By Sandy Langer
AAJ: How did you get started in documentary film making?
LN: I became interested in documentary films as a possible career after seeing some of Ken [Burns]'s early films... an interesting film on the Statue of Liberty, a really terrific film on Huey Long, also one on the Brooklyn Bridge (1981). After I saw those, I was really inspired to think that I would one day like to do that. But I really had no idea how difficult it really was--because the films, I think, are so well done that they make it look like it's very easy to do. In fact, it's quite difficult, and there are a lot of decisions and work that go into it that end up quite invisible when the film is finished.
So I began, basically, after studying American Studies in college: working at the Smithsonian for a few years in the history of photography and social history division; then as an intern at WNET in New York on a local public affairs program (Metroline). And I worked my way up to production assistant, researcher, and associate producer on various projects there. Then I worked with Bill Moyers on two major PBS series: Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth (1987) and A World of Ideas with Bill Moyers (1988). And then eventually I found my way to Ken Burns in 1989.
AAJ: What was your first collaboration with Ken Burns?
LN: I came to work with Ken when he was finishing the Civil War series (1990). So I was able to help do the picture clearances as well as the subsequent public relations stuff and marketing--just dealing with the public television stations, and that kind of thing--but I didn't have any creative input into the film.
AAJ: I was going to ask you about the photography and so on.
LN: I wasn't involved in any of that! [Laughs.] By the time I came on, it was pretty much done. So I was honored to put my name on it but I really didn't have anything to do with the creative decisions that made the film what it is.
AAJ: How and when was the idea to produce a jazz documentary conceived?
LN: Well, Geoffrey Ward--who wrote the script for Jazz as well as Civil War, Baseball, and many other Burns films--has always been a great lover of jazz. He and Ken were talking about the idea that one day they might do a film on jazz, but I don't think it was front and center until they were working on the Baseball series.
In the course of working on that film, we determined that we needed to use American music from the different time periods that we were covering--from the 1850s to the present. Each episode was basically a decade of baseball, so we did an episode on the teens, the twenties, the thirties, the forties, the fifties, etc. We went back actually to Jeff's record collection and asked him, "O.K. If we're going to be dealing with America in the thirties, what records should we try to use?" And we found a bunch of great Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and other great jazz from that period and put it in the film. We saw that music really helps to bring this part of American history to life. And I think that was the first time that I'd been exposed to some of that earlier jazz.
Also, in the course of making the series on baseball, I had the privilege of interviewing a gentleman named Gerald Early. He appears a lot in the Jazz series, but in Baseball he was one of our advisors. He had written about baseball, and he agreed to do an interview. When I asked him why he thought baseball was important to America, he said that it was the most beautiful thing he could imagine. And there were only three things America would be remembered for two thousand years from now, when archeologists study our civilization: the Constitution, baseball and jazz!
AAJ: And of course, [Marcel] Duchamp said the Brooklyn Bridge.
LN: There you go! So we put Early's comment in the very first minutes of the Baseball series. We really had a lot of time to think about what he meant, and why what he said was true. We absolutely agreed 100 percent, but really hadn't thought about it before then. I think there's something very American about this idea of improvisation--that you don't necessarily do it the way that everybody else has done it. And there's a fluidity to our society, and the way that we operate, that plays out in baseball... and certainly in competition and its adaptability, and also in jazz.
So by the time we finished the Baseball series--having worked with a lot of great music and listened to what Gerald had to say--we felt that we had begun to understand some things about the twentieth century. It turned out that we really hadn't understood everything (and obviously you never can!). So we sat down after that to talk about future projects. We were already planning on doing [Peabody Award winner] Frank Lloyd Wright (1998). I remember saying to Ken, "You know, we've been talking about doing Jazz for a really long time. And I think, you know: just do it!" He said, "You know, you're absolutely right." He really didn't need me to tell him; it was just something that emerged. And right away he made a few calls and kind of rallied the troops and committed to doing it.
So I think it was just a convergence of things. But neither one of us were really experts on the history of jazz. Part of the fun of what we do is picking interesting subject matter that we think is important, but don't know that much about. If you pick a subject that you already know all about, it's not nearly as interesting to work on as something that you get to learn about and study and discover in the process of doing it.
