Tom Jennings is the founder and Chief Creative Officer of 1895 Films and one of the most decorated documentary filmmakers working today. A Peabody and Emmy Award winner, Tom has written, produced and directed more than 500 hours of programming and pioneered a format that now spans 42 films: no narrator, no modern interviews, pure archive from start to finish. His work includes Diana: In Her Own Words, Apollo: Missions to the Moon and a Peabody winning film on the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. In this episode Tom takes us through the full arc of his career, from print journalist covering the OJ Simpson trial to the moment he cut a ten minute proof of concept reel and snuck into the Television Critics Association to pitch it. He explains how that single meeting with National Geographic in 2009 launched a format the industry had resisted for fourteen years. We go deep on what it actually takes to build an archive film: throwing a wide net, going through every single tape, and why the Christa McAuliffe rehearsal footage that won the Challenger Emmy was sitting on tape 39 of a 40 tape collection that most producers never finished. Tom talks about the seven hours of Diana tapes locked in a publisher's office in London, the funeral home phone call it took to clear a song, and why he steers clear of fair use.He also speaks candidly about what AI can now do to historical voices, why it sits like a loaded gun on the table, and what it means for audiences who trust archive films to tell the truth.An essential conversation for documentary makers, archive producers, rights professionals, researchers and anyone who wants to understand how the most powerful non fiction storytelling gets made. Dominic Dare (00:23) Welcome to the archive room. My name is Dominic Dare and this is my co-host, Sandra Quelo. Sandra Coelho (00:28) Hello everybody, hope you're all doing well. Dominic Dare (00:30) Today's guest is Tom Jennings. He is a Peabody and Emmy award-winning documentary filmmaker and journalist. He has written, produced and directed more than 500 hours of programming across politics, history, crime, religion, sport and culture, producing films all over the world while constantly looking for new ways to tell true stories. Tom and his company, 1895 Films, received a Peabody Award for their Smithsonian channel film detailing the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King and an Emmy Award for their National Geographic documentary on the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. He also produced the landmark archival film, Diana in Her Own Words, which became a worldwide phenomenon in 2020 when Netflix paired it with season four of The Crown. Originally trained as a print journalist, Tom wrote for the New York Times. the LA Times and the Associated Press and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in investigative reporting in 1994. In 2019, he received the William Taylor Award from Kent State University in recognition of his outstanding contribution to journalism and documentary storytelling. So Tom, we're delighted to have you. Welcome to the Archive Room. Tom (01:44) Thank you so much, Dominic. It's great to be here. Dominic Dare (01:47) we are, we're fascinated to find out a little bit about your journey. So can you just place us, we know you started in journalism. Can you just take us back to, how you got into storytelling and a little bit about your career moving into documentaries? Tom (02:00) Sure. I was a print journalist. I went to Kent State University in Ohio and got a journalism degree. I worked for a couple of years in Washington, D.C. and then came out to Los Angeles and worked here for seven years as a reporter in the 90s. And that was a real go-go time for journalists. I covered The Menendez trial, the LA riots, my last big assignment was the OJ Simpson criminal trial. And it was that trial that made me think I need to do something different because the circus atmosphere around it was not what I had gotten into journalism for. And I was talking to a friend I had made an NPR reporter who was also covering the OJ trial and her name is Kitty Felby. And I said, you know, I want to do something different. I don't know what it is. And she offhandedly said, well, I a friend of mine just called me. Remember, she was in electronic media and. print media and electronic media and never the twain shall meet. So this guy had called her asking if she could write a script for Discovery Channel and she said she didn't have time. So she put me in touch with this guy and his production company and they didn't want to hire me. I felt like the dread pirate Roberts and the princess bride, know, good job. Good job today, Tom. We'll have to fire you tomorrow. I remember I said to him, just give me a couple of scripts that you like and I'll make all this material look like that. And actually by chance that show, was for a series on discovery called Rivals. And Rivals was like biography, but with two people. George Wallace and Dr. Martin Luther King. You know, an act of a biography of one, then the other, then the conflict between the two, and then resolution. Well, this last episode, none of this guy's producers wanted to write the show because it was Jack Ruby and Lee Harvey Oswald. And unless you believe the conspiracy theories, there's, you know, They never met. They didn't know each other until they were in