broadcasting act of 1960 seven. next on american history tv, a documentary on pbs programming. the senior advisor to the eyes on the prize civil rights series. executive ofr and frontline. and mark, former executive producer of american experience. the library of congress and w tbh posted the 45 minute event. panel is called documentaries, style and the use of archives. pat will moderate. atis a university professor the school of communication at american university and washington, d.c. she founded the school for media and social impact your it looks include, how to put balance back in copyright. heat -- she coordinates the free speech project with the professor of the washington college of law. what a great pleasure it is.

i feel like my entire life is passing before me as i look around the crowd [laughter] a panel with these people is extraordinary. each of the people here have not nearly make great documentaries, but create a future for a different kind of documentary that was ever possible on any other kind of television to be made. contributed has differently to doing that. also, in some cases, supporting each other, which is really -- i don't want to know if i am giving away secrets, but it doesn't always happen in public television. [laughter] anyways, i have had the

pleasure of working with some of these people because over the last decade we have been working with different organizations to make fair use for archival ways to makers in public tv broadcasts. some of these people have really , andincredibly supportive early adopters in early -- in order to make better use of material -- third party material to tell america story in so many different ways. i want to start with clayborne carson. clayborne carson is the founder, director of the martin luther education institute. he was the senior advisor fries on theprize -- eyes prize at a time when no one thought it could be made. i would like to ask each of you, starting with clayborne, to talk

mind what did you have in -- each of you had the experience of a series that ended up really providing a template for how to do things in the future for filmmakers. it really had not been done. clayborne: what if the things to point out is, yesterday i was lecturing at stanford to my students who were born well after all of this had happened and i think that they were telling me about a period before i came on the scene. i certainly felt younger, in a sense that, i got a call from , who unfortunately passed away way too early. he was a visionary. eyes ons a visionary of

the prize. i accepted an invitation from kuroda scott king to edit martin luther king papers. it was not like i was looking for work. i realized it would take decades , and a has taken decades to edit and publish his papers. he talked about his idea for a series. i think one of the things that i see running through discussions this afternoon is about democratization of information and the interpretation of history. which -- if you think back to the days before pbs, before npr, before the modern documentary style, most information about the past came from a few sources. if you saw a documentary it was

what we doe by -- not have large scale documentaries made by anything other than large scale corporations. , things like cbs reports were done by a commercial networks. what he was proposing was to do something very radical. that is to get away from the notion of history is a master narrative told by a handful of textbooksd written in , and everyone took that as authoritative. one of the first things he said -- there will not be any what we now call talking heads on the price. our job was not to go there and pontificate. the four of us, the senior advisers, we were very young.

go and find was, to how history was made during the 1960's, 1950's and 1960's. to go to the sources and find those people, and let them tell the story of how they made history. not to interpret it. because,a breakthrough even now when you look at documentaries you see that many ,f them go back to that notion by having the authoritative historian give this interpretation that will guide you through. ofre is this other story these ordinary people who make history. was,eal joy of doing it that for us as historians, we were in our own work.

my first book was on the student nonviolent coordinating committee, it was the counter king story. i welcomed that kind of approach. i think that that has influenced the documentaries that have been made since then that many of them do take up that mantle of allowing ordinary people to tell the story of making history. from what you are telling me as well, one characteristic -- this is ordinary people telling the story. also in an oral history way. there was so much oil his -- oral history that it would have escaped us forever. clayborne: now i can go into my classroom and use those interviews. i have rarely used eyes on the classroom, but i

have used the interviews. so much better and a sense that, i get it to the front where it fits what i want to talk about. if i want to talk about karen s scottking -- coretta king, there is a wonderful interview we did with her that maybe we used five minutes of it at eyes of the prize. i find that my students are so drawn to seeing her talk about ordinary things. was it like talking to the president of the united states when your husband is in jail and you have never spoken to him before and he calls on the phone and your young son answers the ?hone and starts babbling away

that kind of story is going to get through the minds of students far more than simply a lectureg in a -- about martin luther king and writing a letter from the jail. pat: something i thought was was them was that it arguing every image had to be exactly what you claimed it was. it could not be something that looked sort of like that. clayborne: there was no reconstruction. that kind ofory illustrates that. were interviewing ralph abernathy about the march on washington and he told us wonderful story about coming back after that a at the march. there was aas well

particular meeting or he talked about coming back after all the .eople had the part it in the evening, seeing the wrestling of the papers and all the things, then he says, it is just the most beautiful day of my entire life. saying,er david kind of but it could not have happened that way. why? because we know where rolf abernathy was every moment of that day. whetherhis debate about to trust his recollection, as opposed to our historical reconstruction. we decided to use it. history might not have happened that way, maybe it should have.