Jeff Ward already knew a great deal about jazz, but I think even he learned a lot from working on the film. There were parts of the picture that he really hadn't delved into at all. What we tried to do was get a board of expert advisors. We never pretended to be experts--even after the film is done, we're not experts. And we let them guide us. In this case we had a very diverse board of advisors with different opinions. So we had to sort of let everybody have his day, and then try to pick our way through the mine field of which elements to focus on.
AAJ: Well it was quite a mine field, apparently! What were your primary responsibilities as co-producer?
LN: My responsibilities are fairly diverse and broad, and they vary depending on what stage of the project we're in. At the beginning of a project my real job is to try to comprehend the subject as much as possible--think with the music, talk to people, just try to absorb as much as possible about the subject, and what therefore we could try to contain. So I spent about six months just trying to immerse myself as much as possible in the subject. I talked to people and assembled the board of advisors, and identified where the important collections are: photographs, music, archival film, private collections. And then I put all that together in a proposal to funding agencies, and that I can do by myself.
But other producers helped me on this project. The total was 500 pages long, so we divided it up. Different segments and different areas of it went to other producers. I sort of oversaw that to some degree for Ken. He had a lot of input, but he didn't necessarily write the proposal and go into every detail at that stage. And then Ken and I worked with Jeff Ward, the writer, to try and knock out the script. We tried to provide him with raw material: first person voices, newspaper articles, books, and whatever would help him to generate a script.
At the same time, we generated a list of potential interviews worth doing, again with the help of our advisors. Basically we got input from lots of people about who we should really talk to-- and we based that not just on their importance, but also on their ability to speak on camera in a compelling way.
Unfortunately, sometimes people who are really, really important to a particular story don't tell their own story all that well. They've lived it, and they don't necessarily have the perspective or the ability to talk about it. They're shy or withdrawn, or they don't want to do it for a variety of reasons. It's not always the person who's at the center of the moment who actually tells you what you need to know for a television documentary.
Then Ken and I (and another producer, Dave Lacy) conducted all the interviews. I usually helped to prepare for the ones that I didn't conduct. I organized extensive questions just like this [showing me the page and a half of questions I had given her at the beginning of our interview] based on their backgrounds, talking to them ahead of time, sometimes meeting them. I helped Ken or the other producer prepare if I wasn't doing the interview myself. It ended up being broken into thirds, more or less--Ken did some of the really important interviews, but I also did a bunch of them. Then we screened the interviews, picking out the material that's most relevant to our subject and trying to place it within the script... figure out where it should go.
On other projects, I've done a lot of the research as well, but on this project I did not. Another producer, Vicki Gohl, did all the picture research with a staff of people helping her; and Peter Miller did the archival part of the research. So I helped out and guided them a little bit, and I worked with them just to figure out what they should be looking for. But they were pretty independent, and I really didn't have much input. On Baseball I did a lot of research myself, but this was too big, and I was doing too many other things.
So anyway, a lot of what happens after we get all the raw material together is sitting with Ken and some other producers in the editing room. Then we put together a "rough-cut"--an assemblage of the material--and then we watch it and try to make it into an actual film. And you know, we had thirty hours to cut down to seventeen. Actually, we started with hundreds of hours, because the film was a lot longer and very unwieldy.
We had to find a narrative thread and a subplot; figure out which music should go with which characters, and which photographs and which footage to use; and figure out how to make a scene after that. And we also had to identify which stuff we just don't need to know about. That requires two years of constant revision, revision, revision, with rough drafts, rough drafts, rough drafts--revision, revision, revision--until you finally feel like it's done. And after that was all said and done--after getting together with Paul Barnes, the supervising film editor--I supervised all the post production.
AAJ: How did you develop the narrative? You must have had some kind of concept.
LN: Well, yes. Our overall idea was that this is an incredibly important art form that tells us a lot about American culture and history. So we were trying to understand the art form--the artists (the most important artists), and their influence; why they're important, and how influential they were, and in what way. And then we wanted to understand what this art form can tell us about our national experience, in the broadest sense. And so we were trying to marry those different narratives.
It's not purely an art film, it's not purely a social history film... it's a combination. So we had to find a balance between delving deep into the arcana of the musicological story, versus presenting what the music meant to people who listened to it--and danced to it, and went to proms, and worshipped Charlie Parker or whomever.
AAJ: So you wanted a broad-based audience?
LN: Yes. And we always thought that the audience was a broad, general audience--not just people who already know about jazz. Even those people want to know about jazz and to watch it. We hope they do, and we think they have. But we didn't make it for them--we made it for people who know nothing about jazz.
