May 2, 2023 • 38 mins
Forty years ago, “Vietnam: A Television History,” the 13-part documentary series examining the Vietnam War, premiered on PBS. It served as a searing look into the background, cost and toll taken on the principal figures involved in the war, both at home and abroad. Judith Vecchione served as one of the producers on the series and joined Alec to speak about what went into creating such a wide-ranging and deep investigation of the conflict. The Emmy- and Peabody-winning Vecchione has served as an executive producer with Boston-based PBS station WGBH for the past 23 years, working on many ground-breaking projects, including the Civil Rights series “Eyes on the Prize.” Vecchione shares with Alec the weight of responsibility she felt in bringing “Vietnam: A Television History” to the public, what inspires her dedication to the important stories she produces, and how she mentors the next generation of documentary filmmakers.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
This is Alec Baldwin, and you're listening to Here's the
Thing from iHeart Radio. In the nineteen sixties, which was
a convulsive period in American history, one major story seemed
to play on and on with no end in sight,
the War in Vietnam. When that war officially ended in
(00:24):
nineteen seventy five, journalists, artists, and public broadcasting began to
conduct the autopsy. The result produced films like nineteen seventy
Eight's Coming Home, nineteen seventy nine Apocalypse Now, and a
PBS series first broadcast in nineteen eighty three, Vietnam a
(00:45):
Television History. Over the course of thirteen hours, the program
dug deep into the background, cost and toll taken on
the principal figures involved in the war.
Speaker 2 (00:58):
Thirty years after the first American died in Vietnam, the
last Americans were leaving, waiting on the US embassy roof
to be flown to safety. The long war was ending
in the defeat of the South Vietnamese state that America
had supported for two decades. What kind of peace finally
was at hand? What would be the meaning of peace?
Speaker 1 (01:23):
My guest today is Judith Vecchioni, an Emmy and Peabody
winning producer of that series. Vecchione has worked in documentary
programming with Boston based PBS station WGBH since the seventies
and has been an executive producer there for twenty three years.
Her career has encompassed programs like Frontline and American Experience,
(01:48):
documentary films like Blood, Sugar Rising, and the Peabody winning
doc series Eyes on the Prize. I wanted to know
what Vecchione's upbringing was like and how her home environment
influenced her career path.
Speaker 3 (02:04):
I grew up in a politically very aware household. My
father read the newspaper from cover to cover, The New
York Times cover to cover every day, and we talked
about what was going on, and so the big issues
of the day, civil rights, the Vietnam War were live
topics in my family. My parents worked with civil rights
(02:25):
organizations making sure our community was not dismantling the housing
discrimination in our suburban community. But what area of was
this in south shore of Long Island? Where what town
from Massapequa. I'm from Merrick, so you were in the
south shore of the Island.
Speaker 1 (02:44):
Was your dad? Was your writer?
Speaker 3 (02:47):
He should have been, but he did not end up
doing that. He should have been He should have been
an academic. Actually, I think the politics of the day
for people who were very progressive made that hard. And
my mother was a teacher, a school math teacher who
I had for math actually, and luckily it's a subject
(03:07):
where you get the answers right or you get them wrong,
and so there's no favoriteism. Nobody ever got worried about
whether mom was being nice to me, and half the
class called her mom anyway.
Speaker 1 (03:19):
So when you leave, you go off to Yale, and
as you head off to New Haven, was there a plan?
Was there something you wanted to study? And what was that?
Speaker 3 (03:28):
Well, the first thing is that I'm in the first
class of women at Yale, the first matriculating class. So
I don't know that I knew what I was going
to study at that time. I was interested in languages.
I was interested in history, and I ended up being
a linguistics major, which probably wasn't the most useful thing
to study. But it's such a rich environment, you know,
(03:52):
in these big universities, you get great education. I'm not
sure I took full advantage of it. It was the
middle of the Vietnam War. There was a lot going on,
and Yale was very unprepared for us, for the women.
How so, well they fifty years later, this is like
(04:13):
five years ago, they invited the first women back. So
that's my class plus the two transferred classes. And they
admitted that they just did it in a hurry to
beat Princeton to co education. And I felt a lot
better once they said, you know, we really didn't think
about anything except well, what we'll paint some bathrooms for
(04:34):
you or something. But there were no You have to
think about when you arrive in an environment like that
a university, you expect the upper class people to guide you,
to help you. You expect the teachers to know where
to draw. They didn't know what. Nobody knew what to do.
All the upper class women were as new as we were.
(04:54):
It was a real pioneering experience.
Speaker 1 (04:57):
Is sixty nine.
Speaker 3 (04:59):
We arrived in six and.
Speaker 1 (05:01):
That class were you as incoming freshmen and people who
had transferred, who were upper class people as well, right
transfer as well.
Speaker 3 (05:08):
So graduating classes of seventy three, minds seventy two and
seventy one. But they came from you know, Vasser and
from NYU and wherever. They didn't know Yale. They didn't
know the professors. Nobody could say to you those key
things of don't take this class, take that one. You
know this. If you got a choice of teaching assistance,
(05:30):
go with this one. It was, as I say, a
tremendously rich environment. There was more than enough for anybody.
But I know that the later classes had it easier
than we did.
Speaker 1 (05:41):
When you leave Yale with a linguistics degree, what's the
plan then? Was you you had never no filmmaking? Had
you done a minor in film? No?
Speaker 3 (05:51):
By that point I did have a plan though, Okay,
which is my last semester. I got out in seven
semesters instead of eightsters in part because I always had
siblings in school. It was in college, so it was
it was expensive for my family, even with scholarships and things.
(06:11):
And my last semester I discovered I had extra credits
that nobody had mentioned to me, and I could take
something fun instead of all my major classes. And I said,
I think I'll take this class in video what the
heck in the Art and Architecture building. And it got
there and they had cameras the size of refrigerators, giant cameras.
(06:33):
It was two inch videotape that you were recording on,
so basically couldn't edit. And we took pictures of each
other that first day, you know, videos of each other.
And I had two enormous light bulb moments, light bulb
over the head moments where I said, I need to
do this, this is what I should be doing. I
(06:54):
had been doing radio rock and roll, news radio, that
sort of thing at WYBC GBH community station. I covered
the panther trials and then the riots around that before
there were those in New Haven. New Haven had a
black panther trial. Yeah, there was an event and they
came and then there was a trial after that event
(07:15):
on May Day, there was an event, But.
Speaker 1 (07:17):
What about it? Did you have the light bulb moment?
Meaning when you're there? We used to have a joke
We did a TV show where the guy in the
period was period television, and he's drunk or he's halluciny
or something and he turns to the producers into producer
and says, why are those people pointing those ovens at me?
Meeting the camerace They were so gigantic, But what instide
(07:38):
when you're inside that environment? Because you go on to
go ahead and have this obviously amazing career. What was
the light bulb moment? What was attractive?
Speaker 3 (07:46):
I think it was telling stories that were real and
that mattered to people, that these were important things that
were happening around us, and there were ways of telling
those stories that had impact and that were creatively satisfying.
I mean I had done art before, painting and so forth,
and it just it fed those same brain cells for
(08:09):
me that I did, and it had impact. It had reasons,
so reasons to do it that were not just entertainment
or selling toothpaste, which is why, of course I went
for public television, not to commercial television.
Speaker 1 (08:23):
So that was the beachhead was public television and stuff.
That's where you started.