that basement of parking garage of the Dallas police station that Sunday morning when Ruby shot Oswald. And I mentioned that because in putting that show together for them, I connected with a place in Dallas called the Sixth Floor Museum, which is in the School Book Depository Building. The Sixth Floor is where Oswald fired the shots. Dominic Dare (04:42) Mm-hmm. Tom (04:45) And the curator of their media at the time had worked in local Dallas television. And he wound up showing me his collection. What he had done is he had gone around to all the TV and radio stations. He had heard that a lot of the TV stations there were going to get rid of all of their Kennedy assassination footage. And They, because they cherry picked the greatest hits, which is an anathema to me. I don't want to see the greatest hits. I want to see everything else. And, I remember his name was Gary Mack. And I said, Gary, you could just let this stuff play. This is amazing. And he said, yeah, but nobody's ever done it that way. And, I tried to convince the producer at this company is like, wait, We could just let this material play. This is unbelievable. You really feel like you're there. And his response, as was network responses over the years, was there's no context. The audience won't understand what's going on. And I kept saying, no, they will. Well, it took me 14 years. That's how long I've been doing that. Dominic Dare (05:59) You Tom (06:00) I really believed in the format. so Gary Mack gave me a bunch of, you know, prime time footage, things people had never seen. And I wound up cutting a 10 minute reel on my own as proof of concept. And I snuck into the Television Critics Association meeting in Pasadena and went to see a guy named Michael Cascio. who was vice president of National Geographic at the time. And I said, Michael, I had been already talking with him about this. I said, just watch this. And he was like, wow, wow, wow. And they wound up commissioning a two hour show in that format from me. And we were nominated for an Emmy. And that was the first one we did. And that was in 2009. Since then, we've done 42 films like that. No narrator, all archive, no modern day interviews. The format works if you know the tricks to make it work, and we did. Dominic Dare (06:53) Wow. And so, what are those tricks? mean, do you start with the archive or do you start with the narrative? How do you formulate a show? Tom (07:09) Well, we throw a very wide net. I always tell my researchers. If I were a piece of footage, where would I live? Think outside the box. Just don't go running off to Getty, which owns half the world these days, it seems. Where else can we find this material? For us, in order to make the format work, audio is king. We need audio. because that becomes the narration in a sense, whether it's from news reporting. We use oral histories a lot of times, like we did a very popular show on Pearl Harbor and there's a tremendous amount of oral histories on Pearl Harbor. Same with D-Day. And we use those to create a narrative drive. So we throw a really wide net. We try and get everything we possibly can. We're usually swimming in footage. Like our film you mentioned, Diana and Her Own Words, that was a 90 minute, it was about 100 minute. They gave us extra time on National Geographic for that one and then it went to Netflix. Our first cut. Dominic Dare (08:03) Hmm. Tom (08:15) and I wouldn't even call it a cut, we just chunk things in from all of the sources we have, was nine or 10 hours long. We just put everything in that we liked down a timeline, and then we start whittling it down. So we try and look for things that people have never seen before. We use things like contact sheets from newspapers, for example, you know, in the old days where they used Dominic Dare (08:39) Hmm. Tom (08:41) grease pencils to circle the one they want published. But there's 30 shots on there from the same event. And I always tell my editors, don't use the one that's published. Use one that is similar, but feels like you're seeing something brand new, even though it's about the same story. So we're constantly looking for the unseen, forgotten images and sounds. to make these stories feel like you're seeing them for the first time. Sandra Coelho (09:10) where do you decide what story or subject you're going to do? Is that because you've seen, you know, there's archive out there or do you go from it from a perspective? I want to do a story on this. What archive is out there? Tom (09:25) I usually say the shows we make are whatever they're buying, you know, so. Dominic Dare (09:31) Hahaha Tom (09:34) I have personal favorites that I pitch all the time, but the ones that you'll like, the one that won the Peabody on Martin Luther King and the Challenger, which won the Emmy, those were network ideas. They'll often call us and say, hey, can you do one of those all archive things that you're known for on this? so it's a two-way street. mean, there are some that I haven't been able to do that I find very frustrating. A good example is over the years, Myself and my researchers are big fans of the Titanic story, for example. And by chance, several years ago, we stumbled across some archive of people like us in the 1930s, which is when professional level audio kind of came forward. Before that, it was the old Edison reels that you know, didn't sound so great. But we've accumulated over the years