fascinating. let me jump to david, if you don't mind, who i remember when he was the brash young australian -- south african, sorry. >> we draw the lines. us a wholeo bring new format that was possibly -- format that was possibly to challenging for television. i walked into a public television station in 1970 three in huntington beach as a young filmmaker from south africa by way of the bbc. i walked into volunteer. i put my hands on the tools, the camera and began working. wgbh summaryt

there and brought me to start a series. seriesa was to start a about the world as others see it. there was this idea, and i went this extraordinary institution that was dedicated to ideas. i have never been around anything like it. each of the people that were working from the different genres of science, to history, to even julia child who is in the back corner of our offices, were doing things because they cared about the ideas. it was annexed ordinary this amazing privilege. the reason there is a front minus because we were trusted with enough resources for long enough to work it out, to try to figure out how to do the best work. the privilege of being able to give in to that research -- resource and say how you will spend it and testify it.

if you cannot make the best film you will make about the subject, then don't make it. it was as simple as that. it was all the people i could go out and bring to public television. i tried that out and we did 60 films. along the way there was a moment when i sat in a meeting at the corporation of public broadcasting, there was a man who must be remembered. louis friedman was the head of programming and he walked in and withhe was in indicted thousands of proposals and he could not sort through it all. he made a decision to do three big strands. one would be drama, the second was children's and it became wonder works, and the third was a news and documentary idea. i walked in looking for a little bit of funding for the next season. he made me sit down at his table with a sandwich and figure out

what the budget for a 36 week series would look like. we counter inducted $3 million, at the time and 1981. 1981.e in we said we could probably do it for that much money. he said great, i will put out a request for proposals. various people, including our friends proposed it, we proposed it and we dropped the money. the guarantee was that we would have the money for three years. if we could persuade the stations to match the money progressively over the course of the three years. it was a visionary idea. he left us the freedom to do that. we made our mistakes and we bumped our heads and we did some good things, we found some smart people. slowly this idea grew. it grew out of that idea.

found meur mcgee, who at the beach in huntington beach and brought me to boston, the people i think for front man, they made it happen. "frontline they made it happen. they developed a brand. you did put your stamp on a kind of documentary that became a style of documentaries. david: i think there were a lot of styles of different films. there were observational films, investigative films. thee were films like wonderful six hours. there were extraordinary different films that came about. i always thought that we needed to make the series that young and older producers, reporters and filmmakers will look at and say, i can learn from that. people have come to me and said

how do you make these films, just watch a lot of them and try to deconstruct them and look for the different ones that shoot either ito you ultimately, these are works of authorship. if you encourage authors, and encourage them by even them another film, then you begin to build a body of work of the time. --ontline" initially had judy was anchoring the series for the first season, but there was a certain point where we felt like we were taking the extra time and we begin to use will as the voice. we made that should teach it twice that there would be a quality of the words or storytelling that said, that is that different thing, that is that show. there was a value to that. there were people that question that will is old-fashioned, and

the patriarchy, and all kinds of people that -- reasons that people would say we should use other voices. ultimately we would say you have to have connect if tissue that would pull the string towards films. some ofyou could have these marking features, then you could have a lot more artistic freedom in other areas? anid: something other than anthology series. it was not going to be an anthology series made by filmmakers i would come to us with films made. we would initiate, then we would subject of an editorial process. that meant that the journalism had to be transparent, we needed to go deep into it and be able to understand the source materials inside that. margaret, american experience. garet: there is another

binding agent in "frontline." i had come from cbs where i worked at cbs report and a couple of magazine shows. because tvshutdown ,uide, do you remember tv guide they ran a front-page cover story saying the documentary is dead. this was in 1985. aat is when documentary was bad word. everybody went scurrying and i ,ot a great job offer from wgbh again, from peter mcgee, who really needs to be mentioned because he sets the standards at wgbh. they wanted peter and judy was the original executive producer, they wanted to do a history series, but the binding agent in

the history series was good storytelling. it had to have a beginning, middle and end. narrative, narrative, narrative. it was something that most documentarians had not been doing. on commercial television you ,ave a lot of documentaries like nbc white paper, and they were surveys. they were surveys from the top down. they were not actual stories where you had characters that you could follow. i think that was an element that gbh.in for size that youe were talking before, want to hear from as many people as possible who says close to the subject as possible, then constructed very carefully to have a story arc. what happened next. what happened after that?