Speaker 3 (08:26):
Absolutely. I started at GBH and I stayed there for
almost my entire career. I mean I left once or twice,
but came back because public media is where you do documentaries.
I mean, now there's HBO, but HBO does what five
ten documentaries a year. They're wonderful, but that's not what
(08:51):
they really do, whereas Frontline does forty a year, right,
and American Experience does another you know, ten or fifteen.
I don't know what they do. Pov is still on
independent lens. Through GBH. I've worked with the POV people,
I've worked with the independent lens people, so those are
(09:12):
the independent filmmakers, which is where I am now mostly focused.
But I've also worked with Frontline, Nova, American Experience and
all the background ones, and that brings in an enormous
cadre of incredibly talented people that you get to learn from.
I can't tell you the number of people who I've gone, Oh, Now,
(09:35):
I understand why we do these things this way. And
I also have a I'm old enough that my career
spans from film to digital. So when we started, Vietnam
was shot on film. My fire film was shot on film,
and that's way later. So you're you're kind of in
the midst of really smart, dedicated people.
Speaker 1 (09:59):
Now when you when you arrive at GBH. The CPB
is formed in sixty seven, and before you have a
government centralized funding mechanism for public broadcasting and in this
case obviously a public TV. I'm wondering if they were
off on their own, doing their own thing and raising
the money.
Speaker 3 (10:17):
I don't think so. I think the system was formulated
after the Carnegie Commission report that they said.
Speaker 1 (10:24):
We need to have MINO, that's right.
Speaker 3 (10:27):
We need to have a federally supported system that could
be independent and could be therefore able to cover topics
that commercial stations needing to fill a bottom line and
pay stockholders and so forth that they couldn't do.
Speaker 1 (10:44):
So when you show up at GBH and maybe everything
is concretizing at the same time and congealing at the
same time, what was the terrain like, you're a woman, Yes,
you have a degree from Yale, so that's a good thing.
Did you get in there and roll up your sieves
and start working or are you making coffee for a year?
Or what happened?
Speaker 3 (11:03):
At first? I was a part time vacation replacement secretary,
and I worked in the design department, which, as I remember,
it was pretty self contained and had a photographer and
a photography studio. And this is pre digital. There's not
(11:24):
even three quarter inch tapes, so you know, it's mostly
serving news and local very labor intensive, very labor intensive,
and I didn't have a lot to do except observe,
learn and watch the Watergate hearings. It's a good summer
to be employed there. And then I worked for the
Finance Department and then I saw some people. I continued
(11:49):
to do these fill in replacement stuff and I saw
these people in the cafeteria waving their fingers about and
I looked at them and I said, what are you doing?
And they said, we're learning sign language because we're going
to start the first captioning for the deaf and we
need to know how to speak to our deaf employees.
(12:11):
And I said, languages, linguistics. I'm interested in this, and
they said, well, you know, we meet when we can.
And I said, you know, i'm a secretary in the
finance department or something. They'll let me take lunch at
three if that's when you do it. They don't care
when I take lunch. And I went in and I
learned to sign, not fluently but enough. And when they
(12:34):
had trouble recruiting someone for a deaf person, they intended
to have a certain number of people, one of whom
was deaf, doing this job. And it took them longer
than anticipated to get the first deaf person to pay
attention because it was it was untried captioning. So they
hired me as the non deaf replacement for the deaf people,
(12:55):
and that was again an excellent learning process. It was writing.
Because you were writing, you were taking the ABC Evening
News and writing it into caption language and putting it
in computers. Early computers again, the size of refrigerators extremely slow.
And when things went wrong and the machines broke down,
(13:18):
we had a sign language interpreter who'd show up in
the little corner of the screen and do it.
Speaker 1 (13:23):
And between when you start these beginnings at GBH and
when you become part of your first project that you're
on the crew, you're helping to write, you're helping to produce,
whatever your contribution. I'm assuming you didn't direct right out
of the gate, right, so you get what's the first
filmed project? Or I guess so it's all filmed back then,
(13:44):
what's the first filmed project you work on?
Speaker 3 (13:46):
What year was that I went over to Nova from
captioning and I would say would be like seventy six
that I.
Speaker 1 (13:54):
Now you think three years and you were Nova doing
what I was.
Speaker 3 (13:58):
A production assistant, mostly doing post so learning how you
mix in film and how you taking care of bringing
in narrators and contracting and so forth, you putting it together,
started producing promos. A very good learning experience if you
got to tell people why they should watch this film
(14:19):
on wolves in thirty seconds? What are you going to
put up there? I had very good mentors there, some
of whom came over from the BBC because they had
been doing the Horizon Science series, which was an inspiration
for Nova. Nova was the first big national project that
GBH did, and it was clear at that point that
(14:41):
the person who was running National Productions was interested in
expanding the national series the documentary series, and so Nova
and then World, which was the predecessor to Frontline, and
then American Experience all came in under that for ten
year period.
Speaker 1 (15:01):
So you're doing post and it seems like, and I
don't want to be too you know, polite or whatever,
but it seems like did you feel that everywhere you
when people saw that you had it in terms of
the capacity to do this work? Because the business relies
on mentoring. The business relies on someone who's in a
more powerful position than you are, turning to you and going,
(15:23):
let's go. You're going to come with us and we're
going to go on the shoot together. Right, what's the
first film you make? You go and shoot?
Speaker 3 (15:30):
I was a PA at Nova in post production and
they would occasionally need somebody to go out in a
field on a production for them. And there was a
film that was done on very early genetic engineering, and
I became the PA on that one, and I traveled
with the two producers. This was, you know, back in
(15:52):
the day when crews were bigger. You had generally a
producer and associate producer and a production assistant, plus your
three person camera sound team going out. Nowadays it would
be maybe two people with the equipment that we have
and the ability to do things remotely. So that was
one of the early ones, the genetic engineering.
Speaker 1 (16:15):
Film were most of the people involved in that project
and the early projects you became a part of after that,
was it mostly men?
Speaker 3 (16:22):
Mostly? Yes, mostly, But actually on that film there were
co producers and it was a man and a woman,
and the woman actually eventually became Nova's executive producer, pla Apsel.
But GBH, I thought was always pretty friendly to women.
There weren't as many women at the very top levels
(16:43):
for a while. Now there are, and in fact GBH
now has its first woman CEO as of last year.
And I would say it's more women than men in
production at GBH. I'm not sure that's true across the
system for public broadcasting, and it certainly I don't think
I'm not part of the larger commercial world. It's not true.
(17:04):
It's certainly true in the independent world that it doesn't
matter whether you're not really being downgraded.
Speaker 1 (17:12):
Yes or No is the first film you make? Correct?
Speaker 3 (17:17):
Yeah, that might have been, and that's for World, the
predecessor for Frontline. And I did that one in Canada,
and I'm the producer. I'm not the director on that.
The director is Michael ruba.
Speaker 1 (17:30):
What was the topic of Yes or No? What was
it about?
Speaker 3 (17:32):
This was in the period when Quebec was looking to
secede from Canada. Yes, and Michael Rubau knew this impersonator,
an impressionist named Jean Gui Moreau and Jeanie did impressions
of rone Levec, the premiere of Quebeco was the great
driver for secession. And Jeanque Morovo was so well known
(17:58):
in French Canada. This is not an experience I had
had before. You'd walk through the streets of Montreal or wherever,
and little girls would faint in front of you. Oh
my god, it's Janqui. He's so well known, he's so
wonderful and Seanki decided he would take his show to
Toronto to see if it would play there. So it
(18:22):
was about the difference between French and English Canada told
through this story of Shunky's journey.