about 100 interviews done in the 30s, 40s and 50s of people who actually survived the sinking. And you don't think of someone going through an event in 1912 telling you Dominic Dare (10:30) Yeah. Tom (10:55) the story in first person. You we just don't compute that way. And to hear these people tell their stories is, you know, fascinating and amazing and unbelievable. But conversely, there are not, as you all know, not that many images of the Titanic itself. There's a sum, but certainly not enough to cover an hour. And the note keeps coming back, well, how are you going to show it? And for a long time, I felt like, well, we'll show it however you want us to show it. You know, we're animated if you want to. We've got these tapes and they don't come just from the BBC. We've found them in historical societies, families that kept these things over the years in some closet somewhere. And we can't get it over the top, no matter what. Sandra Coelho (11:46) So surprising. Tom (11:50) the Queen Mary here in Los Angeles in the harbor, you know, and it kind of has a Titanic vibe to it. You know, we could shoot very interpretive B-roll to help tell the story. It doesn't have to be on the nose. We're not going to do James Cameron light, you know, but yeah, that's one I haven't gotten across. But to further answer your question, most I would say 60 to 70 % of all archive films we've done have been generated, the idea has been generated by the networker stream. Sandra Coelho (12:22) Can I just ask, how much has that changed going forward? mean, now when I stream now, there's a lot of biographies. So is that changed from the type of things 10 years ago that they were wanting to commission to now? Is it more official documentaries or is it more unofficial or just different stories? What type of stories are they looking for? Tom (12:47) we're dealing with one network right now. They're firing up, at least four, all archive, shows from us. So we'll go up to 46 after this. and the difference now is that, it has to be global, a global appeal because of the internet, because of streaming. You know, the platforms are looking much more at, you know, putting something on the web, on a streaming service. So you can watch that anywhere in the world. And so they want universal stories, stories that are big enough to have captured the attention of people in Des Moines, Iowa, and in Christchurch, New Zealand. You know, it has to be something very, very big. so that narrows the window in which we can operate because there are a good amount of stories like this. But in developing out new ideas, we were asked by this particular network streamer, OK, we want to do these with you. Come up with four ideas, well, you we gave them like a dozen ideas and half of them were thrown out, you know, immediately because they felt like it didn't have the reach worldwide. Whereas in the past, especially for the U.S. market, it was very easy for us to pitch something that was obviously a big deal in the United States, but not necessarily something that would travel. overseas. Now everything has to travel. Everything has to travel. They want to know that they'll get eyeballs around the world and that it'll be evergreen as well. That they could show these things 10 years from now. And almost all the films that we've done, because they're historical in nature, we like to consider the type of archive films that we do kind of like, you know, a living document of that particular event or place in time. And you could watch them 40 years, 50 years from now, and it would still hold water because it's using all source material from the time as best we can to make it feel like you're living in the moment. I consider these things like time machines. You know, it's like turn it on. I always joke that the audience is waiting for the narrator to come and save them and the narrator never shows up. And which is true, but once they get it, it's like, I see two or three, four minutes in. Then it just kind of washes over you and you're like living through it as the events unfold. Dominic Dare (15:26) I I'm just intrigued as to how you protect the historical integrity. I is that you overseeing it? Is that the editor? Because if you're building a narrative, there's always, as we will, I'm sure there is temptation to take something in a certain way. How do you manage that side of things? Tom (15:42) Well, because I have a print journalism background, I was educated and lived in a time of journalism where it was just like, you're right down the middle. You don't have an opinion. excuse me, unless you're a columnist or something like that where you're paid to have an opinion, you don't have an opinion. And you have to be very, very careful with that. And I think how we adhere to historical accuracy A good example is from Diana in her own words. In putting that film together, we wound up watching a lot of the other Diana documentaries and almost to the one where they're talking about part of her story, say in 1986, the choice was made to use images of her that were obviously in the early 1990s because it was prettier or she looked better. And I found that very frustrating. It's just too easy to grab whatever shot you particularly like. Well, it's Diana. Yeah, but it's Diana seven years later. You know, that's not right. So in that film and in everything that we do, And this is a really great example of how we keep things