Audio: David Atwood on 30 years at WGBH-TV

From Joel Olicker at Powerderhouse Productions:

David Atwood got hired at WGBH-TV in 1965, for 80 bucks a week. He worked his way up from hanging lights in the studio to directing thousands of hours of groundbreaking TV over a four decade career. He’s worked with everyone from Julia Child to Alistair Cooke to Nam June Paik.

One of his secret weapons from the 70s: a bag full of coaxial cable jumpers of varying lengths to correct the “color phase” of video art projects that would have otherwise been rejected by the engineers on technical grounds.

Transcript: David’s Career in Television

Joel Olicker (in italics) interviewed David Atwood in 2015.

So David, I met you in the mid-eighties, ’cause I showed up at GBH in ’85.

Right.

And so you had been there for 20 years already, right?

Twenty years. Well, yeah. I came in ’65. I left in 1980 to go to work for Qube Columbus, but came back as a freelancer in ’82 and actually I never stopped ’cause they were hiring me back to direct things even while I was working for Qube in Columbus.

Wow.

So I was doing, Pops, Evening at Pops.

So I, I grew up in New York and I basically came to Boston after college. A lot, in, absolutely one of the major driving forces for me coming to Boston was because GBH was there. It was a big, it was a big deal.

It was a big deal.

It still is a big deal in a way, but it was… I remember as a kid watching Nova and watching Zoom and thinking, wow, that is fantastic. And, and so and falling in love with documentaries as a kid. So it was a real magnet for me. You, you, though, showed up in such early days. What was it like? Can you tell me what, what was it like in…

Well, you know…

Yeah, how did you wind up?

I had, I was about to get married. I was about… I needed a job. My history and government degree from the University of Maine went into the top drawer and stayed there. And the only experience I had was four years of television production in, in commercial television up in Maine. So I made an alphabetical list of the stations and WBZ was first. I went to WBZ. They said, “Well, we might put you in the mailroom.” So I kinda went, “The mailroom? I don’t think so.” So I went to WGBH, which happened to be desperate for people. They’d had a whole bunch of people leave. And I was just basically hired on the spot. This is Monday. “Can you start Wednesday?” “Sure.”

Wow.

You know, at the astounding amount of 80 bucks a week.

Which was a lot of money, right, in ’65?

Which was decent.

Yeah.

It was decent. Right after that, they hired two young women at 50 bucks a week each.

Mmm.

So it was, it was exciting. I had never been anything, I had never been in public television. I had never been in a station that had ten cameras. The most cameras I’d ever seen in my life were two…

Right.

…at once, and…

But let me, can I ask you a question? So this was before PBS even existed. Do you remember?

Yes.

So what, what was, what was the notion of public television? What was the concept?

Well, there was a lot of “bicycling” in programming. There was the Eastern Educational Network. And so programs, we were creating that were bicycled around by tape, two-inch tape.

Literally somebody would physically carry, right.

Literally, literally mailed to the next station, and then sent on to the next station, and, and, and whatever. And we did a lot of live programming. We did College Sport of the Week back when people weren’t doing sports. We did endless amounts of talk shows. We were doing, doing symphony. So we did, so GBH was doing a whole smattering of things, culturally and some political affairs, and…

And what, what were you working on? What, what did you…

Well, I was originally on the crew. In fact, that’s where for years where everybody went.

Right.

Before they, even producers went on the crew.

Wow.

Some never even lasted, they never made it.

And when you say the crew…

The studio crew.

So the guys, the cameras and the sound.

Camera, lighting, sound, all that stuff.

And is that what you wanted? Were you into that stuff?

I, I didn’t know. I mean I was, needed a job. And I had some experience.

Right.

So the first thing I did is I found myself 18 feet in the air on an EcoLift, you know, moving 150-pound lights, which was not thrilling very much. But that’s what we all did.

Yeah.

We, we, we lit shows, we set, set them, lit ’em, struck ’em. And then a little while into that, they asked me to run camera, which I told them I knew how to run camera, so I ran camera. And they went, “Oh, he knows how to run camera.”

All right, so wait, so because we’re both gearheads, what were, tell me about the cameras. What was…

Those days, the RCA TK60 black and white cameras, lens turret, four lens, four lenses, fixed focal-length lenses. Studio skills were a big deal. And there was a culture there that people that I looked up to. Learning how to dolly a camera, how to, how to move your picture through the air. Right? You know, doing moves where you’re coming, you know, down and in at the same time with this 300-, 200-pound camera, pedestaling camera, changing lenses quietly. We only had like two zoom lenses, I think, and they were both on the mobile units. And it was all fixed focal length.

All right, so, so can I ask you? Were you, so you were behind this camera, which was on a pedestal. And the pedestal, you had a…

Up and down counterweight.

Up and down, like…

Counterweight.

Counterweight. And could, so, and you also could push it forward and backward and left…

And sideways.

Sideways. And so you, you had to have the physical strength to move this? Start a smooth move and end a smooth move and have it be…

Absolutely.