Speaker 1 (18:29):
I've got to get a copy of that. That sounds amazing,
documentary producer Judith Decioni. If you enjoy conversations with brilliant
documentary filmmakers, be sure to check out my episode with
director and producer Rory Kennedy.
Speaker 4 (18:48):
I love Boeing and what Boeing stood for in this country,
and we really celebrate that in the film because it's
been an extraordinary company for decades. You know, it helped
us get out of World War Two, it helped get
us to the moon with my uncle Jack, and for
many decades, Bowing did one thing, which was to say,
we're going to prioritize excellence and safety. And the McDonald
(19:10):
douglas people were put in charge and they had a
very different business model, which was very Wall Street focused.
Speaker 1 (19:20):
To hear more of my conversation with Rory Kennedy, go
to Here's the Thing dot Org. After the break, Judith
Vecchioni shares the weight of responsibility she felt bringing the
series Vietnam A Television History to the American public. I'm
(19:45):
Alec Baldwin, and you were listening to Here's the Thing
documentary producer Judith VECCHIONI can spend years behind the scenes
making a series before it sees the light of day.
Vietnam A Television History. He was no exception. It was
an incredible undertaking, with its thirteen episodes being produced over
(20:06):
six years.
Speaker 3 (20:08):
I think it was two years of fundraising and four
years of production. Yeah, And it was in part it
took so long because we were making up a format
for America. Nobody had ever done this kind of large,
multipart series right where the stories fed to each other.
You could watch them separately, but if you really want
(20:30):
to understand it, you watched all of them roughly the
order that they were presented. So we were inventing that.
And one of the reasons we had a British producer,
Martin Smith. Martin Smith came because he had worked at
World at War and that was the only really big
linked series that had been done before that. So he
(20:50):
came over and was one of our producers and was
tremendously helpful in talking about how do you divide up
stories that are happening virtually simultaneously, How do you pick
away to do that? And things that we did for
Vietnam I brought with me when we went to Eyes
on the Prize not to jump too far ahead, and
(21:13):
other people used for other linked series. An example is school.
At the beginning of each of these projects, we sat
down all the production staff and went to school together.
We had lecturers, we watched films, we discussed the stories.
We talked about what's a source and what's not a source.
It was a combination of film school and journalism, and
(21:37):
it meant that what we did was as unimpeachable as
we could possibly make it. And for Vietnam that was
critical since we were working within the decade of the
Fall of Saigon.
Speaker 1 (21:51):
Vietnam and television history. I saw that in its original production.
How do you feel? And this goes throughout your career.
Eventually we get to Eyes on the Prize. I mean
you do two back to back. I mean you climb
with your compatriots, you climb big mountains that set the
tone for public television for decades to come. I mean
(22:14):
we're gonna get into the eyes of the prize in
a minute. But for me, when I watched Vietnama television history,
I go, this is it, this is what happened. For you?
Did you sense did you realize at the time, because
you seem like such an incredibly bright and thoughtful person
that you're sitting there going, you know, I'm carving history
in stone here? Did you feel that sense of responsibility
(22:38):
when you were doing this show?
Speaker 3 (22:39):
We did, and we didn't know how people would react.
I know that every single person that we called up
to interview to bring on board, whether they were American
or Vietnamese or whatever they were, every single person said,
which side were you on? That was their first question.
They wanted to know where we going to say it
(23:01):
was American imperialism? Where were we going to say America
was saving democracy? Where were we going to Where were
we going to be? And we we said, and I
think we worked very very hard. It's not just fair
but balanced to say there are multiple sides to this story.
(23:21):
There's the South Vietnamese, there's the North Vietnamese, there's the
Viet Min viet Cong, there's the Yes, there's multiple and
so what we want to be doing is over and
over again showcasing the complexity of the history with as
much as possible, and it had to be very strong.
(23:43):
Back up, I'll tell you a story that we in
the the story of d NBN Foo, we had a
story of North Vietnamese heroism, the legends they told about
how hard that victory was for them. We also had
in that section a story of heroism from the South
(24:05):
Vietnamese and how they marched into the battles singing the
French national anthem because they didn't have their own anthem yet.
It was too young a country. That kind of balancing,
that constant balancing, and the research to find and verify
these was enormous. I had a French speaking production assistant
(24:27):
to make sure that we were hitting the right records,
not just the American records, but the French records for
my French based films.
Speaker 1 (24:38):
Now I'm assuming that you know you might have worked
on other things, but Vietnam of Television History in its
original release was an eighty three, and you're working on
Eyes on the Prize after that. In your career at
this point, are you commissioned, are you assigned or do
you pitch? How does Judith vic KENI get on board
you know, one of the most seminal public television productions in.
Speaker 3 (25:02):
History, Well, Vietnam. I pitched myself to be part of it,
as I said, to you an associate producer, I'll do that.
And then as I'd worked on the first I worked
on episodes three and twelve as an associate producer and
it became clear that I should do the first two programs,
and so they just said you want to do them,
(25:22):
and I said, yes, I will. For Eyes, it was
Henry Hampton's series. Henry Hampton was the visionary behind Eyes
on the Prize and he had been trying for years
and years to get funding. He tried several times, got started,
had to stop, and when he finally really got it
(25:44):
together to do it, he came and looked around the
Vietnam Cadre to say, I need someone who has this
experience of making linked films, and I know he talked
to some of my colleagues and he said to me,
do you want this? And I said, exactly what I
had said about Vietnam. Yes, this is my story. I
want to be part of it. So I left GBH
(26:07):
to do Ice on the Prize was an independent production,
and I said to my boss at the time, can
I have a leave of absence? It'll be probably two years,
three years, I don't know, and he said, we don't
give long leaves of absence. I said, then I have
to leave and who produce? And who produced that?
Speaker 1 (26:23):
Because I'm assuming that, like I mean, in our podcast world,
there's a number of places to go and you know,
look for funding. GBH itself be easy where IRA is
and so forth. But I'm assuming that at this point
in the eighties GBH is like the mothership for this
kind of producing or were there other stations that were
doing more of this kind of production as well.
Speaker 3 (26:46):
I think GBH was doing most of it. Other stations
like w NET were doing some. They did the Atoms Chronicles.
What was that called the which was a fictionalization of
John and Abigail Adams but a long piece. But the
documentaries were from GVH. But Henry Hampton, who was black
(27:06):
Side's founder and president, really wanted to do it independently.
It was a black owned company. He wanted to staff
it and run it, and he himself had been at SELMA,
so it was a very very important story to him
to tell.
Speaker 1 (27:23):
And he got the money from where.
Speaker 3 (27:24):
Do you think a neh and CPB money but directly,
and we were running out of money all the way
through it. And at a certain point he got some
company money from I think Lotus Incorporated came in and
gave him and that was how he made payroll that week.
We were not going to make payroll the independent world.
I always say, you think you're the poorest of the
(27:47):
poor when you work for public television, and then you
go independent for public television, and you really know what
poverty is.
Speaker 1 (27:57):
Documentary producer Judith A.
Speaker 2 (27:59):
Koni.
