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