really clean is when we put that show together, we had a rule of thumb, which was if we're talking about Diana in the summer of 1986, we can't use an image of her more than three months either side. of the timeline we're talking about. It has to be from that time. We're not going to borrow something from the 90s because she looks better. It has to be to the time period, bottom line, that's it. So, and we do that with everything, with the audio, you know, we're very, very careful. You know, no one's ever called us out on, manipulated the truth or the fact. Dominic Dare (17:11) Thank Tom (17:34) You know, we stay very true to the story. And, you know, I like to say everything that we do, but especially the archive things, because it can be easily manipulated if you wanted to. Our films are clean to the frame. That's what I always tell my editors. This thing is clean to the frame. No one will ever come back and question what we did. Dominic Dare (17:54) So, know, notoriously expensive to make archive driven shows. Is that true? I mean, is it impossible? And where do you marry the line between, you know, your licensing keeping these archives alive because they require this money that you would raise for that versus fair use and fair dealing where you may have a very strong legal right to use the footage as you want. Where do you lie in that kind of battleground? Tom (18:19) Well, it's a battleground that's getting bloodier, unfortunately, because the cost of archive just keeps going up and up and up. And we have had to make, you know, I always tell the networks that, look, if you wanted this done the way I wanted to do it, you'd have to triple your archive budget. You know, because that's what all the best images cost and footage. And so what we wind up doing is let's say I found a 30 second clip that's very, very expensive and I'd love to have it. But is it absolutely necessary when I can get 20 photos for all of that and cover a lot more of Dominic Dare (18:40) Right. Tom (19:03) the black, as they say. So we have to make hard choices sometimes. The other thing to consider with archive is clearance, which can be the provenance of where the footage came from or who owns it is very, very difficult. Like our challenger show, no, it was. We did a film called The Real Right Stuff for National Geographic Disney, and they have really stringent rules about music. And we found in Cocoa Beach, Florida, in this holiday inn bar, there was this trio of people called the We Three Trio, and they did this song that became a hit for a summer. in like 1960 singing about the right stuff astronauts, the Mercury program astronauts. And it was perfect for the show and we could afford it. It came from NBC News at the time. And I said, I want that. I want that song. want that song. Well, when you use music, you know, proving who owns the rights to the song are that you're problematic if it's not been registered with one of the songwriting websites or organizations. And it wasn't. And long story short, we wound up trying to track the three men. was two women and a man. And we wound up tracking. We got somehow got the guy's name and. We found out that he had passed on in the 1990s. And this is the links that we go to to clear stuff, to get things we want. We wound up finding out the funeral home that had his funeral. And funeral homes, by the way, keep meticulous records. So we called the funeral home. And the funeral home had the name of the guy's son. So, Dominic Dare (21:03) Wow. Tom (21:05) who's still alive. And so we called the guy and he said, oh yeah, my dad was in that band in the sixties. And he wound up signing off on the song for, you know, a non-CBC. So we had to go to a funeral home to get the clip that I wanted. So it's not just money, but it's also clearance and some... Dominic Dare (21:07) Brilliant. Tom (21:26) I steer clear of fair use. It frankly kind of scares me. I know how to do it. Maybe done it once or twice, you know, for a very particular shot, but I'd rather know, I'd rather sleep well at night, not worrying about getting a lawyer letter from somebody. And, you know, if somebody owns a piece of footage, fine, they own the piece of footage and we'll try and make it work within the budget. But Dominic Dare (21:41) Yeah. Tom (21:50) It's a constant dance between what we can afford and what we want. And we always make it work, to be honest, we're never really fully happy because we have to say goodbye to a lot of things we would prefer to have. Sandra Coelho (22:04) What advice would you give to libraries then that working with you? mean, how can they make it work for you? Tom (22:11) yeah, I, I wish, you know, off the top of my head, we license so much material from various libraries around the world that, I wish the bulk deals were better. you know, it's like, Hey, we're, we're licensing 15 minutes from you, you know, everybody else licenses, maybe two minutes from you. and, We've been approached by various libraries wanting to do like co-productions almost where they would own part of the IP if we're keeping the IP, which by the way, that's another thing that's happening right now is several networks, streamers, they're saying, well, can you get buy-ins from distributors, for example, to cover part of the cost and in exchange for that, you get to keep the IP. You know, and we get first window broadcast in like the UK and the US. So the business