Speaker 1 (28:00):
If you're enjoying this conversation, tell a friend and be
sure to follow Here's the Thing on the iHeartRadio app,
Spotify or wherever you'll get your podcasts. When we come back,
Judith Vecchioni shares her advice for the next class of
documentary filmmakers. I'm Alec Baldwin, and you're listening to Here's
(28:32):
the Thing. In the nineteen eighties, there were multiple high
profile resignations from the board of the Corporation for Public
Broadcasting or CPB, which funds PBS. It was a time
of public disputes and allegations of politicization attributed to the
Reagan administration's multiple appointees. I wanted to know if Vecchione
(28:55):
had any awareness of the tumult happening at the top
of the CPP.
Speaker 3 (29:01):
I did not, And I think that's a testimony to
the firewall between content and fundraising that I wasn't doing
the fundraising at that point as a producer, as a
senior producer, I wasn't doing any of that. Henry did it,
Henry Ampton, for Eyes and for Vietnam, Richard Ellison had
(29:22):
done it. I wasn't a part of it.
Speaker 1 (29:24):
It was there.
Speaker 3 (29:25):
It was certainly an issue, but it wasn't something I saw,
and GBH was very clear about we have to keep
a firewall going or else we're commercial station. Then you know,
we're just responding to different masters. I'm not saying it
wasn't true. I'm just saying I wasn't at that level.
Speaker 1 (29:42):
So I worked very heavily in the nineties on campaign
finance reform Arizona main events where we raised money for
the Legal Defense Fund for those laws, and I worked
with a group of people who we solemnly believe, I mean,
without an ounce of hesitation, thought that the campaign finance
reform was the lynch and of all the problems in
this country, you know, spending a speech, money a speech,
(30:05):
and campaigns, and we came up with all the cliches.
You here now, which is well of money is speech
and the person with the most money speaks loudest. And
I believe that every single person in the United States
Congress Democratic Republican, they might as well wear decals on
them and stickers on them like their NASCAR race car
drivers of who's promoting them and owning them. You can't
(30:25):
run for office unless you get the money. Most of
the people who win, overwhelmingly, the overwhelming majority win who
have the most money. Campaign finance reform was really just
the biggest problem. So we go see Burt Newborn. He's
from the Brennan Center, the think Taket NYU Law School,
and Burt Newborn said that when Brown versus the Board
(30:46):
of Education comes, he says, they didn't wake up that
morning and they had some new information. He said, they
knew the country was ready, They knew the country that
the country needed this. We had to go in this
direction order for the country. It has remain healthy and
eyes on the prize comes and it's a huge success,
(31:06):
huge one of the most successful documentaries that I can
recall and did you feel the same thing, which was
that it was timing that people were just ready to
start to really do the deep dive into the civil
rights movement.
Speaker 3 (31:18):
That and also the commitment to strong journalism made the
stories really forceful. I remember a screening that we had.
We would have screenings of rough cuts with not just
ourselves the team, but with larger groups. And I remember,
you know this that when you're watching one of your
(31:40):
films with a group, you don't watch the film, you
watch the people watching it. And I remember the hairs
rising on the back of my neck and saying, we
got it, we have this. This was the the Emmett
Till story in episode one, it's are we speaking to
the audience? Are we driving new understanding? I am a
(32:03):
firm believer that journalists need to not enter into political discussions.
I know some journalists who don't vote because they don't
believe they can do that and still remain impartial. I'm
not that far a lot, but I am very very
(32:23):
careful about expressing my let me admit, quite strong feelings
because I don't see how I can be effective in
my job now.
Speaker 1 (32:34):
With the time we have left. Of course, your career
spans many years, and now there are far more women
working in the documentary film world, and I'm wondering, do
you do any teaching? You do you teach?
Speaker 3 (32:49):
I do a lot of mentoring. I don't teach, but
I do a lot of mentoring. For twelve years I
ran a project for PBS nationally called the Producer's Workshop
up at WGBH, where for a week we would bring
in promising associate producers and local producers and run them
(33:11):
through a very tough boot camp, like ten twelve hour
days about how do you bring your projects up to
the national level. And we've looked very much for women,
for people of color, for people from rural areas to
bring in new voices for public media. A lot of
(33:31):
those people have gone on and made wonderful, wonderful films.
So that's been a very important part of my job.
And I'm now working as senior editorial advisor for World Channel,
which if viewers don't know, is part of the PBS ecosystem.
The way PBS Kids is a part of it. This
(33:52):
is documentaries, short form and long form, digital and broadcast
and bringing in new voices to the system. So we
have a series called America Reframed, where the stories are
you haven't heard this that tells you something about the
(34:14):
town of Orangeburg, the town of Chicago, the farming communities
of wherever. We also have a series called Local USA,
which looks at really hyperlocal stories being told by the
people within them. So that new voices is an important
part of what I'm doing now.
Speaker 1 (34:36):
Now, two quick things. I watched the diabetes blood sugar
rising and I have type two. I went back and
forth and had a pre diabetes for a long time.
When I see this, and obviously there's no comparison in
terms of content with the Vietnam thing, But what was
the reason? Was this an assignment? Why did you do
the diabetes?
Speaker 3 (34:57):
I'm fascinated by stories that are at the the edges
of society. They are very very important to the communities
that face these issues, but not necessarily to everyone. And
I realized that diabetes is a national emergency. If we
hadn't just had COVID, we would be calling diabetes a
(35:17):
pandemic that there were There was a moment when things
were starting to shift. The first continuous glucose monitors were
coming in, the first real fights over the cost of
insulin were gearing up, and that's just born fruit. You know,
a week before we're talking with the cap on insulin costs.
(35:38):
So it just seemed to me to be an important
story that wasn't being told and that we needed to
get out there. I have it in my family too, right, And.
Speaker 1 (35:48):
Some people have talked about, you know, putting warnings on candy.
You know that, you know, whatever that might be. But like,
excessive consumption of this product can lead to certain health issues.
I don't know what to what the answer to that is,
but I do realize it's like when you live inside
the minefield of diabetes, when you live inside the minefield
(36:09):
of blood sugar issues everywhere you go, you just can't
believe it. I mean, I mean, I might have seen
a beautiful woman years ago, when I was younger, I
might have said to myself, my god, look how beautiful
that woman is. Now I hold up a drink in
my hand in a deli and go, my god, this
says eighty eight grams of sugar in it. You know,
(36:30):
the sugar content of food has taken over my life.
Last question, your advice to newcomers, your advice to people
who are coming.
Speaker 3 (36:39):
In well, this is a little bit like yours and
a little bit different. When I talk to young makers
who come to me with a brilliant idea, I say,
this is a brilliant idea. It probably shouldn't be your
first film. It should be your second film. Make something
(36:59):
for that you can learn and make mistakes on, and
then make the one that really matters.
Speaker 1 (37:05):
See you, interesting idea.
Speaker 3 (37:07):
I also say to people, don't reinvent the wheel if
you can work for someone. I worked for people like
David Fanning who started Frontline, and I worked for Paula
Apsel who ran Frontline. These are people who I learned
from by watching, by making my mistakes in front of
(37:27):
them instead of in front of an audience and letting
them say to me. I have an absolute memory of
David saying to me at one point, if you moved
that scene from here to there, what would happen? And
I said, oh my god, it opens up so many
possibilities if I just I keep the scene, but I
(37:49):
just move it a little later in the film. And
he had that kind of knowledge that I could accumulate
and not have to make my mistakes and put the
film out wrong. So don't reinvent the wheel, learn from
the people around you, and go forward.