…coherent throughout.

Absolutely.

So it was a physical, it was very physical.

Yeah, it was physical but you learned how to use, how, how to move the camera. So it wasn’t like you were really straining to get something because you learned the technique of exactly how to point the wheels and exactly how to push and with what and use your feet and, and everything. And then dolly over the floor in a smooth, in a smooth move. I mean everybody was smoking at that time and the worst thing you could do was leave a cigarette butt on the floor.

Yeah.

Your, your colleagues would get furious at you if they ran over a cigarette butt, cigarette butt that you had left on the floor.

Because it would bump your, bump your move.

Yeah, which is…

Right.

…which would drive people…

So people were literally smoking while shooting? Like the crew was just smoking.

In the control room, out in the studio, the talent was. It was just horrible.

Yeah. I know, I, I kinda remember those days, too, but it was, it seems so funny in retrospect.

So about a year and nine months into my studio crew gig, ’65, ’67 I think, they called me into the office and said, “We need a director and it’s you.” Okay, I thought. You know, sure. So I started directing.

And so what was that transition like?

I think that was a really tough transition. The transition is that standing behind the camera with somebody else directing, you knew exactly how you could do it, and in fact do it better than they were doing it.

Exactly.

And the minute you landed in the control room all those ideas went away. And now you’re sitting looking at 15 or 20 monitors and you have people on either side of you and nothing happened until you spoke, you know. And wow, where did all my great ideas go? So it was kinda like I always felt I was just like hanging on, surviving. And, and we were doing all these live shows. I mean literally go from studio to studio. You finish one show and out of your seat and change studios and…

Really? What were some of those shows?

Talk shows, Elliot Norton Reviews.

Oh, yeah.

Things like that.

Yeah.

You know, just two camera. We were also doing shows for the Navy, educational shows.

Oh, that’s interesting.

Yeah, they were being, they were, they were shot on tape and they were kinescoped to 16mm film and then put on the submarines.

Wow.

So that people would take courses.

Wow.

And so they’re basically a Harvard Extension course.

How cool!

Yeah. So we do, those were half-hour shows. And they each had their own set.

So you’d come into work in the morning. You would start directing. Direct one show. Were, were these live shows or were these…

Live, live on tape.

Wow.

Most, a lot of live.

Yeah?

Later on tape.

And so people sitting in the studio kinda like, you know, the Emily Rooney thing now. But obviously a long time ago. And it was all black and white, right?

It was black and white until, until… So yeah. So at the exact same time that I made the transition from a, as a cameraman to a director, in came color. Okay? So in black and white, we did everything with those cameras. We dollied them on the floor. We created special mounts for them. We hung ’em from the grid. We could, you know, Dutch ’em. We did all this stuff with these black and white cameras. Right?

With these monstrous cameras.

They were monstrous, but you know. So when color came in, they would start lining the cameras up in the morning for the late afternoon or early evening show.

And when you say “lining them up,” you mean…

Lining them up, registering, setting all the little parameters.

Yeah.

And these things. I mean they took more care and feeding that you could imagine.

So you needed an engineer who was devoted just to tweaking?

And in fact, the first series I think I started directing called Brattle Street Forum was a three-camera show. But I never got my third camera until I was in the show live. And the rehearsals were out. I mean…

Because, because they didn’t have time to get the third camera in place?

They couldn’t, they couldn’t get them. They were always lining them up. So, so I didn’t have a chance, we didn’t have a chance.

To rehearse.

We didn’t have the cameras…

Right.

…until like the last second. This was early, early on. So all the black and white tricks where I could have the cameras and check all the shots and do all this stuff – gone. No, we’re lining them up. They’re on a chart. You can’t touch ’em. You’ll get ’em, you’ll get ’em by air time. Oh, great, thanks. So, so it was a, I think it was a hard transition. I, I… Austin Hoyt and I went to the BBC to study a show they were doing. They sent us over years later and we spent like a week or two weeks there. It was great, just observing and talking and meeting people. And I realized that they had a whole system of bringing directors up to speed on the craft.

Oh, interesting.

You know?

Yeah.

I wasn’t brought up to speed. I was thrown in the chair.

Yeah.

I didn’t get up to speed for like five years.

So what kinds of things did you learn there that you, that hadn’t occurred to you or that… Anything that you remember?

Just that they had this process.

Yeah.

They had a process for creating directors.

Yeah.

And taking them through all these steps of kind of training and working with people who knew part of the craft. What we did is you just, you followed the people that you admired.

Right.

Or maybe you had a mentor. Like Bill Cosel was a mentor to me.

Right.

I mean, you didn’t, we didn’t spend a lot of time talking about the craft. You do this or do that. There was, you’d observe.

Right. So I think for a lot of people, you know, it’s a very mysterious thing – a TV director. We, we see it on TV, in movies and TV shows. But it looks like just somebody saying “take one, take two, move in here, move in there.” Tell me about your, like storytelling and how, how do you think about what you’re doing.

