JoAnne Garrett:
In making documentaries, 'you never have it figured out'
Originally published in Current, Dec. 12, 1994
By Steve Behrens
The old man, James Cameron, stands at a window in the abandoned jailhouse in Marion, Ind., recalling the night when a mob chanted, "We want Cameron!" over and over. They wanted him to come out so they could lynch him.
JoAnne Garrett produced the half-hour documentary for public television, but it's no insult to say that it tells its as effectively as the most evocative long features on National Public Radio. The pictures only add to its power.
Garrett, 39, who has worked in public TV production for more than a dozen years at Wisconsin PTV--and her colleagues and audiences--are beneficiaries of the fact that Wisconsin has a substantial, ongoing production house that can train young people, give them experience, and produce works like "A Lynching in Marion."
The program, which airs in Wisconsin in February 1995 and will be distributed nationally by Central Educational Network (CEN), demonstrates how a healthy flow of production activity breeds more and better programs.
The lynching documentary grew out of research for a piece of the 1992 project "Confronting Violence." After interviewing James Cameron, who now lives in Milwaukee, she knew a short segment in the documentary couldn't do justice to his hair-raising story. To make a half-hour program, Wisconsin PTV went to CEN for a regional production grant supported by CPB.
Garrett paces the storytelling, inserting bits of national context, reminding us how white mobs in many communities used lynching as "rituals of humiliation meant to impose their social order, white over black," while running a long crawl of the names of lynching victims.
The program segues into Cameron's personal story with a motif that returns occasionally: wind in the trees against a gray sky. It was a windy day when the crew took Cameron back to interview him again in Marion, and Garrett suggested that videographer/editor Everett (Butch) Soetenga catch some shots of trees tossing in the wind. As Cameron tells his story, he's shown in slow-motion, walking in the wind, then poking around in the old Indiana jail where he was almost killed more than 60 years ago. Garrett's husband, staff sound recordist Brad Wray, adds to the effect with bluesy guitar passages.
Cameron clearly lived through the night, but just by a hair, as he tells it. Tune in to find out how. Garrett does offer a newspaper clipping to corroborate the tale, but she chooses not to hunt up other eyewitnesses. It's the survivor's story, and she leaves it that way. "This documentary is his word on it," she says.
She's the good cop
Garrett is better known as senior producer of Wisconsin's Collaborative Documentary Project, which has coordinated and packaged a series of PBS specials in the past two years. One of them, "Move Over: Women and the '92 Campaign," received a Silver Baton in the duPont-Columbia Awards. To assemble the single-topic hours, the project brings together segments of three to 12 minutes apiece from various public TV stations. She and Executive Producer Dave Iverson share the job of dealing with producers outside Wisconsin.
"You have to have a good cop and a bad cop," says Iverson. "I'm usually the bad cop."
For a 1993 collaborative project, "High School Stories: One Day in America's Schools," Garrett and Iverson solicited segments on an assertive Haitian-born girl in Cambridge (from WGBH), a girl who is probably considered "at-risk" of academic failure at an alternative school she loves (New Hampshire PTV), a religious but modern home-schooling family in Minnesota (KTCA), a tiny high school for gay teenagers in Manhattan (WNYC), isolated rural schools (North Carolina PTV and Nebraska ETV), and a Lummi Indian boy who thrives when he moves to a tribal school (KCTS, Seattle).
"We wanted to show how different life can be," says Garrett, and to heighten the contrasts, she and Iverson asked the producers to confine their shooting to one day per segment. The hour is packed with sights, impressions, personalities and the characteristic hopefulness of youth. A 60-minute magazine program can really tell a lot of stories when there are no commercials! Though the segments end up fitting together like siblings in a harmonious family, there are underlying stylistic differences. WNYC, for instance, produced its segment without professional narration. You don't miss it--the kids provide the voices.
Seductive musical fragments with a hip-hop beat separate the pieces, though Garrett says she ended up wishing the program hadn't rushed along so efficiently. "I think that show needed a little more breathing room. People need to have breaks, so they can feel the moment out."
10 days to air
The collaborative project's big trophy was "The Flood of '93," aired July 23 of that year, with segments from stations throughout the waterlogged Midwest.
"That project took 10 days from Jo walking in and saying, 'Hey, we should do this,' " says Iverson.
As midwestern rivers rose beyond the levees, Garrett recalls that she "kind of innocently" mentioned in a meeting that Wisconsin should call producers in Minnesota and Iowa and patch together a half-hour on the crisis. As she recalls it, station manager Byron Knight said, No, they should call up and down the river and do a national show.
Wisconsin, unlike many producers in the system, has many options when matching a subject with a production of appropriate scale. Since 1992 it has had the option of packaging a national hour for PBS.
"To me, there's no other way PBS could have done that special on the flood, other than the Collaborative Project," says Iverson.