Speaker 1 (38:09):
My thanks to Judith Vecchione. This episode was recorded at
CDM Studios in New York City. We're produced by Kathleen Russo,
Zach MacNeice, and Maureen Hoven. Our engineer is Frank Imperial.
Our social media manager is Danielle Gingrich. I'm Alec Baldwin.
Here's the Thing is brought to you by iHeart Radio.
This is Alec Baldwin, and you're listening to Here's the
Thing from iHeart Radio. In the nineteen sixties, which was
a convulsive period in American history, one major story seemed
to play on and on with no end in sight,
the War in Vietnam. When that war officially ended in
(00:24):
nineteen seventy five, journalists, artists, and public broadcasting began to
conduct the autopsy. The result produced films like nineteen seventy
Eight's Coming Home, nineteen seventy nine Apocalypse Now, and a
PBS series first broadcast in nineteen eighty three, Vietnam a
(00:45):
Television History. Over the course of thirteen hours, the program
dug deep into the background, cost and toll taken on
the principal figures involved in the war.
Speaker 2 (00:58):
Thirty years after the first American died in Vietnam, the
last Americans were leaving, waiting on the US embassy roof
to be flown to safety. The long war was ending
in the defeat of the South Vietnamese state that America
had supported for two decades. What kind of peace finally
was at hand? What would be the meaning of peace?
Speaker 1 (01:23):
My guest today is Judith Vecchioni, an Emmy and Peabody
winning producer of that series. Vecchione has worked in documentary
programming with Boston based PBS station WGBH since the seventies
and has been an executive producer there for twenty three years.
Her career has encompassed programs like Frontline and American Experience,
(01:48):
documentary films like Blood, Sugar Rising, and the Peabody winning
doc series Eyes on the Prize. I wanted to know
what Vecchione's upbringing was like and how her home environment
influenced her career path.
Speaker 3 (02:04):
I grew up in a politically very aware household. My
father read the newspaper from cover to cover, The New
York Times cover to cover every day, and we talked
about what was going on, and so the big issues
of the day, civil rights, the Vietnam War were live
topics in my family. My parents worked with civil rights
(02:25):
organizations making sure our community was not dismantling the housing
discrimination in our suburban community. But what area of was
this in south shore of Long Island? Where what town
from Massapequa. I'm from Merrick, so you were in the
south shore of the Island.
Speaker 1 (02:44):
Was your dad? Was your writer?
Speaker 3 (02:47):
He should have been, but he did not end up
doing that. He should have been He should have been
an academic. Actually, I think the politics of the day
for people who were very progressive made that hard. And
my mother was a teacher, a school math teacher who
I had for math actually, and luckily it's a subject
(03:07):
where you get the answers right or you get them wrong,
and so there's no favoriteism. Nobody ever got worried about
whether mom was being nice to me, and half the
class called her mom anyway.
Speaker 1 (03:19):
So when you leave, you go off to Yale, and
as you head off to New Haven, was there a plan?
Was there something you wanted to study? And what was that?
Speaker 3 (03:28):
Well, the first thing is that I'm in the first
class of women at Yale, the first matriculating class. So
I don't know that I knew what I was going
to study at that time. I was interested in languages.
I was interested in history, and I ended up being
a linguistics major, which probably wasn't the most useful thing
to study. But it's such a rich environment, you know,
(03:52):
in these big universities, you get great education. I'm not
sure I took full advantage of it. It was the
middle of the Vietnam War. There was a lot going on,
and Yale was very unprepared for us, for the women.
How so, well they fifty years later, this is like
(04:13):
five years ago, they invited the first women back. So
that's my class plus the two transferred classes. And they
admitted that they just did it in a hurry to
beat Princeton to co education. And I felt a lot
better once they said, you know, we really didn't think
about anything except well, what we'll paint some bathrooms for
(04:34):
you or something. But there were no You have to
think about when you arrive in an environment like that
a university, you expect the upper class people to guide you,
to help you. You expect the teachers to know where
to draw. They didn't know what. Nobody knew what to do.
All the upper class women were as new as we were.
(04:54):
It was a real pioneering experience.
Speaker 1 (04:57):
Is sixty nine.
Speaker 3 (04:59):
We arrived in six and.
Speaker 1 (05:01):
That class were you as incoming freshmen and people who
had transferred, who were upper class people as well, right
transfer as well.
Speaker 3 (05:08):
So graduating classes of seventy three, minds seventy two and
seventy one. But they came from you know, Vasser and
from NYU and wherever. They didn't know Yale. They didn't
know the professors. Nobody could say to you those key
things of don't take this class, take that one. You
know this. If you got a choice of teaching assistance,
(05:30):
go with this one. It was, as I say, a
tremendously rich environment. There was more than enough for anybody.
But I know that the later classes had it easier
than we did.
Speaker 1 (05:41):
When you leave Yale with a linguistics degree, what's the
plan then? Was you you had never no filmmaking? Had
you done a minor in film? No?
Speaker 3 (05:51):
By that point I did have a plan though, Okay,
which is my last semester. I got out in seven
semesters instead of eightsters in part because I always had
siblings in school. It was in college, so it was
it was expensive for my family, even with scholarships and things.
(06:11):
And my last semester I discovered I had extra credits
that nobody had mentioned to me, and I could take
something fun instead of all my major classes. And I said,
I think I'll take this class in video what the
heck in the Art and Architecture building. And it got
there and they had cameras the size of refrigerators, giant cameras.
(06:33):
It was two inch videotape that you were recording on,
so basically couldn't edit. And we took pictures of each
other that first day, you know, videos of each other.
And I had two enormous light bulb moments, light bulb
over the head moments where I said, I need to
do this, this is what I should be doing. I
(06:54):
had been doing radio rock and roll, news radio, that
sort of thing at WYBC GBH community station. I covered
the panther trials and then the riots around that before
there were those in New Haven. New Haven had a
black panther trial. Yeah, there was an event and they
came and then there was a trial after that event
(07:15):
on May Day, there was an event, But.
Speaker 1 (07:17):
What about it? Did you have the light bulb moment?
Meaning when you're there? We used to have a joke
We did a TV show where the guy in the
period was period television, and he's drunk or he's halluciny
or something and he turns to the producers into producer
and says, why are those people pointing those ovens at me?
Meeting the camerace They were so gigantic, But what instide
(07:38):
when you're inside that environment? Because you go on to
go ahead and have this obviously amazing career. What was
the light bulb moment? What was attractive?
Speaker 3 (07:46):
I think it was telling stories that were real and
that mattered to people, that these were important things that
were happening around us, and there were ways of telling
those stories that had impact and that were creatively satisfying.
I mean I had done art before, painting and so forth,
and it just it fed those same brain cells for
(08:09):
me that I did, and it had impact. It had reasons,
so reasons to do it that were not just entertainment
or selling toothpaste, which is why, of course I went
for public television, not to commercial television.
Speaker 1 (08:23):
So that was the beachhead was public television and stuff.
That's where you started.
Speaker 3 (08:26):
Absolutely. I started at GBH and I stayed there for
almost my entire career. I mean I left once or twice,
but came back because public media is where you do documentaries.
I mean, now there's HBO, but HBO does what five
ten documentaries a year. They're wonderful, but that's not what
(08:51):
they really do, whereas Frontline does forty a year, right,
and American Experience does another you know, ten or fifteen.