Well, I think in the first place, we’re not drama directors. We were, we were camera directors.

I see.

In those days, but, but in those days you were the, also the manager of the studio. Once the show came to the studio. Until the time the show came to the studio, the producer was basically the manager. But, but once you were in the studio set up, set and light and production, the director was the manager. And I jokingly, not so jokingly, say “nothing moved until I walked into the studio.” Like what do you want to do about this? What do you want to do about that? And so you learned to be a manager. And a lot of the stuff, I mean I grew up in real-time television, live television. Live, real time. And I learned from observing people how they shot it, how they prepared to shoot it, how they rehearsed, how they blocked. And I learned that by the time I went in the control room, I knew almost every shot in the show.

Really?

I just didn’t know when I was gonna take it.

Yeah.

Because that was determined by…

What was happening.

Live, live.

Right.

But you learned, you’re gonna start here and open here, and then it went into a discussion of whatever. I, I was fortunate. I AD’d for one fabulous drama director and I learned more from him in that one show than I think I learned in five years.

Really! Do you remember what, any, any specific lessons?

He, he had… I did two of these shows. The first one I did with another director who blocked the whole show and then got in the control room. And he had never done control room before. And he looked at me and says, “You’re gonna have to cut this.” And I cut it but badly ’cause I wasn’t prepared to. I had written down shots. Working with this director, all the rehearsals we did which is not in the studios, but outside the studios with taped-off floors, he never wrote down a shot. I stood there like a good AD with my book in my hand and my pencil poised over every line to write down shots. So the night before we were working in the studio, he invited me to his club on Commonwealth Avenue, an exclusive men’s club. We’d had a lovely dinner. And he said, “By the way, bring your book.” So I brought my book. So we had a lovely dinner and then we retired to the smoking room afterwards. He took out his book. He said, “Well, okay, let’s, let’s put the shots down.” And I went, “Put the shots down? Like why haven’t we been doing this all the way along?”

Yeah.

And we went right through and he put every shot down.

You mean he wrote it, he, in his head…

Here it’s gonna be this, it’s gonna be this. Right.

Okay.

So that’s when I realized he knew every shot in the show and he knew it because he blocked it. And as he was blocking it, he was shooting it.

In his head.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

Absolutely. He knew every move. He knew…

And that was a, that was a revelation.

So then we went into the studio and I thought, wow, you know what I mean. This is an old-time director. I wonder if he’ll be able to actually cut the show.

Yeah, yeah.

So I sat there. Of course he cut it perfectly, perfectly.

Now when you say “cut it”…

Cut the cameras.

You mean in other words, you’re talking about live, take one, take three.

Yeah, yeah. Ready two, two, two take.

And he, so he, he knew his script and he did it. Was he referring to anything or no, it was just all in his head?

Yeah, he was referring but…

Yeah.

…he’d blocked it. He, he had cut the shots, taken the shots, and cut the shots as he blocked, every scene that he blocked with his actors.

Wow. That’s great.

Every line.

Do you remember who it was?

Fielder Cook. And that’s when I learned, and I started from that time on, even though it was a talk show, not a drama, I, I…

Did it that way.

…took every shot as I was blocking it. You need to be here, you need to be there. Or even blocking where people were gonna stand and stuff like that. You took, you take the shots.

Fantastic.

Yeah, it was a great lesson.

So, so you were… For, for almost 20 years before I showed up, you were basically a director at GBH.

Yeah, I was a director from ‘67 to ’80 when I left…

Okay.

…to go work for Warner-Amex Qube in Columbus, Ohio. And I did… We would, we, we were generalists in those days. We did everything.

Right.

We could do everything from music to sports to talk to…

It was all just TV.

Yeah. I mean, so we did sym-, symphony and pops and all kinds of, all kinds of different shows.

And, and what was the culture like? What was the, your memories of the people and the, the vibe?

My mem-… I think ’65 to ’80 was a really great period of time. We would, we would do so many… We got into video art…

Yeah.

…which was a side kind of hobby. Those of us who accepted it or got into it, were interested in it. I did somehow. So that was like fascinating. And now we’re working with artists who had all new ideas about how to do move cameras.

Yeah, so, so, so I remember reading about this. GBH… Was this the late seventies? It was, it was called like the Experimental Television Workshop.

It was the New Television Workshop.

New Television Workshop.

That was part of it.

Okay.

Yeah, it started with a series on the PBL Laboratory magazine show when we were invited to come to New York to be the producer-directors of this segment with six different artists; each artist gonna do a different piece. And that’s, and we had been doing a lot of stuff. I mean Freddie Barzyk was doing What’s Happening Mr. Silver, which was pretty revolutionary on its own. I was doing Mixed Bag, which was the old jazz show, I did jazz show which was live. Then it turned to Mixed Bag ’cause they wanted to expand the format to other types of music. And we started doing light shows and crazy and I was switching my own shows and double and triple exposing cameras on the switcher. Doing everything that the engineers just absolutely hated. So we got into doing that. That was a whole different…

Yeah.