"We were one of the first networks to have something on about the flood," says Garrett. "It was a way of showing that local public television stations can move quickly."
Garrett is enthusiastic about the project's experiments with off-line digital editing. As she describes the process, editors using Avid postproduction systems select the videotape segments they want to use, make digital copies of them in the system's disc memory and manipulate the digital copies of the shots in much the way a writer uses a word processor. When editing is done, the system provides an edit list for assembly of the actual videotape.
Producers in another city can send a cartridge with their edits to Madison, for example, where Wisconsin producers can propose tweaks or major changes by re-doing it and sending it back for consultation. "We can say, 'I'd edit it this way--here's my version," says Garrett. Though the collaborators are separated by hundreds or thousands of miles, they can talk back and forth, showing exactly what's on their minds.
The good jobs are all taken
Garrett started on Wisconsin PTV's student crew before she graduated with a B.A. in communication arts in 1978. Three years later, a part-time researcher/writer job opened up on the state network's cinema series--"Go find all the information on Betty Grable--that kind of thing," Garrett recalls.
The network wanted to keep her.
"Jo is just really smart," says Iverson, who especially admires her as an essayist. "She has brains. She's a very talented and bright individual. What I always look for is smart people, because the rest is pretty teachable."
The problem was that the positions where young producers are taught through experience are fairly scarce. Even in a fairly big shop like Wisconsin, the full-time producer jobs are often all taken. "People come at age 30 and hang around," says Iverson. "This is a pretty good place to work, and we have good projects here, so people stay." There's stability and growth opportunity for people who work there, but relatively few people get a crack at becoming producers.
Iverson says he'd like to think Wisconsin PTV would have kept Garrett around somehow, but the factor that let her develop quickly as a producer was a training grant of the kind that CPB was then giving out to women and members of minority groups to learn broadcasting. She was one of three or four young people given CPB training grants in 1983. CPB discontinued the grants several years later.
The grant was "just invaluable," says Garrett. It allowed her to work full-time and handle production of entire segments and programs. "It was producing. That's not the same as running camera or hanging lights. . . . It gives you a chance to learn your trade, in a way you don't get in academia." She got a chance to learn production by producing full-time for Wisconsin Magazine.
Garrett proposed a short piece on the differences between the ways that boys and girls look at the world. One of the differences, she found, is that females must live with the possibility of rape. The program grew to become "Rape: The Boundaries of Fear," and she ended up writing it. The program aired in '86.
The next year, she expanded a Wisconsin Magazine segment on the Wisconsin-born magician Houdini to the half-hour PBS documentary that shared his name. It won NATPE's Iris Award for entertainment programs.
She benefitted from mentors who could tell her things like, "I wouldn't do that, Joanne," or "Your transitions are weak."
"I was very fortunate to be at a place where excellence was expected," she says. Moreover, she counts herself lucky to have started at the University of Wisconsin-based network, where there was a tradition of training, and outlets for short productions--Wisconsin Magazine--as well as longer ones.
Garrett was named senior producer for documentary series in 1988 and worked on several successors to Wisconsin Magazine, including 7 Central, a series of 26 half-hour docs and then five American Journey half-hours, each containing a pair of non-celebrity profiles in 30 minutes.
Garrett has now headed nine multistate collaborative documentaries at Wisconsin, most recently "The Flood of '93,'' "Reinventing Government in America," "Campaign '94: Religion and Politics," and "America's Battlegrounds"--the last three aired in 1994.
At the moment, she's working with videographer/editor Chuck France on a travelogue of Wisconsin's state-designated "Rustic Roads," probably for broadcast during a pledge drive. The state network brought in a publisher to do a coffee-table book to accompany the show.
Wisconsin is now planning future collaborative projects. Garrett wants to do a sequel to last month's "America's Battlegrounds," next time focusing more narrowing on some particular kind of conflict, such as sites of labor struggles or "battles of inclusion."
Garrett and Iverson aren't thinking, or permitting themselves to talk, about applying cash or steroids to the project and making it a fixture of the national schedule. The project could become the prototype for an ongoing program as ambitious as Frontline or The American Experience, which are nominally put together by consortia or partnerships among stations; this one could be a real collaboration using ideas and talent from large stations and small.
She thinks the project is a good vehicle to share a lot more productions, but points out that it was started to benefit the viewers in Wisconsin. "When you talk about taking on a bigger project, in order to do it well, you need a big structure in place."
Bigger is not everybody's idea of better. There's some kind of excitement for Garrett in every individual documentary ahead.
"Each particular subject demands that you respect the subject and find the best way to tell the story," observes Garrett. "You never have it figured out. Each time you start a project, you are at Square One. You're never 'done.' "
"If I'm falling into a pattern, then I'm failing. I need to let the story tell me how to tell it."
Over time, a producer picks up skills at using natural sound or music, or how to write for the ear and the pictures, she says, "but the trick is always to walk through the forest this time."
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