model is radically changing as well, where we're allowed to keep it. But we've had libraries come back and say, look, you can use whatever you want out of our library if we get a piece of the film in the long run. And that's still kind of like in play for us. We haven't made those deals yet. You know, We've won terrific awards for this. won on top of the Peabody and Emmy. We won the Producers Guild of America Award for Apollo Missions to the Moon. We did, you know, in 2019. And so we'll say, well, look, you're going to be part of this award-winning film. Let's hope it's award-winning. And they don't seem to care as much about awards. You know, they're looking at their bottom line. Dominic Dare (23:50) You Tom (23:52) I don't know what the answer is other than if they could like make more sweetheart deals if we're getting, you know, six, seven times the footage that a normal order comes in at. And it's all relationships too. mean, sometimes they'll charge us a full go for a particular piece of really rare footage, but then they'll discount like two dozen stills that we want from the same place. So it's kind of like horse trading as they used to say in the old days. But we are definitely constrained by the budgets and the networks are, yeah, but the networks are, they're constrained too. The orders are, they don't come as fast as they used to. The development process is much longer than it was. You you just have, love what I do. My staff says, keep this thing going because we don't want to do anything else because we really enjoy the style. But it's more difficult now than it was even three or four years ago. Even during COVID, we were still getting a lot of orders. Dominic Dare (24:53) Yeah, I mean, it's fascinating to me how technology may be changing. This is part of the research for this. You send us on to the Artifactual podcast, which if anybody hasn't tapped into it. Brilliant. Loved it. So many kind of incredible stories that haven't been told. I was just thinking as we're talking, I just saw a film with Paul Mezcal called The History of Sound. And if anyone's seen it, it's a brilliant, gentle, lyrical film. And it's all about these wax cylinders. And I was just thinking to myself then like, are we in a stage now where You'd mentioned earlier that recording of those isn't particularly strong. Is technology and AI, the dreaded AI, helping you to go back to material that perhaps wasn't able to be approached before? Do you see that change happening? Tom (25:34) Yes. And mentioning AI, by the way, we've experimented with AI and it's wonderful, but it's as far as what we do, but it's extremely dangerous, I would say. It's like having a loaded gun on the table. And I say that because, gosh, it must be almost a year and a half, two years ago. You know, we're not an AI company, but we have AI engines that we have fun with. And we thought we got, you know, we got this notion that what if we could clone voices? This was before we even started messing with images. What if we could clone voices? And AI is very good at cloning voices. And the original idea was because there were a couple of people aboard the Titanic, those Titanic recordings, where we found, a 12 to 15 minute audio tape of them talking, but they had written a book. And so we were able to clone a particular person's voice from the Titanic and then pump in their book. And now we have 15 hours of them. Dominic Dare (26:47) Mm-hmm. Yeah. Tom (26:50) And at first, where we were pitching it, the networks were like, no, no, no, you can't do that. You can't do that. And one thing we're very careful of is if we were to ever do that, we don't write stuff for them to say. We would only have them say things that they had written or in an interview or something like that, in a newspaper or magazine. One of the voices that was very easy to clone was Malcolm X. We did a big film on Malcolm X several years ago for Smithsonian Channel. And you cannot tell the difference between our clone and Malcolm X. And so we thought, wouldn't it be amazing to have Malcolm X read the autobiography of Malcolm X, which was published three months after he was assassinated. And so we developed that out where we came up with this series idea called AI in their own words. And we cloned Oppenheimer and my God, there were so many. I remember we had a Zoom meeting as we often do for the staff. And one of our editors pushed play on, you know, Hey, listen to this. speaking of Oppenheimer, you know, the staff's reaction was, know, you are the destroyer of documentaries. know, you're going to burn this thing. Like, how, how could you do this? And I'm like, well, I don't know. mean, it's happening whether we do it or somebody else does. And a year ago, nobody wanted to touch it. And now we're. Dominic Dare (28:11) Hehehehehe Hahaha. Tom (28:28) hearing people do want to touch it. But again, we wouldn't write things for people to say, we'd only use their actual words. I'm still on the fence about it. It's kind of cool that we can do it, but it can be so easily manipulated that I prefer not to do it. But we have the means to do it now. not only that, we do a lot of education videos for universities, as well as network stuff. And, we recently did like 32 hours, for a great book series, everyone from Socrates to Shakespeare. And we've been able to like clone, or not clone, create in AI, create in the computer. historical characters