And then coming out of the…

This is the TV version of like psychedelic, the whole, the whole psychedelic thing.

Totally.

That’s cool!

Yeah, we had light shows, we had light show groups.

Does any of that stuff exist?

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Well, I took… I mean for years they threw out two-inch tapes because they, there was no storage.

Right. So you have some of those?

Oh, I took 20 or 30 tapes home and some of the…

Oh, man.

I think I had the first show ever done in color at WGBH.

Oh, my god. You are an archive.

Oh, not just me. Fred Barzyk and others.

Really?

Others did too, and 20 or 30 years later they were, “You have those tapes?” “Yeah, would you like ’em back?” “Oh, my god, yes.”

So you gave ’em back?

Yeah.

Oh, okay. Good.

And then they made…

Copies.

…archival copies, preservation copies.

Right.

So, so we have ’em, yeah.

That’s great. That’s great.

Yeah, we have ’em. It was, it was fun stuff.

And so I, I remember reading about Nam June Paik was there.

Nam June.

Peter Campus. Do you remember him? So, so what kind of stuff? There was keying, right? Optical illusions.

Every, well, every artist had a different thing they wanted to do. Paik was one of the six original artists for Medium Is the Medium. And then he was interested in continuing doing more stuff, and we were interested in continuing with him. We got a Rockefeller grant for him, as we did with other, other artists. And I was the, I was Paik’s producer or minder.

What kind of guy was he? What was he like?

Oh, Paik was great. I actually roomed with him for, for a year.

Really?

He was great. He was so selfless. He always spread the wealth around in terms of.…

Credit?

…people contributing to every project.

Yeah.

I mean he really played himself down. And yet, he was the brains behind the whole thing. But his, his goal was, after working with us in the studio, then he went off and developed this video synthesizer thing, which was all made out of commercial industrial cameras and spare parts and, and everything. And the video synthesizer became an incredible tool…

Yeah.

…for making video art.

Yeah.

You’d have it and a lot of artists used it and I babysat it for years.

Really?

I was, I was the synthesizer’s minder.

And what was it? What was the synthesizer?

Well, it was this collection of small black and white cameras, industrial cameras, and Paik’s monitors that he had redone the coils on, which could twist images in every different way. So there’s about 10 or 15 cameras and there was these encoders covered with the dials where you could mix color in and mix color out.

Oh, wow. It sounds so cool.

I know, I know.

Like an early version of the Toaster. Remember the Toaster?

Yeah, yeah. Engineering hated it. They hated it.

Oh, yeah.

They just… In fact, they would… When we’d go, we’d have these record sessions scheduled with Paik or with Ron Hays, the fabulous video artist, the late Ron Hays, who just did amazing things on the synthesizer. We’d have these record sessions. And so I’d go in to master control and say, “Okay, we’re scheduled on the log today to record the synthesizer.” And an engineer would look at me like, “Do we have to?”

Oh, here we go again.

Yeah. And then they would, some would even forget where the patch was on the patch panel. And they’d say, “Oh, I don’t know, that patch, I don’t know where it is we patch it in.” And I’d get down on my hands and knees. I’d go, “I think it’s right here.”

Yeah.

I put my finger on it. And they’d roll their eyes. So then there was, then it was always out of color phase. Color has phase if you…

Yeah, yeah.

…look at a vectorscope. And they’d go. “Well, it’s, it’s, you can see, you can see it’s too far out of phase. We’re not gonna be able to…” But I knew that if I put video cable in line, that video cable was two degrees per foot, two degrees of phase for every foot of video cable. So I had this plastic green frog in the synthesizer full of video cables of every imaginable length. Then I’d go, “Well how far is it?” I’d go in, I’d splice together these video cables, put ’em in line where the signals going. And I’d come back in and I’d go, I’d say, “How’s it now?” “Oh, yeah, it’s closer. I guess we can adjust it now.”

Wow.

We went through this little dance…

Every time.

…every time.

That’s so funny. So…

And then the artist would go, “Phew. David, thank you” because, you know…

Right.

So that was, that was fun. But we were also doing symphony, pops, some, some really important talk shows. I did, I did the pilots for The Advocates.

Wow.

Oftentimes I was thrown into the first-time-out shows, the pilots of…

Yeah.

Tough.

And so you left in ’80.

Yeah, I went, I had, I had been there 15 years and I was, should have probably moved on before that, but I was having too much fun. And I got a job offer to go work for Qube as a manager.

Yeah, so, so tell me about Qube because we talked about it a little bit before, but I didn’t… How did, how they did find you? And, or did you find them? And what was it? It was kind of a big deal at the time.

It was a big deal. It was unique in the world. It was two-way interactive cable. We could, we could take, take the… We could read everybody’s cable box and tell what they’re watching every 20 seconds in the whole of Columbus, Ohio. Plus there were these response buttons where people could respond, play games, they could choose plays. We did a whole football game in which the audience chose the next play.