I don't know what they do. Pov is still on
independent lens. Through GBH. I've worked with the POV people,
I've worked with the independent lens people, so those are
(09:12):
the independent filmmakers, which is where I am now mostly focused.
But I've also worked with Frontline, Nova, American Experience and
all the background ones, and that brings in an enormous
cadre of incredibly talented people that you get to learn from.
I can't tell you the number of people who I've gone, Oh, Now,
(09:35):
I understand why we do these things this way. And
I also have a I'm old enough that my career
spans from film to digital. So when we started, Vietnam
was shot on film. My fire film was shot on film,
and that's way later. So you're you're kind of in
the midst of really smart, dedicated people.
Speaker 1 (09:59):
Now when you when you arrive at GBH. The CPB
is formed in sixty seven, and before you have a
government centralized funding mechanism for public broadcasting and in this
case obviously a public TV. I'm wondering if they were
off on their own, doing their own thing and raising
the money.
Speaker 3 (10:17):
I don't think so. I think the system was formulated
after the Carnegie Commission report that they said.
Speaker 1 (10:24):
We need to have MINO, that's right.
Speaker 3 (10:27):
We need to have a federally supported system that could
be independent and could be therefore able to cover topics
that commercial stations needing to fill a bottom line and
pay stockholders and so forth that they couldn't do.
Speaker 1 (10:44):
So when you show up at GBH and maybe everything
is concretizing at the same time and congealing at the
same time, what was the terrain like, you're a woman, Yes,
you have a degree from Yale, so that's a good thing.
Did you get in there and roll up your sieves
and start working or are you making coffee for a year?
Or what happened?
Speaker 3 (11:03):
At first? I was a part time vacation replacement secretary,
and I worked in the design department, which, as I remember,
it was pretty self contained and had a photographer and
a photography studio. And this is pre digital. There's not
(11:24):
even three quarter inch tapes, so you know, it's mostly
serving news and local very labor intensive, very labor intensive,
and I didn't have a lot to do except observe,
learn and watch the Watergate hearings. It's a good summer
to be employed there. And then I worked for the
Finance Department and then I saw some people. I continued
(11:49):
to do these fill in replacement stuff and I saw
these people in the cafeteria waving their fingers about and
I looked at them and I said, what are you doing?
And they said, we're learning sign language because we're going
to start the first captioning for the deaf and we
need to know how to speak to our deaf employees.
(12:11):
And I said, languages, linguistics. I'm interested in this, and
they said, well, you know, we meet when we can.
And I said, you know, i'm a secretary in the
finance department or something. They'll let me take lunch at
three if that's when you do it. They don't care
when I take lunch. And I went in and I
learned to sign, not fluently but enough. And when they
(12:34):
had trouble recruiting someone for a deaf person, they intended
to have a certain number of people, one of whom
was deaf, doing this job. And it took them longer
than anticipated to get the first deaf person to pay
attention because it was it was untried captioning. So they
hired me as the non deaf replacement for the deaf people,
(12:55):
and that was again an excellent learning process. It was writing.
Because you were writing, you were taking the ABC Evening
News and writing it into caption language and putting it
in computers. Early computers again, the size of refrigerators extremely slow.
And when things went wrong and the machines broke down,
(13:18):
we had a sign language interpreter who'd show up in
the little corner of the screen and do it.
Speaker 1 (13:23):
And between when you start these beginnings at GBH and
when you become part of your first project that you're
on the crew, you're helping to write, you're helping to produce,
whatever your contribution. I'm assuming you didn't direct right out
of the gate, right, so you get what's the first
filmed project? Or I guess so it's all filmed back then,
(13:44):
what's the first filmed project you work on?
Speaker 3 (13:46):
What year was that I went over to Nova from
captioning and I would say would be like seventy six
that I.
Speaker 1 (13:54):
Now you think three years and you were Nova doing
what I was.
Speaker 3 (13:58):
A production assistant, mostly doing post so learning how you
mix in film and how you taking care of bringing
in narrators and contracting and so forth, you putting it together,
started producing promos. A very good learning experience if you
got to tell people why they should watch this film
(14:19):
on wolves in thirty seconds? What are you going to
put up there? I had very good mentors there, some
of whom came over from the BBC because they had
been doing the Horizon Science series, which was an inspiration
for Nova. Nova was the first big national project that
GBH did, and it was clear at that point that
(14:41):
the person who was running National Productions was interested in
expanding the national series the documentary series, and so Nova
and then World, which was the predecessor to Frontline, and
then American Experience all came in under that for ten
year period.
Speaker 1 (15:01):
So you're doing post and it seems like, and I
don't want to be too you know, polite or whatever,
but it seems like did you feel that everywhere you
when people saw that you had it in terms of
the capacity to do this work? Because the business relies
on mentoring. The business relies on someone who's in a
more powerful position than you are, turning to you and going,
(15:23):
let's go. You're going to come with us and we're
going to go on the shoot together. Right, what's the
first film you make? You go and shoot?
Speaker 3 (15:30):
I was a PA at Nova in post production and
they would occasionally need somebody to go out in a
field on a production for them. And there was a
film that was done on very early genetic engineering, and
I became the PA on that one, and I traveled
with the two producers. This was, you know, back in
(15:52):
the day when crews were bigger. You had generally a
producer and associate producer and a production assistant, plus your
three person camera sound team going out. Nowadays it would
be maybe two people with the equipment that we have
and the ability to do things remotely. So that was
one of the early ones, the genetic engineering.
Speaker 1 (16:15):
Film were most of the people involved in that project
and the early projects you became a part of after that,
was it mostly men?
Speaker 3 (16:22):
Mostly? Yes, mostly, But actually on that film there were
co producers and it was a man and a woman,
and the woman actually eventually became Nova's executive producer, pla Apsel.
But GBH, I thought was always pretty friendly to women.
There weren't as many women at the very top levels
(16:43):
for a while. Now there are, and in fact GBH
now has its first woman CEO as of last year.
And I would say it's more women than men in
production at GBH. I'm not sure that's true across the
system for public broadcasting, and it certainly I don't think
I'm not part of the larger commercial world. It's not true.
(17:04):
It's certainly true in the independent world that it doesn't
matter whether you're not really being downgraded.
Speaker 1 (17:12):
Yes or No is the first film you make? Correct?
Speaker 3 (17:17):
Yeah, that might have been, and that's for World, the
predecessor for Frontline. And I did that one in Canada,
and I'm the producer. I'm not the director on that.
The director is Michael ruba.
Speaker 1 (17:30):
What was the topic of Yes or No? What was
it about?
Speaker 3 (17:32):
This was in the period when Quebec was looking to
secede from Canada. Yes, and Michael Rubau knew this impersonator,
an impressionist named Jean Gui Moreau and Jeanie did impressions
of rone Levec, the premiere of Quebeco was the great
driver for secession. And Jeanque Morovo was so well known
(17:58):
in French Canada. This is not an experience I had
had before. You'd walk through the streets of Montreal or wherever,
and little girls would faint in front of you. Oh
my god, it's Janqui. He's so well known, he's so
wonderful and Seanki decided he would take his show to
Toronto to see if it would play there. So it
(18:22):
was about the difference between French and English Canada told
through this story of Shunky's journey.
Speaker 1 (18:29):
I've got to get a copy of that. That sounds amazing,
documentary producer Judith Decioni. If you enjoy conversations with brilliant
documentary filmmakers, be sure to check out my episode with
director and producer Rory Kennedy.