that can respond to questions. And the people we're doing this for, I mean, it's so realistic that they asked me, are these actors? Because they looked like they were on a set being filmed. And I said, no, none of this exists except inside of a computer. And that's how good it's gotten. And again, we... Dominic Dare (29:25) Really. Tom (29:37) We're not an AI powered company, but we try and keep up with every trend and that's a trend that's coming. But imagine you take footage from a historical event, know, the D-Day or Pearl Harbor, you can start to change that footage. And you can start to change that footage and no one will be the wiser. It's like I said, it's like having a loaded gun on the table in front of you because it can be so easy. could think of young people, you know, who are looking to our kinds of films to educate them. And we get letters often from either college professors or a lot of high school teachers saying, you know, thank you for me. I showed this film to my class and in one hour they got more out of this story. than if I had taught the same subject for a week, because they feel like they're living through it. It's all content, so they get it. I don't know where it's headed, but the fact that you can find things online that I would know or that you all would know are obviously fake, but the general audience is not that discerning. and it's hook line and sinker, you know, they just buy in and it's like, well, that's how it really was. It's like, no, that's all made up. They just make it look like. Dominic Dare (30:55) It just makes the work that you're doing all the more valuable, you know, I mean, if that if we can maintain that authenticity. I mean, I think probably, you know, one of the things that I guess came to mind as we were chatting was, you know, we'll have a lot of archive producers listening here, and some editors hopefully, you know, in your expert opinion, what facets is a good archival producer? Do you work with the same team? Tom (31:01) yeah. Dominic Dare (31:19) Do join the same people each time? you work with the same editing team? Is it a long-standing crew or do you bring people in and out? Explain how you kind of staff up and staff down. Tom (31:27) A little of both. I have a long-standing crew. They know how I approach things. You know, we're very symbiotic in how we find material, look for material. And then there are freelancers that we bring in, our archival producers, for example, certainly clearance people. You know, one thing, a quick story about, you know, how Dominic Dare (31:40) you Tom (31:50) I really trust the people that I work with is I insist that they go through everything. I tell them, I don't care if it's a double time. Everything has to be looked at. And one reason we won an Emmy, a News and Doc Emmy for our Challenger film was we found footage of Christa McAuliffe, the teacher in space. Dominic Dare (32:14) Mm-hmm. Tom (32:15) rehearsing her lesson plans inside the Challenger with a NASA film crew in the weeks before the Challenger launched and the tragedy happened. And I remember why, and we used it extensively in the show. And one of my researchers came to me, know, footage people and said, look what I found. Dominic Dare (32:26) wow. Tom (32:36) And I'm like, and we had, again, watched as many Challenger docs as we could. I'd not seen that before. Like, where the heck did this come from? And he said it's on one of the NASA tapes. And so we wound up talking to the NASA archivists that we have a good relationship with. And this is advice for archive producers. You have to go through everything. And the reason is we said, Why hasn't this been used before? We can't find it in any other documentary. And it's Kristin McAuliffe rehearsing. She was going to beam back to Earth lessons in space that were going to be broadcast in classrooms around the world, live from the Challenger. And cautionary tale, this guy said, Dominic Dare (33:13) Wow. Tom (33:21) Oh, you know, because most, most of, most producers like you, although we were the exception because we found the footage, you know, we send out like at the time they were still sending out tapes. We send out 40, you know, our collection of Challenger is 40 tapes, 40 hours. That's what you have to work with. And it's like, You people get through about 20 or 25 of those tapes and you figure I have enough. Well, the Christa McAuliffe stuff was always in the Nassau, but it was at like tape 39. And no one ever got to the end of the collection. They just said, we have enough. And so we put that in there and we wound up beating out like 60 minutes and you know. Dominic Dare (33:54) All right. Tom (34:07) in the category that we were in. So good advice is, know, if you throw a wide net, you should be willing to take the time and make the effort to look at everything before you make final decisions, because so much can be overlooked by thinking, I've seen that, I've seen that, I've seen that, forget it, I'm not gonna watch the rest. I mean, that's a lesson. Dominic Dare (34:27) Yeah. Sandra Coelho (34:28) such good that's such good advice there because I think there are people that just for time constraints they don't get a chance to look at everything and if you're gonna make a program look at everything Tom (34:31) Yeah. That's right, Sandra. mean, otherwise, why get all this stuff? Like if you go to the National Archives in the United