pat: let's point out that public television is the real innovator of this character driven story model that is now standard expectation for documentary. margaret: i think so. i do not want to tip the credit for it because i did not invent the narrative style, but it was something we embraced wholeheartedly by wgbh, and they give all of us the resources to figure it out. when you're in the process of telling a story, you need time to figure out who the main characters are, where are the break-ins, what will happen next, how to conclude it. you do not have to tell the entire story. everybody used to agonize about what is left out. if you did your job properly, nobody would notice that you left anything out. our philosophy is just go narrow and deep.

go narrow and deep and get characters. i do want to comment on something you said before about firsthand witnesses. in "eyesn the prize -- on the prize" i thought it was terrific. we held -- we had a challenge because our mandate was to tell all american history. we had to go back to the 17th century and we were terrified. that wasd anything pre-archival because we did not know how to deal with it. you cannot find witnesses who are -- one of our first shows 06ers.e 19 we barely got people to make an appearance. a soon as we got them we shot them immediately. we did not even think we would make this story. it was a stretch for us and we had to challenge ourselves to go

back into the 19th century, even back in to the revolutionary period. , since weve relied on are here talking about the archives, letters, diaries, firsthand accounts that could be employed in many different ways to recall -- maybe it was the donner party. there is no firsthand witnesses in the donner party. [laughter] david: they ate each other. margaret: one of our most successful films. we relied on diaries and letters. one of the things that is so impressive about what both of your series -- and all of your work in documentaries did was create a sense of trust among the stations, for something they ed testeaded and fear before there was a pbs. like the redlining show that made nixing think he should be

fun public broadcasting. you've created a sense of and so on.liability something else that is really interesting to me is that public television, in building upon foster --been able to as you describe it, anthology show for independent voices. impressively, i have to say thank you to david for being so supportive of anthologies, as well as the executive produced journalism series. stephen is here from the center for asian american media, one of cpb, is also aof veteran independent filmmaker, and somebody who supports

independent filmmakers and has also been involved in creative creating archives we can all draw on. i would love to hear you talk about the filmmaking that goes to fuel the big anthology series. actually, if i could, i would like to make a reference to the panel. the seeds of the minority consortia independent, and diverse filmmakers goes back to the same era of the great society. so many of these entities were founded in the 1970's. he came out of post-civil rights and on the rapidly changing demographics of the country, which will start to be recognized. wasimmigration act rewritten in 1965. even though it would take the generation, it has reshaped america.

from theime period 1960's until now, the asian-american community went from 1% of the population and now we are 6%, we are over 20 million and the fastest-growing. and also the statistics for the latino community. as the whole enterprise was giving -- getting under way was where were these voices of other communities. for home our presence in media overall was an absence. americans, entertainment media, we are only the villains in war movies, house boys, gangsters in chinatown or laundry men. yet we have this inspiration of the civil rights movement to recognize how important it was for us to be able to participate in society. in thehanism for us minority consortia, and the

wisdom of the corporation for public broadcasting was to help ensure that there was a pipeline of these minority communities. betweenbeen doing this 35 and 40 years. all of the five members of the organization. one of the things -- one of the first points i want to make an respondent answer your question is, we have learned something deeper in this construct that it was important to include the perspectives of people of color in telling diverse kinds of stories. be it about history or social histories or our cultural histories. at first, we thought we were presenting authentic images that our communities could recognize. is important is that you cannot fully participate in a society unless

you see yourself in your stories told in this -- in the stories told in the society. the second thing we came to understand was that the stories needed to be for all americans, not just for our own communities. the asian-american community would be a good example because we are so diverse, different in language and cultural backgrounds, that in some ways, -- in this construct of asian america. in the recent years, and this is where i want to end my thoughts i think we now -- where we are today in this question of who is an american and what is it that makes america great, it is clear that we took for diversity was an important and key factor of the american experience. it is vital that we stand in for

this notion of what this country could be. we are not just about our racial stories. diversity is within each of our communities. i think that is the larger piece to re-shift the way we talk about what is our common ancestry. exploring are still what these different points of you mean. will all need we to beyond because we don't have the guide stone of white european mail through line history. pat: jump in before me. clayboren: all of us in some ways are beneficiaries of the technological changes that have , and some would

say even the skill level to get it to filmmaking. . it has become much easier to do a film like "eyes on the prize" today, you could probably do it for much less money because the equipment is so much less. i think that, looking forward into the future, what i see coming out of african-american that proliferation is kind of pulling us in -- even within the african-american now you have gay filmmakers, black filmmakers might be trying to describe that experience. you have so much diversity within each of these communities that one thing i fear is that it is very difficult to get a

