Sometime in 1990/91, I applied to a documentary workshop/program at the American Film Institute. I don’t recall the exact name of it now, but it was being sponsored by CBS. They were looking for new fresh documentary film ideas for the network. Not necessarily series, but one-offs. Single programs.
This was right after Ken Burns film, The Civil War, had dominated the ratings in the fall of 1990. The major networks had been blind sided by the film’s success over five nights, both ratings-wise, and the fact it received over forty awards.
Of course the networks wanted something like this for themselves. I’m sure it was the old, anything PBS can do, we can do much better. I don’t know what the other networks were doing, but CBS partnered with AFI to attempt to come up with their own documentaries.
This was over thirty-five years ago so forgive me if I can’t remember people’s names or other specifics, but this is what I remember.
The assembled documentary filmmakers were a pretty impressive group as far as I was concerned, and I was honored to be among them. I believe there were 12-20 of us, and we all had interesting ideas. There were filmmakers whose work I had seen, others had amazing backgrounds in production.
The workshop/program was being run by Alan Landsburg. He had done quite a few television documentaries in the sixties and seventies. Among them, Kennedy, The First Thousand Days, In Search Of…, hosted by Leonard Nimoy, and various National Geographic Specials, as well as the first season of The World Of Jacques Cousteau, later renamed, The Undersea World Of Jacques Cousteau.
In 1980 he created, That’s Incredible! Over the next 10-20 years he Executive Produced a lot of made for TV movies, usually focused on real people, real stories.
He was an interesting guy and he knew his way around producing non-fiction for television. He usually showed up in his chauffeur driven limousine from his house in Malibu as I recall. I was crashing in a buddies spare bedroom and driving my old rusty Toyota pick-up with gaffer tape holding the passenger side mirror up. This is the truck that went on to star in my film, Stolen Toyota, a few years later.
Alan brought in some of his industry colleagues to talk to us and show us their work. Most of these guys were in their late fifties, early sixties and most of us were in our twenties and early thirties. To say we all had different sensibilities would be an understatement.
We were each assigned a different industry mentor, and we had thirty days to develop our proposals, with our mentors, and then we’d pitch them individually to a representative from CBS. We met the CBS guy on the first day or so and he seemed like a nice enough fellow. He didn’t seem to be a senior executive as he was younger. Something was mentioned about his father also working at CBS, As I remember, if he liked our proposals then he would get us an audience with other executives at CBS. I don’t believe he had the power to say “Yes” on his own.
I had a wonderful mentor, Chris Pye. He had some reality shows on different cable stations and had worked at the BBC as well as Grenada Television, and Sony, among other places. He loved my idea and met with me a few times to look over what I was working on, offer feedback, and turn me loose once again. He had a bunch of things going on at the time so I really don’t believe he had that much time to give me. Which at the time was fine.
I’m not going to reveal the documentary idea I had to get accepted into the program, but I will tell you that I spent Father’s Day at the Ventura County jail, hanging out in the waiting room with families waiting to visit family members who were incarcerated there. It was like this weird “home coming” where a lot of the family members knew each other, from other places, other jails. And yes, there were a couple of rough looking characters who thought, I looked familiar... I got a lot of “nods”, especially from the bikers. They probably thought I was just another “ex-con” showing up to visit family.
I have no idea on how the others were doing on their films or with their mentors. When we would meet as a class and discus our film ideas, I was impressed. Our ideas were all totally different from each other, and were all things I would love to see come to the screen. Most everyone was very supportive of each other, although there are always one or two that were mostly just out for themselves…
Finally the day came when we all delivered our pitches to the fellow from CBS. He was in a room with Alan and a few others. He had very few questions for me, but I could see pretty quickly that he wasn’t interested. Since I had a bit of time left, I asked him a few questions about how thing worked at the network.
Alan later chastised me in front of the whole group. He said the moment I realized the guy wasn’t interested I should have just cut the meeting short and left. Now there was “No Way” that guy would ever take a meeting with me again, because I “wasted his time” with my questions. I foolishly thought politely getting a little more information, in case there was a next time, was a good move. Oh well…
We met with the executive one more time as a group, and I had to ask another question. I know Alan hated this one as well.
“Would CBS have funded The Civil War, if it had not known it was going to become such a huge hit? If it hadn’t become such a phenomenon?”
His reply was, Absolutely Not! They weren’t interested in that type of programming at all. He admitted that after they saw what a huge success it was, especially in audience numbers, that was why they wanted to find the “next Civil War”.
Ultimately, CBS passed on everyone’s documentary proposal for development. I heard a couple people got a second meeting with the executive, but nothing ever happened. It reminded me of that old Hollywood adage, “No one ever gets fired for saying no. You only get fired if you say yes.”
It was an interesting month in LA for me.
Since I mentioned Stolen Toyota earlier I’ll re-post it again here.
Stolen Toyota has been broadcast on various PBS stations, Canadian, and Australian television in 1996). It screened at the Aspen and Denver Film Festivals, Virginia Film Festival of American Film, the Fort Lauderdale Film Festival, and the Mill Valley Film Festival.
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