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Originally published in Current, Aug. 19, 2002
As a boss of producers who was once a producer himself, McGhee says he undersands what producers need an don't need, "where theyhad to be trusted and what a boss couldn't know." Above: McGhee introduces a 1974 documentary he produced at WGBH.
Getting to the truth
David Fanning implied an analogy between program-making and cabinet-making, and you reportedly like cabinet-making enough that you plan to take a course in it when you retire. Is this comparison too neat?
I’ve always enjoyed working in wood, and one of the things that’s satisfying about it is that something tangible results from it. I’ve spent 30-odd years on the production of intangibles—
The tapes assembled on your shelves here look pretty tangible.
These are products of collaboration, and the clumsy wooden objects that I’ll make will at least be me collaborating with my hands.
How long have you been woodworking?
I like woodworking, but I haven’t done a lot of it. I have a bit of a workshop in the country, but I haven’t much used it in the past 15 years.
I had a friend who went through this course, and I’ve seen what others have done who’ve started from a position of no greater expertise than my own. I’ve been encouraged to think I might get to the same place in a couple of years.
You don’t hold the tools of television in your job—instead you appoint others to lead productions. What do you look for in people that you give this much responsibility?
There are a lot of things, but my disposition comes out of having been trained as a journalist and having gone to a Great Books school.
I was a producer myself, and I learned how easy it was and is to cheat. You can make anything appear to be true through the craft. You can make "yes" into "no." You’re under great temptation to exaggerate or modify or make things more exciting than they are.
If your job is to look for the truth in some basic way, and you have as your vehicle a medium in which you could be so easily tempted to go off track, you’d better find people who care so much about getting to the truth that they can resist those siren songs. And that’s a particular person—who cares more about that than they do about glory or financial reward—who really thinks the most significant use of this power is to get at something truthful and important.
I want somebody who’s really committed to that purpose—who genuinely thinks that’s what we’re in it for—not that this is a means to some other end.
Do you often hire producers other than executive producers?
Although by and large I’m removed from production, and my job is not to spend money but to develop programs that can attract money, sometimes an idea and a person is just too appealing and too tempting to resist. This support is modest in financial terms and it’s usually fairly early, when modest support means a lot.
As in the case of The Farmer’s Wife?
David Sutherland had done two or three films before that. You could say I had him under my wing in some way. My hope is that my enthusiasms will be sufficiently contagious that, at some point down the road, Frontline or American Experience will come along and shoulder the real financial load, which was the case with Jeannie Jordan’s Troublesome Creek or The Farmer’s Wife.
We’ve been told that you give people great latitude to make programs, sink or swim. Does the sink or swim option—if that characterizes the mandate you give them—does that motivate them to take full responsibility?
I wouldn’t have put it that way. It’s true that I place my trust in them, and I ask them to place their trust in me. To come to me when they think I should know something, but otherwise to do what they think they should do. If they have a problem, I want to know about it if they think I can help them.
How often do you have to intervene when they bring something to you, or you hear otherwise there are problems, to steer the project a little bit?
In a sense it is quite collaborative. If they have a problem and they come to me, it becomes our problem and we try to work it through. It might be a problem with a person, or with PBS or with program length. It starts out as an hour and now it’s 90 minutes and it needs to be longer and we’re out of funding.
That happened with Ric Burns’s New York. The time and money ran out before the series was done.
You’ve got to understand that every program at the beginning is just a theory. And at the beginning you are embarking on what is an original voyage of discovery. You imagine as Columbus imagined that it’s going to take you somewhere, but it may take you somewhere else, and you may run out of bananas before you reach the other side.
New York is a case in point. There had been no written history that attempted to do what Ric attempted to do in that series. He set out from one shore to another without knowing the width of the ocean between. It was a brilliant series. The final four-hour addition was certainly as good if not greater than the first 10 hours. And there’s an eighth episode planned because, after 9/11 there’s an opportunity to discover what that event has meant to New York.
And that’s going to be presented and eventually packaged in the series?
Yes. PBS and American Experience have committed funds to it, but we’re still short. We still have to raise the money.
But I don’t want to lose the question about producers having troubles. If anything is any good, there are enormous risks associated with the kind of original program-making that we do or we ought to do. As problems arise, we try to solve them. Not all the risks you take pay off, but I would say we have a pretty good record.
When we’re carried past the point where we imagine and we’re not done, or the thing isn’t done well, because we’ve built up a critical mass as a producer—we have a capacity to make sure that we don’t put out something that isn’t right. That may mean we invest our own money—more than we anticipated—to make it right. That is I think the great strength of this institution, and the importance of institutions like this—that an individual producer can never have. The capacity to make things right when things start out wrong.
What you describe isn’t manufacturing at all. It’s very different from producers who schedule their work, buy some limited archival footage, who know how many cuts they have to make and how many hours they can spend in editing.
I wouldn’t denigrate them. If you have a contract from the History Channel for $150,000 for a 60-minute film, you know you’re going to shoot five days. You know you’re going to have three minutes of animation or that you’re going edit for six weeks, and you know you’re going to mix on the 17th of February. You know it all. It is a Procrustean bed in which you goddamn better well lie if you want a contract for another one.
You reportedly called WGBH "a Darwinian jungle."
’GBH is not a jungle—Darwinian or any other kind. I used the term to describe the realm of the producer in public television.
Darwin becomes a metaphor for the larger enterprise in which we and other producers are joined. No one is entitled to funding or a place in the schedule by dint of who they are. Everyone has to struggle to make something and make something good. It is a system that is at once painful because people die, and in some ways invigorating, because the fitter things survive.