Gerald Early--who I was talking to yesterday--told me that he loves jazz, and he's a big record collector. He listens to music a lot. He grew up listening to jazz. He says he's got two daughters, I think they're in their late teens or early 20s. And they've never been interested in jazz: NEVER! He tried, you know... here are people who actually had access to jazz in their home, and they were not interested. They watched the film, and now they're buying jazz records. And that's what we're trying to do.
We never felt that we had to try to cover everyone. We didn't want to become the jazz telephone book or the jazz encyclopedia. And we know that some people, who love jazz and are deeply involved in it, want to see their favorite trombone player mentioned and celebrated--but that was never our agenda, insofar as we have an agenda.
Our idea was to celebrate this music and make it accessible to people--because a lot of people are either not interested in jazz, or have not been exposed to jazz, or don't understand. Or they think it is too difficult for them. And we don't believe any of that, but we felt that we had to peel away all those barriers--perceived barriers--and present the story in a way that ordinary people could relate to. In order to do that we tried to take a narrative, as opposed to a thematic, approach to this story.
We really think film lends itself best to a story-telling, narrative approach--as opposed to essayistic form. Although essays can be great on film, that's not what we're interested in doing. So rather than have an essay about the meaning of jazz, we're trying to tell a story about how jazz evolved from New Orleans to now. And because of that, we really focused on the most important artists--and we didn't make these decisions based on pulling the names out of a hat. We consulted with the best people to learn who those artists were, and why they mattered.
AAJ: Who were your senior staff advisors and how did you go about selecting them?
LN: Without a list I'm gonna forget somebody...
[From the list: Dan Morgenstern and Wynton Marsalis; and the Board of advisors includes Michael Chertok, James Lincoln Collier, Stanley Crouch, Michael Cuscuna, Dayton Duncan, Julie Dunfey, Gerald Early, Tom Evered, Gary Giddins, Matt Glaser, Joanna Groning, Eric Hobsbaum, Robin D. Kelley, Charlie Lourie, Allen Lowe, Albert Murray, Daniel Okrent, Bruce Boyd Raeburn, Loren Schoenberg, Gunther Schuller, and Margaret Washington.]
AAJ: Which ones did you rely on most for input?
LN: We tried to select a range of people with different opinions. And I know people have said, "Oh well, you have the Lincoln Center triumvirate, blah, blah, blah." But our board of advisors featured many people. Wynton [Marsalis], Stanley Crouch, and Albert Murray are three out of a group of about twenty. And they have our ear as much as anybody else. We heard what they had to say, and we didn't always agree. Our job is to hear all the different input, and then try to sift through it without necessarily favoring one or the other.
AAJ: How do you feel about the response to the series?
LN: We were a little disappointed with some of the responses, because we felt that people who really loved jazz--and had dedicated their lives to celebrating it--would be happy that someone had come along to explain why they loved jazz to more people then had ever heard of it.
AAJ: Do you see your narrative as a "counter-narrative" to a former more traditional interpretation of the Jazz canon? By counter-narrative, I mean talking from the slaves' point of view, as opposed to the plantation owners'--or woman's as opposed to man's.
LN: I'm not sure I understand in the context of jazz. You mean as a working musician?
AAJ: Yes. But widespread emphasis was placed on the idea that this film was about freedom and exposing white-versus-black discrimination. Were you aware of developing a narrative counter to the traditional framing of jazz as music only?
LN: I really don't know what you mean when you mention the "traditional narrative" framing jazz. I've read many books on this music, and I don't think our main emphasis was ever on discrimination. I really don't.
The film is about American society, and the reality of American society. The fact that this music comes out of the black community is undeniable. If you take the top ten or twenty most influential, most creative, most important jazz artists, they're all black. You just cannot get away from that. But our film is not about jazz-as-protest-music or some kind of response to racism. That is not what our film is. Our film is about an art form and the artists who made it. They are black to a large degree, but I don't think we're presenting a counter-narrative to any traditional narrative. We're telling a story of our country and its music. I really can't even answer your question, because I don't necessarily agree with your premise that there's another way of telling it. I don't think that's at all the case.
AAJ: There's been a lot of commentary across the board about anti-Semitism [e.g. David Hajdu's "Not Quite All That Jazz"; www.nybooks.com].
LN: There hasn't been a lot--there's been a little.
CONTINUE