States, for example, and you want to see, you know, a particular story, let's say D-Day, whatever they have, they have their like greatest hits reel, you know, and it's like, here you go. Here's the greatest hits. And it's like, no, I don't want to see the greatest hits reel. I want to go down that hallway, turn left and go to that secret room where you pile everything up that people don't normally see. And another cautionary tale is our MLK film for Smithsonian channel. It was their idea. They said, hey, can you do one of those all archive things on the assassination of Martin Luther King? And I thought, sure, there must be tons of stuff. So I went to Memphis where he was killed and I went to the TV and radio stations and believe it or not, none of them, that's another thing we do. don't like, I say, unless it's absolutely necessary, if Walter Cronkite is in this, I don't want to see it. I want to see the local reporters that no one's ever seen before. Dominic Dare (35:50) Mm-hmm. Tom (35:53) because they were the boots on the ground. You know, I don't want to see the 30,000 foot view. I want to like be right there standing with these people. None of these stations had kept any of their footage and I was amazed. And so I was frustrated because I told, I already told the network, oh sure, we can do it, you know, and they were firing up the contract. And so I went to, the National Civil Rights Museum, which is at the Lorraine Motel, which is where King was assassinated. And it's a really wonderful facility. And I met with the executive director and I thinking that maybe they had some stuff and they didn't have much. But then the executive director, she told me, well, you know where you need to go. You need to go to the University of Memphis and Talked to a guy in special collections called Ed Frank. His name is Ed Frank So I went down there It was only a few miles away and I introduced myself told him what I was doing and he said, yeah We have a lot of stuff. It turned out in 1968 when There was a sanitation worker strike in Memphis and that's what brought King to Memphis twice before he was killed Professors at the university at the time thought that this was their city's moment to shine the civil rights movement. So every day they went around to all the TV and radio stations and made copies of all the footage that had been recorded or shot during that day and they kept it all. And so the university was the place that had all this footage. Dominic Dare (37:22) you Tom (37:36) But then from a rights issue, it was a real problem because none of the state, well, only one, but none of the local affiliates would sign off on the footage because they didn't physically possess it in-house, including one that was across the street from the Special Collections Division. And Ed Frank said, we'll make copies for them and they can have them. It was their footage in the first place. Dominic Dare (37:51) Right. Yeah. Tom (38:05) That wasn't enough. But fortunately, we had a really good relationship with NBC national, Clara Fon Singh at the time, who ran their division. And she agreed to represent NBC and sign off on the rights because it was an NBC affiliate. And that's how we got a lot of really fantastic footage. And then we won the Peabody for it. Dominic Dare (38:14) Yeah. Tom (38:29) you know, more advice for archival. You just never know what you're going to run up against. One other quick story was, you know, and you never know until you ask. Nat Geo had asked me to do something on the anniversary of Princess Diana's death. And, you know, it's like, what are we going to find that's... And the request is always... By the way, can you do something about Princess Diana and her death and make sure you find a bunch of new stuff? So it's like, what hasn't been shown or heard? And I remembered a story of the British journalist, Andrew Morton, who wrote the famous book, Diana, Her True Story, that came out in 1992 and blew the whole thing up and. Morton was accused of being a liar. He was pilloried in the British press. And it wasn't until after Diana died in 97 that he came out with a revised edition saying, my source was Diana herself. And so I always respected him because he protected his source. And in journalism school, that's what we were taught. So I tracked him down. I called him up in London and I said, I told them who I was. the reason why I called them up is I remember reading the story about Diana had a mutual friend with Morton named James Coulthurst. And Diana asked Coulthurst to ask Morton, who was a well-known reporter in London at the time, if he would write a book about her. So Morton would write questions, give them to Coulthurst, who was a childhood friend of Diana's. He would literally ride his bike to Kensington Palace and he and Diana would go off into some quiet turret somewhere and Colters would read the questions. He'd hit record on a tape recorder and then Diana would answer and Morton had seven hours of Diana telling her entire life story. So I called Morton and I said, you know, Hey, I know he had never released the tape. And I said, Hey, you know, those tapes you have, you know, it'd be great if we could. And the first thing out of his mouth was get in line, mate. You're the 2000th producer that's asked me, is for those tapes. I'm taking them to my grave. And I'm like, Andrew, wait, we do this completely different. There's no narrator, there