10-21-2022, 08:40 PM
hal wrote:
Nice story - you're a lucky guy.
I had never heard of American Documentary, so I looked it up.
DAMN!!! They made some great movies/TV. The American Experience... and American Masters on PBS is must see tv.
Plus I see that they produced Minding the Gap - that's one of the best docs I've ever seen (and I've seen a lot!) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7476236/ trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5Vm_Awe3bw A great document of coming of age in the current times... Just watching the trailer again gives me goosebumps
American Documentary is is definitely a fountain of incredible works. POV, POV Spark. One of the co-founders named Ellen was who I first worked with. POV west coast was housed in the KQED building next to my section. Here's why it's important to be around the people you work with. She saw me working on a KQED program called "Bay Window." Eventually and prematurely in my opinion, the producer Peter Stein, decided to quit that and focus on helping to evolve the Jewish Museum in SOMA, which is incredible.
POV was distributing a documentary and Ellen peeked at the work I was doing on Bay Window. I had already made friends with her staff, we'd go to Starbucks and lunch all the time. She breezed into my office to chit chat asked me if I had time to help her with her project. It was good for me because Bay Window was shutting down and I just simply lateral transferred into that job. I got keep my same desk in an office I shared with 3 others.
She was really hellbent on collaborating with teachers and school districts to leverage the documentaries as curriculum. All of that effort has coalesced into Active Voice Labs. https://www.activevoice.net/ I helped to create that but I'm no longer involved except for my thoughts occasionally.
Ellen could think of an idea, feverishly plan it and rapidly get it funded. Blew me away.