Speaker 4 (18:48):
I love Boeing and what Boeing stood for in this country,
and we really celebrate that in the film because it's
been an extraordinary company for decades. You know, it helped
us get out of World War Two, it helped get
us to the moon with my uncle Jack, and for
many decades, Bowing did one thing, which was to say,
we're going to prioritize excellence and safety. And the McDonald
(19:10):
douglas people were put in charge and they had a
very different business model, which was very Wall Street focused.
Speaker 1 (19:20):
To hear more of my conversation with Rory Kennedy, go
to Here's the Thing dot Org. After the break, Judith
Vecchioni shares the weight of responsibility she felt bringing the
series Vietnam A Television History to the American public. I'm
(19:45):
Alec Baldwin, and you were listening to Here's the Thing
documentary producer Judith VECCHIONI can spend years behind the scenes
making a series before it sees the light of day.
Vietnam A Television History. He was no exception. It was
an incredible undertaking, with its thirteen episodes being produced over
(20:06):
six years.
Speaker 3 (20:08):
I think it was two years of fundraising and four
years of production. Yeah, And it was in part it
took so long because we were making up a format
for America. Nobody had ever done this kind of large,
multipart series right where the stories fed to each other.
You could watch them separately, but if you really want
(20:30):
to understand it, you watched all of them roughly the
order that they were presented. So we were inventing that.
And one of the reasons we had a British producer,
Martin Smith. Martin Smith came because he had worked at
World at War and that was the only really big
linked series that had been done before that. So he
(20:50):
came over and was one of our producers and was
tremendously helpful in talking about how do you divide up
stories that are happening virtually simultaneously, How do you pick
away to do that? And things that we did for
Vietnam I brought with me when we went to Eyes
on the Prize not to jump too far ahead, and
(21:13):
other people used for other linked series. An example is school.
At the beginning of each of these projects, we sat
down all the production staff and went to school together.
We had lecturers, we watched films, we discussed the stories.
We talked about what's a source and what's not a source.
It was a combination of film school and journalism, and
(21:37):
it meant that what we did was as unimpeachable as
we could possibly make it. And for Vietnam that was
critical since we were working within the decade of the
Fall of Saigon.
Speaker 1 (21:51):
Vietnam and television history. I saw that in its original production.
How do you feel? And this goes throughout your career.
Eventually we get to Eyes on the Prize. I mean
you do two back to back. I mean you climb
with your compatriots, you climb big mountains that set the
tone for public television for decades to come. I mean
(22:14):
we're gonna get into the eyes of the prize in
a minute. But for me, when I watched Vietnama television history,
I go, this is it, this is what happened. For you?
Did you sense did you realize at the time, because
you seem like such an incredibly bright and thoughtful person
that you're sitting there going, you know, I'm carving history
in stone here? Did you feel that sense of responsibility
(22:38):
when you were doing this show?
Speaker 3 (22:39):
We did, and we didn't know how people would react.
I know that every single person that we called up
to interview to bring on board, whether they were American
or Vietnamese or whatever they were, every single person said,
which side were you on? That was their first question.
They wanted to know where we going to say it
(23:01):
was American imperialism? Where were we going to say America
was saving democracy? Where were we going to Where were
we going to be? And we we said, and I
think we worked very very hard. It's not just fair
but balanced to say there are multiple sides to this story.
(23:21):
There's the South Vietnamese, there's the North Vietnamese, there's the
Viet Min viet Cong, there's the Yes, there's multiple and
so what we want to be doing is over and
over again showcasing the complexity of the history with as
much as possible, and it had to be very strong.
(23:43):
Back up, I'll tell you a story that we in
the the story of d NBN Foo, we had a
story of North Vietnamese heroism, the legends they told about
how hard that victory was for them. We also had
in that section a story of heroism from the South
(24:05):
Vietnamese and how they marched into the battles singing the
French national anthem because they didn't have their own anthem yet.
It was too young a country. That kind of balancing,
that constant balancing, and the research to find and verify
these was enormous. I had a French speaking production assistant
(24:27):
to make sure that we were hitting the right records,
not just the American records, but the French records for
my French based films.
Speaker 1 (24:38):
Now I'm assuming that you know you might have worked
on other things, but Vietnam of Television History in its
original release was an eighty three, and you're working on
Eyes on the Prize after that. In your career at
this point, are you commissioned, are you assigned or do
you pitch? How does Judith vic KENI get on board
you know, one of the most seminal public television productions in.
Speaker 3 (25:02):
History, Well, Vietnam. I pitched myself to be part of it,
as I said, to you an associate producer, I'll do that.
And then as I'd worked on the first I worked
on episodes three and twelve as an associate producer and
it became clear that I should do the first two programs,
and so they just said you want to do them,
(25:22):
and I said, yes, I will. For Eyes, it was
Henry Hampton's series. Henry Hampton was the visionary behind Eyes
on the Prize and he had been trying for years
and years to get funding. He tried several times, got started,
had to stop, and when he finally really got it
(25:44):
together to do it, he came and looked around the
Vietnam Cadre to say, I need someone who has this
experience of making linked films, and I know he talked
to some of my colleagues and he said to me,
do you want this? And I said, exactly what I
had said about Vietnam. Yes, this is my story. I
want to be part of it. So I left GBH
(26:07):
to do Ice on the Prize was an independent production,
and I said to my boss at the time, can
I have a leave of absence? It'll be probably two years,
three years, I don't know, and he said, we don't
give long leaves of absence. I said, then I have
to leave and who produce? And who produced that?
Speaker 1 (26:23):
Because I'm assuming that, like I mean, in our podcast world,
there's a number of places to go and you know,
look for funding. GBH itself be easy where IRA is
and so forth. But I'm assuming that at this point
in the eighties GBH is like the mothership for this
kind of producing or were there other stations that were
doing more of this kind of production as well.
Speaker 3 (26:46):
I think GBH was doing most of it. Other stations
like w NET were doing some. They did the Atoms Chronicles.
What was that called the which was a fictionalization of
John and Abigail Adams but a long piece. But the
documentaries were from GVH. But Henry Hampton, who was black
(27:06):
Side's founder and president, really wanted to do it independently.
It was a black owned company. He wanted to staff
it and run it, and he himself had been at SELMA,
so it was a very very important story to him
to tell.
Speaker 1 (27:23):
And he got the money from where.
Speaker 3 (27:24):
Do you think a neh and CPB money but directly,
and we were running out of money all the way
through it. And at a certain point he got some
company money from I think Lotus Incorporated came in and
gave him and that was how he made payroll that week.
We were not going to make payroll the independent world.
I always say, you think you're the poorest of the
(27:47):
poor when you work for public television, and then you
go independent for public television, and you really know what
poverty is.
Speaker 1 (27:57):
Documentary producer Judith A.
Speaker 2 (27:59):
Koni.
Speaker 1 (28:00):
If you're enjoying this conversation, tell a friend and be
sure to follow Here's the Thing on the iHeartRadio app,
Spotify or wherever you'll get your podcasts. When we come back,
Judith Vecchioni shares her advice for the next class of
documentary filmmakers. I'm Alec Baldwin, and you're listening to Here's
(28:32):
the Thing. In the nineteen eighties, there were multiple high
profile resignations from the board of the Corporation for Public
Broadcasting or CPB, which funds PBS. It was a time
of public disputes and allegations of politicization attributed to the
Reagan administration's multiple appointees. I wanted to know if Vecchione
(28:55):
had any awareness of the tumult happening at the top
of the CPP.
