it has become much easier to do a film like eyes on the prize today, you could probably do it for much less money because the equipment is so much less. I think that, looking forward into the future, what i see coming out of africanamerican filmmaking is that proliferation is kind of pulling us in even within the africanamerican community, now you have gay filmmakers, black filmmakers might be trying to describe that experience. You have so much diversity within each of these communities that one thing i fear is that it is very difficult to get a sense. Right now, for example, i have been involved in more than two dozen documentary films about black american life. Most of it is 20th century. It seems like the pace of that keeps increasing. I think there is that concern that we are losing a sense of, even the commonality of being black. Much less being american. Maybe thats good. Otherwise, you would not have a sense that these communities exist, but in terms of trying to get a sense of it. For many of my students i teach a course on black independent films. I find that maybe one student might have seen some of these Fairly Famous films. People who have really made major contributions. They have not even seen early spike lee. They might have seen malcolm x, but thats it. I think that one of the problems we are going to have is that there are audiences that will be , smaller and smaller rather than larger and larger. Pat let me address the changing marketplace for documentaries, and i would like to have any of your responses. This is a point where netflix is busy giving 40 million or 50 million and is launching entire lines. You have vice and fulcher doing instant video journalism. You have buzz feed apparently educating an entire new generation. You have cable channel stuffed with walltowall, something that looks like maybe documentary. You have a legacy that has been built up through the hard work of Public Television that honors the notion of documentary as an authentic true thing. At the same time you have an enormous proliferation and leaping into the marketplace of netflix, amazon and so many more. What is the role now of Public Television documentary . It is surely not the only game in town. Expensive, oh my god, compared to almost any other source for documentary. Relatively slow compared to some of the others. What is the role . No pressure. [laughter] pat but if you could provide us the answer. David it is an enormous challenge. One of the great challenges will be how do you know what is true and trustworthy. People may be will not care about that as much. There is going to be an enormous amount of material that is being produced. It will be manipulated and used because this is the most manipulative media. We are going to have a harder and harder time trying to figure out what we can trust. Pat the trust brand . David the trust brand goes to very high octane documentaries made with big budgets for hbo and netflix and others as well. It is very easy to put your hand on the scale in documentaries, and to be able to manipulate this medium towards certain points of view. There is nothing easier than to kind of the famous film of fahrenheit 9 11. Being able to get those sequences. It is not hard to do. It is very easy to be able to manipulate the archival material and use it in different ways, to lay a voiceover. We have a deep worry as to what lies behind and where do you have trust . Anything that we can hold onto is to say, we really believe you can trust us. The way you should trust us is the body of work and the way we keep doing it, also to make it as transparent as possible. For me, one of the great moments in the life of frontline was 1995. We had just done a film on waco, the inside story. We did all of these inside stories with the manger fbi guys who were part of a negotiating. We even had the audiotapes of the actual negotiations. I kept saying can we make a radio show . Somebody said you could put it on the web. We said, what was that . We build a website, waco the untold story. Plus i said, can we put the whole film on their . Will said you cannot do that yet so we put the interviews up. , all of the interviews were and that website exists today. People actually write to us about that website. From then on we went to publishing all of the edited longer versions of the primary source material behind the the frontline. Last week, the second film that ran of putins revenge, there were 65 interviews. A about a of work that was historically important. That is not going to persuade the average person that there are going to go off and hunt through the interview material. Pat but you make it transparent . David but you have made it completely transparent and in some ways that steeps into the culture. If we raise the bar really high and hold to that bar, then we begin to hold on to where we are and why we remain the only place anywhere in the media culture that does that. So, that is our pat that is your answer. Margaret i want to say that you can take that trust and we all had to learn using new platforms. It was challenging in many ways because we were so schooled in the delivery of hourlong documentaries or six hourlong documentaries, or for hourlong documentaries, which were big documentaries of residents president s. We had to learn how to use material on youtube, podcasting, we had to learn all of the different mobile platforms where we could deliver the same kind of content, shorter, but we hope carries the same branding and the same scrutiny that goes into an hourlong documentary, and deliver it to your students who are not going to be watching hourlong documentaries. Unless somebody leads them to it and shows them what the benefits are. David we are doing that and getting millions of viewers. Clayborne for any documentary, one of the most important tasks is what you do with all of the materials you have brought together, especially the video material . I think one of the most important decisions for eyes on the prize was to put it in an archive for you can now go and credit corree ta king interview. Pat i want to make sure we get your answer for transparency. It has also been partly brand. We are pbs and American Experience, we are frontline we are American Experience and we are frontline. Each consortia does in the series and showcase their work and anthologized as all of this work which is very different. How do you address his point about a centrifugal universe of information out there . [laughter] steven historically, our stuff shows up in the system for a variety of ways, not through one particular strand or one brand. We have a program that is going on American Experience next may that makes use