are no modern day interviews. It would be like Diana is narrating her own show, her own film. And he said, there was a pause, he said, no one's ever asked me to do it that way before. He said, when can you come to London? I said, I'll be there tomorrow from Los Angeles. I got on a plane, I went there, went to his publisher's office. Excuse me. I went to his publisher's office. We met and got along, reporter to reporter. And he said, OK, are you ready? I remember it was pouring rain. Then the publisher's office was like right out of Narnia, know, Ivy Walls or Harry Potter. And we were in this small writer's room. And I remember the pouring rain because there was a skylight in the room. And other than sending out for sandwiches, we sat there all day and he said, are you ready? I said, yes. And he hit play. And for the next seven hours, it was like Diana was sitting in the room with us, telling us her life story. And it was one of the most magical times I've ever experienced in my life, other than the birth of my children. but certainly as a professional of working with archive, I felt like I was a witness. I was a witness to something really extraordinary because of obviously her fame, but also her, she was so raw and what was going on and in her life. it was Andrew and I shook hands and he said, okay. you know, and then off to the races. So as far as advice to archive producers, you never know until you ask and you better have a good follow up if they say no to convince them why it might be something really great to be involved with. That's one of my greatest coups, you know, if you want to call it that is convincing Andrew to let us use those tapes and for Diana to tell her story. And yeah, they paired it with season four of The Crown on Netflix. Who knew that wasn't planned? And it got into the top 10. That's our only top 10 so far on Netflix. But just for a documentary to break into the top 10 is a big deal. Dominic Dare (43:00) So, that's absolutely amazing. wanted to ask you, just sort of to sort of wrap things up a little bit, the audience's attention and what resonates is changing and you know as we sit here today and it'll be different next week we're here vertical vertical vertical you know it just are you concerned about the ability for people to sit through these things or are you looking at embracing new ways of reaching new audiences well how do see the challenges ahead Tom (43:30) You're correct in that we've been asked by more than one network streamer if we could develop like six minute history interstitials that they would punch in between longer form, episodic for example. I think, maybe I'm being naive, but I'd like to think. that what we do and what other archive producer, people who produce archive-based films is that the audience wants authenticity. They want to feel like they're not being lied to. I think if you are able to hook them in, like I said earlier about the narrator's not coming to save them, if you're able to hook them in early, they'll let the stories wash over them and kind of get deeply involved in the storytelling. But at the same time, this lack of ability to focus on the part of all of us and certainly the audience is having an effect and we're getting requests to do half hour shows now instead of hour long shows. And I wanna do two hours on this. You know, and I don't know where, know, it's like everyone's trying to figure it out. You know, there was the phrase in Hollywood, no, no one knows anything. You know, we're not necessarily Hollywood. We're Hollywood adjacent, I guess, because we work in the entertainment industry. But I think it's no one knows anything on steroids right now. I mean, Dominic Dare (44:39) Yeah. Tom (45:03) everyone is grasping on how to figure out what's next. And I think the need for authenticity, but one thing that we're always asked and will forever be asked is, what do you have that's new? What do you have that we can like wave a flag in the media and say, We found the Nixon tapes, you know, from the White House, you know, what do you have that no one's ever had or seen before? Because that becomes the hook to bring people to at least turn it on and see if they're interested. It's where we're, know, whether it's AI or how we format the shows, everything is in flux and we're just trying to ride the wave and keep up with everything. keep in contact with all of our places where we've done business, with executives, hearing what they're going through and trying to tailor our ideas to meet their needs. And that is a very much open-ended question right now. I don't know where it's going and... All you can do is try your best and keep trying to keep up with the needs of the market and roll with it. Dominic Dare (46:15) Absolutely. Well, I think that kind of perfectly rounds up our conversation, Tom. Thank you hugely for your time, your insight, your honesty, your support of archives, which we all love and cherish. you know, long may people watch archive-driven, non-narrated, two-hour documentaries. I certainly will do. I just want the John and Yoko. documentary which has kind of changed my whole perspective on John Lennon. Amazing film, all pretty much archive driven, superb storytelling. So I just think there's a huge audience for there and I think we'll still be doing this in 20 years time. Thank you ever so much and I will see everybody next time. Tom (46:56) Thanks so much.