Wow. So this was like an early experiment in interactive TV…

Yes. Yes.

…which at one point everyone was touting as the next big thing…

Yes.

…before the internet came along and…

Right. And I knew the guy who was the general manager of it, Scott Kurnit…

Oh, yeah.

…’cause he was from WGBY. And he just called me up and said, “I got an opening for a manager out here, production manager out here.

Wow.
DA; And so I went from directing to being a manager and…

And did he go on to be a fairly big deal at Time Warner or AOL?

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Way up there.

Yeah.

Still is.

Yeah.

I haven’t talked to him in a long time. Wish he’d come to a reunion. And that was fun for… It was just different for a year or however, two years, almost two years.

Yeah, so what were you doing? You were basically a manager?

I was a manager.

So you weren’t…

I had like 50 employees.

Yeah.

Three departments.

And how did you find the transition from being a hands-on creative, also a manager, but now more…

Just like the transition from cameraman to director, I found out that all the wonderful managerial things that I inherently knew and would do when I was not a manager were a lot harder to implement…

Yeah.

…than I thought.

Yeah. It looks so easy from…

But it was fun. And, and, and Qube was doing a lot of just really wonderful experimental stuff that… Qube was there to show off the interactive and to experiment with programming. And if anybody came in with a programming idea that was new, it hadn’t been done using the two-way interactive, bingo!

So why, why did you leave?

Well, I think I wanted to get back into production.

I’m sure Columbus, Ohio, was an exciting place.

It wasn’t, no.

I was being sarcastic.

No, I know. No, it, it, it wasn’t. And my family’s all back on the east coast.

Yeah. Yeah.

And my girlfriend at the time was back on the east coast. And it was just like, okay.

Enough.

It’s, it’s enough. It’s time to, it’s time to go back. And so I came back and went back into, became a freelancer. And Joan Wilson, blessed her heart, immediately signed me up to do Masterpiece Theatre intros.

So you came back to Boston and started freelancing.

Went right back into GBH.

Had you been a staff person?

I was on staff at GBH, yeah, yeah.

But, but when you came back, you never were staff again? You were a freelancer.

No, never staff again, always a contractor.

And was that your choice?

Yeah. They didn’t want…

Yeah.

They didn’t want staff.

No.

Everything was project contract at that point.

Exactly.

They wanted you as a, as a contractor.

Right.

That was fine. You’re making good money.

Yeah.

Very, very good day rate. As long as the money was there to do it. So…

Right. So let’s back up for a second. Where were you born? Tell me about your childhood.

I was born in Salem, Mass. And my, my, my mother and dad were [in] Maine. We went to Maine. But then he went to the war, into the war, World War II. I came back, lived in Mass. and then back to Maine. And then grew up, basically grew up in Maine.

So they moved from… You grew up in… You were born in Mass., but moved to Maine as a kid?

Yeah. Yeah.

How old were you when you moved?

Really young, but then I came back again when my dad went in the war.

I see.

But then I went back to Maine when he got out of the war.

And where in Maine?

Augusta.

Okay, so kind of central.

Cape, Cape Elizabeth.

Okay.

Yeah.

Pretty.

And then I left Maine.

Did you like Maine? Did you like growing… What was your childhood like?

What did I know as an alternative?

I mean were you a happy kid?

Oh, yeah. Yeah, pretty, pretty, pretty happy kid. I mean just, went to high school, I went to prep school, went to college.

Were you…

Didn’t get great grades. Played sports a little bit.

Yeah, what’d you play?

I played hockey. In prep school I played hockey and track and stuff, stuff like that.

And so, so when, so, and you went to college up there?

I went to University of Maine.

In what town? Which one?

Orono. It was only in Orono, although it may have been in Portland.

Okay.

Small, but basically it was in Orono.

And now there are a lot of them, right?

Yeah. There are satellite campuses around the state. Yeah, I think.

Yeah. I was at one in Machias, I think.

Yeah.

And so how did you wind up in television?

So my dad was in radio. He was in, he was a, he was a radio announcer.

When he got out of the war, he, he… Or even in the war?

Before the war.

Oh, wow. He was an announcer.

Yeah. He did…

So you come from a broadcast family, broadcast background.

He did announcing for, for radio, for big music shows, big band shows, and stuff like this. It was national stuff. He was out of Boston.

Wow.

And he came to Maine and was the manager of a station in, in Augusta, WRKO. So that’s… We lived in Augusta and then…

RKL?

R, WRDO.

RDO.

WRDO.

Okay. Augusta.

I used to walk downtown and go up, I’d climb up three flights to the station, and go down and hang out with the announcers.

And how old were you when you were doing this?

Young.

Yeah. So you had it in your blood from the very beginning.