Speaker 3 (29:01):
I did not, And I think that's a testimony to
the firewall between content and fundraising that I wasn't doing
the fundraising at that point as a producer, as a
senior producer, I wasn't doing any of that. Henry did it,
Henry Ampton, for Eyes and for Vietnam, Richard Ellison had
(29:22):
done it. I wasn't a part of it.
Speaker 1 (29:24):
It was there.
Speaker 3 (29:25):
It was certainly an issue, but it wasn't something I saw,
and GBH was very clear about we have to keep
a firewall going or else we're commercial station. Then you know,
we're just responding to different masters. I'm not saying it
wasn't true. I'm just saying I wasn't at that level.
Speaker 1 (29:42):
So I worked very heavily in the nineties on campaign
finance reform Arizona main events where we raised money for
the Legal Defense Fund for those laws, and I worked
with a group of people who we solemnly believe, I mean,
without an ounce of hesitation, thought that the campaign finance
reform was the lynch and of all the problems in
this country, you know, spending a speech, money a speech,
(30:05):
and campaigns, and we came up with all the cliches.
You here now, which is well of money is speech
and the person with the most money speaks loudest. And
I believe that every single person in the United States
Congress Democratic Republican, they might as well wear decals on
them and stickers on them like their NASCAR race car
drivers of who's promoting them and owning them. You can't
(30:25):
run for office unless you get the money. Most of
the people who win, overwhelmingly, the overwhelming majority win who
have the most money. Campaign finance reform was really just
the biggest problem. So we go see Burt Newborn. He's
from the Brennan Center, the think Taket NYU Law School,
and Burt Newborn said that when Brown versus the Board
(30:46):
of Education comes, he says, they didn't wake up that
morning and they had some new information. He said, they
knew the country was ready, They knew the country that
the country needed this. We had to go in this
direction order for the country. It has remain healthy and
eyes on the prize comes and it's a huge success,
(31:06):
huge one of the most successful documentaries that I can
recall and did you feel the same thing, which was
that it was timing that people were just ready to
start to really do the deep dive into the civil
rights movement.
Speaker 3 (31:18):
That and also the commitment to strong journalism made the
stories really forceful. I remember a screening that we had.
We would have screenings of rough cuts with not just
ourselves the team, but with larger groups. And I remember,
you know this that when you're watching one of your
(31:40):
films with a group, you don't watch the film, you
watch the people watching it. And I remember the hairs
rising on the back of my neck and saying, we
got it, we have this. This was the the Emmett
Till story in episode one, it's are we speaking to
the audience? Are we driving new understanding? I am a
(32:03):
firm believer that journalists need to not enter into political discussions.
I know some journalists who don't vote because they don't
believe they can do that and still remain impartial. I'm
not that far a lot, but I am very very
(32:23):
careful about expressing my let me admit, quite strong feelings
because I don't see how I can be effective in
my job now.
Speaker 1 (32:34):
With the time we have left. Of course, your career
spans many years, and now there are far more women
working in the documentary film world, and I'm wondering, do
you do any teaching? You do you teach?
Speaker 3 (32:49):
I do a lot of mentoring. I don't teach, but
I do a lot of mentoring. For twelve years I
ran a project for PBS nationally called the Producer's Workshop
up at WGBH, where for a week we would bring
in promising associate producers and local producers and run them
(33:11):
through a very tough boot camp, like ten twelve hour
days about how do you bring your projects up to
the national level. And we've looked very much for women,
for people of color, for people from rural areas to
bring in new voices for public media. A lot of
(33:31):
those people have gone on and made wonderful, wonderful films.
So that's been a very important part of my job.
And I'm now working as senior editorial advisor for World Channel,
which if viewers don't know, is part of the PBS ecosystem.
The way PBS Kids is a part of it. This
(33:52):
is documentaries, short form and long form, digital and broadcast
and bringing in new voices to the system. So we
have a series called America Reframed, where the stories are
you haven't heard this that tells you something about the
(34:14):
town of Orangeburg, the town of Chicago, the farming communities
of wherever. We also have a series called Local USA,
which looks at really hyperlocal stories being told by the
people within them. So that new voices is an important
part of what I'm doing now.
Speaker 1 (34:36):
Now, two quick things. I watched the diabetes blood sugar
rising and I have type two. I went back and
forth and had a pre diabetes for a long time.
When I see this, and obviously there's no comparison in
terms of content with the Vietnam thing, But what was
the reason? Was this an assignment? Why did you do
the diabetes?
Speaker 3 (34:57):
I'm fascinated by stories that are at the the edges
of society. They are very very important to the communities
that face these issues, but not necessarily to everyone. And
I realized that diabetes is a national emergency. If we
hadn't just had COVID, we would be calling diabetes a
(35:17):
pandemic that there were There was a moment when things
were starting to shift. The first continuous glucose monitors were
coming in, the first real fights over the cost of
insulin were gearing up, and that's just born fruit. You know,
a week before we're talking with the cap on insulin costs.
(35:38):
So it just seemed to me to be an important
story that wasn't being told and that we needed to
get out there. I have it in my family too, right, And.
Speaker 1 (35:48):
Some people have talked about, you know, putting warnings on candy.
You know that, you know, whatever that might be. But like,
excessive consumption of this product can lead to certain health issues.
I don't know what to what the answer to that is,
but I do realize it's like when you live inside
the minefield of diabetes, when you live inside the minefield
(36:09):
of blood sugar issues everywhere you go, you just can't
believe it. I mean, I mean, I might have seen
a beautiful woman years ago, when I was younger, I
might have said to myself, my god, look how beautiful
that woman is. Now I hold up a drink in
my hand in a deli and go, my god, this
says eighty eight grams of sugar in it. You know,
(36:30):
the sugar content of food has taken over my life.
Last question, your advice to newcomers, your advice to people
who are coming.
Speaker 3 (36:39):
In well, this is a little bit like yours and
a little bit different. When I talk to young makers
who come to me with a brilliant idea, I say,
this is a brilliant idea. It probably shouldn't be your
first film. It should be your second film. Make something
(36:59):
for that you can learn and make mistakes on, and
then make the one that really matters.
Speaker 1 (37:05):
See you, interesting idea.
Speaker 3 (37:07):
I also say to people, don't reinvent the wheel if
you can work for someone. I worked for people like
David Fanning who started Frontline, and I worked for Paula
Apsel who ran Frontline. These are people who I learned
from by watching, by making my mistakes in front of
(37:27):
them instead of in front of an audience and letting
them say to me. I have an absolute memory of
David saying to me at one point, if you moved
that scene from here to there, what would happen? And
I said, oh my god, it opens up so many
possibilities if I just I keep the scene, but I
(37:49):
just move it a little later in the film. And
he had that kind of knowledge that I could accumulate
and not have to make my mistakes and put the
film out wrong. So don't reinvent the wheel, learn from
the people around you, and go forward.
Speaker 1 (38:09):
My thanks to Judith Vecchione. This episode was recorded at
CDM Studios in New York City. We're produced by Kathleen Russo,
Zach MacNeice, and Maureen Hoven. Our engineer is Frank Imperial.
Our social media manager is Danielle Gingrich. I'm Alec Baldwin.
Here's the Thing is brought to you by iHeart Radio.
Host
Alec Baldwin
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