I used the Darwin metaphor before Evolution came along. Then I developed a more sophisticated understanding so that I don’t use it anymore.
Things were different in the early days of public television. Fred Friendly of the Ford Foundation had a vision for public television that said, "Los Angeles will be the entertainment capital. New York will be the financial capital. Washington will be the political capital. On these three legs the stool of public television will rest." In his architecture, there wasn’t a place for Boston.
I think Boston benefited from that. Right from the get-go it was thrown into the swim. It didn’t have an entitlement. It could only get what it got for itself. That was true of Boston before I came here. I came here around the time of the creation of CPB and the Ford Foundation’s evanescence from general support.
A lot of WGBH’s greatest growth has happened since you’ve been here, but I imagine some things that enabled it to make its way were planted by the nature of the institution, by individuals. Would you talk about why this institution has been stable and had such high standards for so long?
Boston was not disabled by the sense it was entitled to something. And it was set in a community that is alive with ideas and intellectual ambition.
The WGBH that I came to might have had 150 people in it. I came to help start The Advocates, but I remember going to what was described as "all staff meeting." It was called to discuss ideas that people had for programs. This was under Michael Rice. It was in such a dramatic contrast to the environment that I had come from. I came from National Educational Television (NET) in New York.
How were ideas proposed back at NET?
There it was much more about territory—people looking over their shoulders and jockeying for position. It was a completely different culture. It wasn’t a culture of ideas; it was a culture of position and power.
It wasn’t about the same thing. Here it was all about ideas for programs, and it didn’t matter whose ideas they were—it was whether they were good ideas.
That’s been at the heart of ’GBH from its founding, and I wish I could say that I have preserved it. I certainly believe in it, and I think [WGBH President Henry Becton] believes in it. That an idea that’s good is good, no matter whose it is.
David Fanning says that you told him, "I always wanted to be the boss I never had." Could you elaborate?
Because I was a producer, I understood what producers need and what they didn’t need. I understood, for example, where they had to be trusted and what a boss couldn’t know. When I became the boss of producers, I felt I was in a better position to be their champion than the people I had worked for.
So you couldn’t know what producers knew, because they were deep in the voyage?
You can’t be where they are, and you can’t think you know as much as they do, so you better be able to trust what they tell you about where they are. And you better be able to know that they’re going after it.
This kind of producing is extremely difficult—and maybe this is something else I understood from having been a producer. To do this kind of work, you have to become obsessed by it, and it occupies your whole existence for six months, nine months. Then, in an instant, it gets fired out into the gloaming. You’re the horse and the program is the jockey, and you’re going at breakneck speed. The horse hits a stone wall; the jockey goes flying into space. You’ve been going full-tilt for six months. It’s been your whole life, and then it’s over. A week later—two weeks later—somehow you have to pick yourself up and get on the track again.
It sounds like postpartum depression.
Exactly. Some people take longer than others to recover from it, and some people never fully recover, so each time they go through it, they’re diminished. And at a certain point they just can’t get back up on that horse again.
The best of them are like Ric. A project occupies his whole life, and somehow at the end he has the interest, the vitality, to go on with something else.
In fact, what many producers do is they begin to develop the next thing before the last is done, so they’re not left in the chasm of despair.
Your colleagues noted that you never put your name on programs as executive-in-charge. Why?
My own feeling about credits is, if you’ve made the investment of time that are made by people who work on programs, and you see how fast the credits roll by and how many others have to be credited, it is grotesque to insert yourself as if you had something significant to do with the program, when you haven’t. There isn’t enough credit to start with.
Your job involves getting programs off the ground, which is a pretty big contribution.
I know the part I play, and I feel well rewarded for that. But I don’t have my fingerprints on each particular program. Other people’s fingerprints are all over it.
You mentioned your early assignment, producing The Advocates. Could you describe the program?
It was a courtroom-formatted public affairs debate program. It was built around the proposition that there are questions before one or another level of government, about which arguments could be made pro and con. What we could do in the program was to model those arguments, and to test them.
Two advocates would present witnesses and cross-examine each other’s witnesses around what was called a decidable question—for instance, "Should the United States withdraw from Vietnam?" In five years we did hundreds of questions. They were always practical questions that were before some level of government— a state government, Congress, the President or a Cabinet officer.
What did you take away from that experience?
It was a sort of graduate school in a whole range of public affairs issues. One thing that I took away from it was the appreciation that what made the questions that the government was confronted with difficult was that there were good arguments on both sides.
So it was an opportunity to deal with the issues of truth that you were talking about earlier.
Yes. And it wasn’t just for me. There were a whole bunch of us working on The Advocates who continued at ’GBH and are now in fairly senior programming positions. Elizabeth Deane has done many of the presidential series for American Experience; Peter Cooke, he’s doing Antiques Roadshow; Austin Hoyt, another senior producer of programs for American Experience.
Judy Crichton told us that when American Experience set out to do its biography of Nixon, you prescribed a certain mental exercise for the producers. It was telling them they had to deal with why so many Americans liked Nixon. Is that a typical example of ways you set parameters?
That’s an expression of the same idea. If you look at "Nixon," you’ll see that we have done some justice to his complexity. If we haven’t made him quite into the tragic hero, there is something tragic about him.
If all our ambition was to see Nixon in the conventional liberal stereotype, or as a heroic victim, we would merely have been offering something familiar to people who either believed it entirely or wouldn’t listen to it. In displaying the complexity of Nixon, I hope we gave pause to people on the left and the right.
Introduction
Web page posted Sept. 4, 2002
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