Yeah. But then we went to Portland and he became general manager of the sys-, of the Maine Broadcasting System, which was two television, three radios. And, and so I worked summers and winters. Summers full-time as a replacement and winters part-time at the stations.

Was this when you were in college?

Yeah, when I was in college.

So you’d had summer jobs with your dad?

Yeah, I, I did four years of summer replacement.

Right. Doing what?

You filled in for people.

Okay.

You processed film, ran camera, directed, worked in the film room.

All right. So by the time you showed up at GBH, you were kind of a seasoned guy.

I was, I was experienced.

No wonder they hired you right away.

I was experienced in Portland, Maine-level commercial broadcasting…

Yeah.

…in the production side of it.

Yeah.

Even sales. The sales people sometimes took you out on sales calls…

Oh, wow.

…with ’em. It was…

So you saw everything.

Yeah. You, you saw, you saw a lot of it. But it was also a tough job ’cause I was my father’s son. So if you’re the son of the general manager…

The boss’s kid.

…you’d have to do everything twice as good.

Yeah.

Right? ’Cause if you just did good…

No.

…you’d get no credit.

Exactly.

So you had to do it twice…

So did you feel there were people like, “Oh, you’re the boss’s kid. We’re gonna get in trouble.”

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

Well, that must not have been fun.

No. You had to, you had to go around that.

Yeah.

Stay around that stuff. I mean you learned it after a while. At first I thought, hey, I’m just here as a summer replacement. Anyway. But learned a lot. Got out. Came to Boston. Needed a job. GBH.

Cool!

Yeah. Hired me right away.

All right. So let’s skip back ahead and I know you’re pressed. What time do we have here? All right, you have about ten more, five, ten more minutes?

Okay.

So after you got back to Boston, and that’s kinda when I met you, on your second…

Mid-eighties.

Mid-eighties. What, what, what was going on? You were, you were freelance director at that point. I remember you. I remember Cosel. I remember there was a third guy – tall, skinny guy.

Dick Heller.

Dick, well, no. Maybe another Dick, who did, he did… What was the predecessor to Basic Black? Say Brother.

Say Brother.

Who was that guy? Do you remember?

Well, Stan Lathan was the, was the director. I was the original director of Say Brother.

Okay.

I did the first five shows.

Wow.

Yeah. And then, and that was new.

Yeah.

That was brand new.

Yeah.

They used to delight us, take us down in the community. They would take us down as a white guy.

Yeah.

Feed us grits and…

Must have been fun.

…teach us a little bit about what’s going on, on there. It was, it was also so scary. We had a couple of bomb threats. People, because we were doing this show live…

Seriously?

…in the studio. Oh, yeah, yeah, we, we had, we evacuated the building once because…

Wow. Because people didn’t like the fact that you were doing a black show?

Yeah. Oh, yeah.

Good old Boston.

Yeah. We did a, we did an event with… A remote with Smoky Robinson and the Miracles in part of Summerthing, the arts thing. And we were all… And we lit the thing and we had all our cameras out and everything and the sound people never showed up.

Wow.

Supposed to do PA sound and there was 40,000 people there. And that turned ugly.

Ooh.

’Cause they couldn’t hear. They could see the stage all lit up. And we had to clear the stage and bring everybody into the truck.

Wow. What year, what, when was this?

I don’t know. It was somewhere in there.

Seventies.

This was probably seventies, yeah.

Yeah.

That was…

That was intense.

That was intense. Yeah, I had a… As I started up the steps for the mobile unit to get in, I had a kid standing right there with a knife in his hand, put it right in my gut.

Really?

And I had to get by it and get in that truck.

So you were directing Say Brother. Were you doing any of the Masterpiece, Mystery!…

Yeah, I did…

…wraps?

I did a lot of those. I did ’em before I was, when I was on staff because what I was doing, Masterpiece started in ’70. Mystery! started, I think, after I came back in ’82 ’cause we, we got funded for, for the series called Mystery!

Yeah.

We did another series called Classic Theater. So Mobil was giving us a lot of money to…

Yeah.

…do shows in that, in that time frame.

Yeah.

Trips to London and interviewing with actors and actresses.

Nice.

It was great. It was just… I was just a journey, journeyman director.

Yeah. And so what was the next, next step for you? How long were you there during that run?

Up through the nineties. And then I went into corporate television.

Yeah, so, so, so did you decide, okay, this is the second run at GBH, this has been enough. Or did the work dry up? What was…

Yes. The work, the work changed.

Yeah.

I mean so many things went to…

Tape.

…tape and field production.

Yeah, not as much live, right?

When I started, we didn’t have… Field production was a tractor trailer. That was field production.

Right.

But by then, as you know, ’cause you were…

Yeah, I came in in the second generation. I was, I was the tape guy.

Field production. And so a lot of stuff was going the way of field production and out of the studio.

And did you not wanna get on that bandwagon or did you feel like that…

Well, I, I edited some shows.

Yeah, I remember that.

I edited a NOVA. I edited a Frontline, ’cause it was tape. We were editing on tape and, and….