sense. right now, for example, i have been involved in more than two dozen documentary films about black american life. most of it is 20th century. it seems like the pace of that keeps increasing. i think there is that concern we are losing a sense of, even the commonality of being black. much less being american. maybe that's good. they have a sense that these communities exist, but in terms of trying to get a sense of it. i teach of my students a course on black independent .ilms

i find that maybe one student might have seen some of these fairly famous films. people who have really made major contributions. they have not even seen early spike lee. they might have seen malcolm x, but that's it. problemshat one of the we will have is that, there are audiences that will be smaller and smaller rather than larger and larger. the changingddress marketplace in documentaries, and i would like to have any of your responses. this is a point where netflix is millioning 40 or $50 and is launching entire lines. fulcher doingand instant video journalism. apparentlyzz feed

educating an entire new generation. you have cable channel stuffed with wall-to-wall, something that looks like maybe documentary. lead -- a legacy that has been built up through the hard work of public television that honors the notion of documentary as an authentic true thing. at the same time you have an enormous proliferation and leaping into the marketplace of netflix, amazon and so many more. what is the role now of public television documentary? it is surely not the only game in town. expensive, oh my god, compared to almost any other source for documentary. to somely slow compared of the others. what is the role?

no pressure. [laughter] pat: but if you could provide us the answer. enormous is an challenge. one of the great challenges will be how do you know what is true and trustworthy. people may be will not care about that as much. there is said to be an enormous of material amount that is being produced. it will be manipulated and used because this is the most manipulative media. to have a harder and harder time trying to figure out what we can trust. pat: the trust brand? -- brande trust been goes to very high octane documentaries made with high budgets for hbo and netflix and others as well. it is very easy to put your hand on the scale in documentaries,

and to be able to manipulate this medium towards certain points of view. there is nothing easier than to -- the famous film of "fahrenheit 9/11." being able to get those sequences. it is not hard to do. it is very easy to be able to manipulate the archival material and use it in different ways, to layer voiceover. as to whateep worry lies behind and where do you have trust? anything that we can hold onto is to say, we really believe you should trust us. the way you should trust us is the body of work and the way we keep doing it, also to make it as transparent as possible. for me, one of the great moments in the life of "frontline" was

1995. we did a film on waco, the inside story. we did all of these inside stories with the manger fbi guys. we even had the audiotapes of the actual negotiations. make asaying can we radio show? somebody said you could put it on the web. we said what was that. theuild a website, "waco untold story." he said, can we put the whole film on there. will you cannot do that yet, so we put the interviews up. were --he interviews and that website exist today. people actually write to us about that website. from then on we went to publishing all of the edited longer versions of the primary source material behind the frontline -- behind the "frontline."

last week, the second film that revenge, there were 65 interviews. that is not going to persuade the average person that there are going to go off and hunt through the interview material. but you have made it completely transparent and in some ways that steeps into the culture. really highthe bar and hold to that bar, then we begin to hold on to where we are and why we remain the only place anywhere in the media culture that does that. so, that is our -- pat: that is your answer. margaret: i want to say that you -- weke that trust and all had to learn using new platforms. it was challenging in many ways because we were so schooled in the delivery of hour-long

documentaries. or six hour-long documentaries, or for hour-long documentaries, which were big outer fees of presidents. we had to learn how to use material on youtube, podcasting, we had to learn all of the different mobile platforms where we could deliver the same kind hopentent, shorter, but we carries the same branding and scrutiny that goes into an hour-long documentary, and deliver it to your students who are not going to be watching hour-long documentaries. unless somebody leads them to it and shows them what the benefits are. we are doing that and getting millions of viewers. clayborne: for any documentary,

one of the most important tasks is what you do with all of the materials you have brought together? i think one of the most important decisions for "eyes on the prize" was to put it in an archive for you can now go and watch the entire kuroda -- coretta king review. pat: i want to make sure we get transparency.r we are pbs and american experience, we are "frontline" -- we are "american experience" ."d we are "frontline in thensortia does series and showcase their work and anthologized as all of this

work which is very different. how do you address his point about a centrifugal universe of information out there? [laughter] historically, our stuff shows up in the system for a variety of ways, not for one particular strand are one brand. we have a program that is going on "american experience" next may. we are also participating in the archives of public broadcast. she speak in general of the hundred titles the year that collectively come from independent sources through i tbs. we put our stuff on pob. many of you may know about it. have optimism moving into the future because this is what we all have to learn. how to incorporate many more

points of view, and many more voices in public broadcasting. if you stay true to that, it is absolutely mission driven. make use of this incredible education network. pbsll set up the next learning media where we put our materials on and make available to teachers. very strongly about the future of this enterprise because there are tens of thousands of young makers who speak authentic stories that do not necessarily have to be in commercial media and be all about selling a .roduct or even just entertain alone. there are so many issues that we share in public broadcasting. if it stays true to the mission and that singular place. pat: we have like three more minutes. i would like to be able to use

about what you address, archives. "eyes on the prize" somewhere? steven: we have placed a number which collections, interviewed hundreds and hundreds of veterans. the japanese-americans, we have placed all those interviews on that source. all of the other works will going to library of congress, and our collection. i would recommend revenge"e "putin's stuff.