of archives. We are also participating in the archives of public broadcast. To speak in general of the hundred titles the year that collectively come from independent sources through tbs. We put our stuff on pob that many of you may know about it. I have optimism moving into the future because this is what we all have to learn. How to incorporate many more points of view, and many more voices in public broadcasting. If you stay true to that, it is absolutely mission driven. Make use of this incredible education network. I will set up the next pbs learning media where we put our materials on and make available to teachers. I feel very confident about the future of this enterprise because there are tens of thousands of young makers who really want to speak authentic stories that do not necessarily have to be in commercial media and be all about selling a product or even just entertain alone. There are so many issues that we share in public broadcasting. If it stays true to the mission and that singular place. Pat we have like three more minutes. I would like to be able to use them to talk about what you addressed, which is archives. Is eyes on the prize somewhere . Steven we have placed a number of our collections, which interviewed hundreds and hundreds of veterans. The japaneseamericans, we have placed all those interviews on that source. All of the other works will going to library of congress, as part of our collection. Clayborne i would recommend seeing the putins revenge stuff. It was done with duke, and it to state of the art technology. It is stateoftheart. They are all interviews. You can read it and be able to track the video at the same time. You can reach in and clip a piece out and share it. It is the most interactive, profoundly impressive archive. Pat is it frontline material . David i think it is due. We are on the way for the body of work. Margaret i just want to go back a little bit. I am on the board of pob, the independent documentary series, and i am astonished, every year we have an open call and we get more than 1000 entries from independent producers. Of those, we have 18 slots. Every single year, in the middle of the year when there is no entry date, they get inundated with phone calls were they get tapes or links to films that have been produced. There is something going on, it reminds me of the time when i was at cbs and they announced the death of the documentary. I do not think we could say that the documentary is dying, i see quite the opposite. Youngthis hunger in people, made possible by technology in some cases, also just an incessant terry acid he that they curiosity have about their world. You are making these films for practically nothing and some are really terrific. I am optimistic. Pat i interrupted you. Clayborne i think that, in general, scholarship and documentary filmmakers have not been in aggressive enough. I think that in part, that comes from when, a particular film that i was involved in, when it came to being shown on pbs, pbs required certain times of coverage in times of coverage for obvious reasons, legal reasons, that force them to go back and have to take out things. At every level, intellectual property issues have been crucial. Not so much in terms of cost, but just uncertainty about use. Pat and people all being on the same page as what they regard as acceptable, which is where the best practices have been somewhat helpful. Last comments because we have like 15 seconds left. David thank you. Pat thank you. Margaret thank you. [applause] [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2018] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap. Org] raising the fist, does that equate to what the nfl is doing. Have a long history of racism. You could be future during our next live brand. Join the conversation facebook. Calm cspan history, and on twitter at cspan history. Tonight on afterwards, washingtonch in cochair reflects on the 2017 march and what is ahead for the movement in her look, together we rise. He is interviewed what do you say to them. What you say to them to say to their sisters. They otherwise share their culture. I say to them that it may not feel like this, but we are fighting for them and we believe in their potential to do the right thing. We know they often times disappoint and this appoint sisters, the 49 other of the 40 who dont vote. What i ask people to do is i am not well to any political party. I have been known as critical of the democratic party. Vote with your values. Last year, we got into a big controversy about proabortion, prolife, prolife women coming to be a part of this movement. We never said were where a proabortion movement. That was not the language we used. We are prochoice. I believe in woman should have the agency to choose whatever she feels is right for her and her family. Watch tonight on book tv on cspan2. Railamerica, the druge, meeting abuse in 1987 to highlight their most recent findings regarding the causes, treatment, and prevention of drug abuse. Here is a preview. Throughout recorded history, people have use substance to the suffering and change their moods. Every society has struggled with Substance Abuse and addiction because of their power. Drugs were entrusted to doctors and were controlled by law. In the last 20 years, there has been a rapid increase in the amount of drug use and the variety of drugs available. Today, every rights of society is touched, which includes young, old, families, at school and at work. Drugs abuse is a Public Health issue which we cannot ignore. Our surveys and experience show that drug abuse is constantly changing. We face the new challenge of different kinds of drugs, new patterns of use, and new problems associated with drug use. Most bristly, the tragic onset of the aids virus as a grave International Health problem is testing our ability to respond to this challenge. The emergence of intravenous drug use as a major risk factor in aids infection and transmission has placed a unique position to attack the spread of this perplexing and deadly killer. The doctor is a leader in this effort. We have around 230,000 people in treatment for intravenous drug use. Just through treatment alone, we are stopping them from using the needle, which is a vector for the transmission of the virus. Watch the entire film on reel 1639, over the course of the next hundred years, newport, rhode island would become not only one of the most active ports, but the most active slave port. Bristolmerchants and merchants were responsible for nearly 1000 slavery voyages. They transported about 100,000 africans back to the new world during that 100year
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