Yeah.

…my qualifications was that I knew how to make tape machines run. I didn’t know much about editing, but I knew how to make a tape machine run.

But you knew about editing from directing. It’s the same idea, or similar.

Yeah. But I, again, I wasn’t a trained editor. I mean I, I, I, then I started looking at what a trained editor could do and learning how to put pictures together to tell a story and learning how to work with a producer while he was writing the words to go with the pictures and all that craft.

Yeah.

As Austin said to me, Austin said, “Oh, I really need to say this.’ I said, “Why don’t you just say that?” He says, “’Cause I can’t say that because I don’t have pictures to support it.” Wow.

That was a revelation.

Well, yeah.

Yeah.

You can’t just put pictures up. I guess plenty of people do and go yabba, yabba yabba.

Right. No, it’s gotta make sense.

What you are seeing, what you are hearing…

Yeah. It’s tele–vision.

So, but then corporate television came along and I started working for Lotus and we started doing live two-hour specials. Satellite all around the country, sometimes around the world.

And Lotus was a Cambridge company.

Lotus was a Cambridge company.

They had one of the first spreadsheet programs, right?

Lotus 1-2-3.

Which was, was that VisiCalc? Was that…

No, VisiCalc preceded that.

Right.

VisiCalc was the original.

Okay. Did they buy VisiCalc or did they just steal it or did they just do their own thing?

No, they did their own thing.

Okay.

But, but VisiCalc preceded it.

Okay.

So 1-2-3 was just a huge mega software.

It was. Everybody… Before Excel.

They, they used to tell us at Lotus that, that they would, they would drive everybody from the Cambridge offices up to Andover to, to box product. They could not box it fast enough.

Wow.

They didn’t… They physically couldn’t get the stuff in the boxes as fast as they could sell it.

Amazing.

Yeah.

In the days when you actually boxed product.

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

Oh, that’s funny.

So that was a great run. It was a lot of fun to do corporate. It was a whole different, it was a whole different world. I, I did public television and we didn’t, we didn’t have money to go down to the machines in the cafeteria and…

Right.

…buy a candy bar practically. And yet in corporate… And budgets, public television budgets were always like…

Tight.

…completely minuscule, tight. But then with working in corporate TV and they’d say, “Well, how would you do this?” And I’d go, thinking I really have an idea but I’d go, they’re never gonna buy this. And I’d go, “Well, I think what if we did this, that, and the other thing.” And they’d go, “Okay.”

What?

What do you mean “Okay”?

We can do that? Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So the challenge was to actually do it and not figure out all these ways to do anything with no money.

But corporate had its ups and downs, too, didn’t it?

Corporate had its ups… Well, in those days, mid-, mid-nineties through 2000…

Yeah. I, ’cause when I came to town, it was, I think, a fairly big time for corporate because Digital was riding high. All those computer companies – Prime, General Computer.

Data General.

Data General. And Raytheon was doing a lot of stuff. And, and Sheraton was doing a lot of stuff. So there was a lot of corporate stuff but all those computer companies died. So but I guess there was other stuff. I mean Lotus went away. Lotus got bought.

Lotus got bought by IBM right after I went to work for them in ’90. I’m sorry. Yeah, ’95 or ’96.

And they went, but they went, they, they coasted for a while. But does that product even exist anymore?

I think it still does exist. Lotus, Lotus became part of the IBM software group. They…

Right.

…became a software line within the software group.

I see. And then Lotus Notes became their big product. Right?

And, and IBM bought Lotus because of Lotus Notes. Yes, which was a fabulous product.

Yeah.

I used it for years and…

Yeah, a lot of people loved it.

…loved, loved it, yeah. It, it was secure.

Yeah.

When the…

There was never a Mac version though. I think that was the problem.

No. There wasn’t, wasn’t a Mac version.

Couldn’t run it on a Mac.

So it was Notes, yeah, was the, was the primary product and it was… I loved it. I loved software anyway.

Yeah.

So…

Yeah, you, you’ve been a tech guy from the beginning.

Not really.

No?

Just…

Yeah. So tell me ’cause that’s what I thought. I thought of you as, wow, this guy knows machinery. He knows tech. He loves the craft. But that wasn’t you. I had, I had the wrong impression.

I was… I remember going on a job once. I was hired by PBS to go as being the kind of the production consultant, PBS production consultant on a music show. Somewhere, it was in New York state or something like this. And this guy walks up to me on the set early before things. He looks at me and says, “Okay. What are you – smooth or technical?” And I had a hard time. I, I didn’t really want to answer because…

I’m both. Yeah. You’re, you’re both.

Yeah. I mean you had to have… As a director, you had to have an appreciation for the technical side of the, for the hardware and what was going on. You, you, you had to be able to understand not the precise technology but what was involved and what might needed to be done to get, get stuff happen. If you didn’t, the engineering part did not respect you at all.

Right.

They, they didn’t want to deal with you.