you can read it and be able to track the video at the same time. you can reach in and clip a piece out and share it. it is the most interactive, profoundly impressive archive. is it "frontline" material? way for thee on the body of work. margaret: i am on the board of pob, the independent documentary series, and i am astonished, every year we have an open call and we get more than 1000 entries from independent producers. of those, we have 18 slots. year, in the middle

of the year when there is no entry date, they get inundated with phone calls were they get are links to films that have been produced. there is something going on, it reminds me of the time when i was at cbs and they announced the death of the documentary. think we could say that the documentary is dying, i see the opposite. i see this hunger and young people, made possible by technology in some cases, also an incessant terry acid he that they have about their world. you are making these films for practically nothing and some are really terrific trade i am --imistic to pat: optimistic. pat: i interrupted you. that, in: i think

general, scholarship and documentary filmmakers have not been enough. from when, a comes particular film that i was involved in, when it came to requiredwn on pbs, pbs , in times of coverage for obvious reasons, legal reasons, that force them to go back and have to take out things. level, intellectual property issues have been crucial. not so much in terms of cost, but just uncertainty about use. and people all being on the same page as what they regard as acceptable, which is where the best practices have been somewhat helpful.

last comments because we have like 15 seconds left. david: thank you. pat: thank you. [applause] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2018] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] >> to us at c-span history. a tweet asking about an issue that still resounds today. this question is about how many people were fathered by u.s. gis in vietnam? how are they treated 45 years after the u.s. departure? >> you could be featured during our next live program. join the conversation at ,acebook. calm/c-span history and on twitter at c-span history. >> sunday on c-span's "q&a." contributor aj with his book

"the accidental president: harry s truman and the four months that changed the world." was terrified to give this speech. he talked about it the night before he prayed to god that he would not mess it up. he climbs the stairs to the public, he looks out and sees his wife in the crowd, she is crying. she is crying because roosevelt is dead. the nation is in shock, and she never wanted to be the first lady, she never wanted her husband to be president. she is frightened for him. he has to get up there and for hisconfidence administration and the whole world. the whole world has to understand that america will continue, that the war will continue. 8:00&a" sunday night at eastern on c-span. in 2014, 5 former u.s.

secretaries of state and secretary john kerry to part in a groundbreaking ceremony for the u.s. diplomacy center. a museum is scheduled to open in 2019. up next, we visit the center's artifact storage area to learn about the history of american diplomacy. historian selected key items from the artifacts to help tell the story. >> we love passports, we have many and we have a fantastic story about the owner of this passport. >> we do. it is the second oldest passport that we have in our collection. it is unusual on many accounts. he was going over to europe because his profession, as his calling card shows, he was a job or -- jobber. buy was somebody where you things in bulk. for him, it was clothing. this is when you start to see

even wealthy people you merging. there is a market for fine silks, market for beautiful gloves, that is what he would do. he would go over to paris and bring that back to new york city where he had a store in current tribeca. in new york, that was the area or you would not go to shop. but if you were a person who had a smaller shop, you would go to and take it to your smaller boutique shop. >> you could see all of the , and this isesign such a unique design. the eagle and the sunburst pattern that you see in the wording around it, that is not a great seal at the time, but there is a decorative element that was applied to passports.

also unique at the time was that the secretary of's date signed the passport. you have secretary of state lewis signature at the bottom. one thing i always love about these old passports is, there were not photographs attached. so he had to describe his features. >> himself. >> there were no standardized terms, he just answered what is the shape of your forehead, or, what are the color of your eyes? what is the shape of your chin, or your nose? he said he had a straight nose, a round chin and an oval face. >> show them the photograph because he has a beard. so for the person identifying him with the round mouth and chin, a big old beard. >> in might everything antigovernment protests in iran,

real america takes -- "reel am >> assignment iran is a u.s. army program from its "big picture" series. it follows an army advisor. persian language school in california, and two-year assignment in iran. the cold war goal was to combat communist guerrillas. this is about 30 minutes. ♪