Right. You needed to be able to talk to those guys.

If you understood it, if you understood it too much, then you also got slapped down.

Yeah.

So there was a fine line that you had to walk. But you had to have an appreciation.

But you were the guy with different lengths of coax to get the phase correct. I mean, come on.

Exactly right. It’s not a very hard concept to understand.

Oh, I think…

When somebody told me that it was two degrees per foot, I went, oh, I’ll just get gatherings of cable.

Yeah, I think I’ll… A lot of people would be impressed by that.

And it worked. It was true. But yeah. There’s always a __?__ between the, the, the, the technical and, and then working with your colleagues and working with talent, working with guests. I, I think that’s almost a more important part, part of it. Understanding what their needs are. Understanding how to take them through a process.

Right.

And I still use those skills…

Right.

…today.

Right.

Especially when you’re doing live shows and what you need to do to, before show. I mean certain things need to happen.

Well, David, you were always in my memory, you were always one of the sweetest people at GBH. You always had a nice…

I was never sweet. You know that __?__

No, I’m sorry. You always had a…

I was nasty and…

…very kind word to say to everybody.

I did?

To me especially, you were very sweet and I always felt like you were looking out for me. And I was… You were, you were one of the good guys.

Wow. I always thought I was difficult to work with and…

I guess we never really worked together, did we? We just kind of said hello.

I mean I wasn’t sweet in the control room. I, I, I…

Yeah.

…I had my years of yelling. And, and I grew up in a station in W, at WCSH in Portland. We had a guy that we all idolized there. And he would get on headsets and he would just fill the air, the headset system, with stuff around his directing. I mean he would beat up on people. He would denigrate people. He would be sarcastic. He’d tell jokes. It, it was just nonstop. It was on the verge of being abusive at some point, especially if you did anything wrong on the cam-…

Yeah.

…camera. And I, I quickly learned that that, that wasn’t well, well tolerated…

Yeah.

…at, at GBH. And I could do it, too.

Right, ‘cause it rubbed off.

Yeah. You’re just constantly jabbing at everybody and everything. So…

So, so when was the, when, when was your last experience at GBH? When do you feel like you officially left or…

Yeah, they, well, they… John Kerr brought me on to do pledge. Pledge was live on the air fundraising.

Yeah.

And John Kerr brought me in years and years and years back. Could have been in the eighties. And said, “Can you help me with this production?”

Yeah.

“Make it more of a production.” And I think what we did is we made much more of a production out of it. We made, instead of just somebody standing in front of a white curtain, we made it look more like a television show.

Yeah. Cut to this person. Cut to that person.

Two or three cameras and all that stuff.

Yeah. There’s a lot going on.

So I did that for years as a director and also as a producer when we started realizing that you needed people to be producing and actually thinking about the breaks and adding some structure and giving some direction to talent and…

Right.

…stuff like that. So I did that for years and years and years. And then that stopped. That was… I did it for about 20 years.

Wow.

And that was… It had its run and…

That was it.

That was, that was it.

So, so what have you been up to lately?

So I work for ON24, which is a big webcasting and virtual event company, as a production manager and also as a producer. And I even direct sometimes, depending on what my producer roles are.

So, so, so tell… What’s the world of webcasting like? What, what is it?

Our, our clients, a lot of 5, Fortune 500 companies who need to distribute their content, whether it’s internal, external, over the web. I mean when we, when times get tough, it was companies were shrinking back on bringing people to these large conferences and flying them around, halfway around the world.

Yeah.

And, and having to deliver the content on a web. So sometimes whole conferences, breakout sessions and everything, would be also accessed on the web. So I don’t… I mean my world is that I have clients that do both internal events and external events. And some are complicated and some are __?__

So you’re, you’re basically producing live television events.

Producing. Yeah, it’s live.

And it’s video and…

It’s just where I started with live television.

Yeah. And so these are people performing in front of a live audience and…

Yeah, it’s not performance, but it’s…

Speaking.

It’s business television basically.

Right.

They’re speaking, giving, doing presentations.

And are there roll-in segments?

Often there’s video. There’s almost always slides.

Wow.

And PowerPoint presentations. There’s, there’s other interactive ways that the audience can interact with them.

And these are accessible only by invitation, password, things like that. I mean they’re not…

Yeah. Yeah. You go, we go through a registration process where a person registers and then at 15 minutes usually before the event, then they’re able to launch the presentation. And, and yeah.

So it’s this whole world of sort of corporate private television broadcasting.

Right.

Internal and some external purposes that most people are totally unaware of.

That’s right. But it’s really important for these people…

Yeah.

…’cause they… We work for global companies.

Yeah.

I mean and, and we literally do shows that then repeat in other, other geos and time zones.

Yeah.

A lot of, a lot of that.

Yeah. Well, it sounds like you’ve landed well.

Or still flying.

Exactly. Well, listen, thank you.

Thank you, Joel.

Anything, anything else you wanna…

No, that was fun. That was great.