Trailer Trash
When Tim Cowling asked me in 1992 if I wanted to produce a special for D-Day, the Allied invasion of Europe toward the end of World War II, I told him I was pretty much a pacifist and he probably wanted to get someone else. He said no, that’s just who they were looking for.
Normandy became an obsession with me. We based the show entirely on letters, journals and post combat interviews, not from recollections gathered long after the war was over. Consequently, I read hundreds of letters from soldiers, from wives at home, and journal entries and post combat debriefings, still carrying the raw horror of combat. I reviewed hundreds of hours of film footage, some from Russia and some from right-wing sources in the United States that had never been seen before. I stared at thousands of personal photographs.
We made the unprecedented decision to profiling everyone involved, including Germans soldiers and French civilians living in the battle zones. It took a good deal of convincing to get the head of the Hitler Jugend Division to turn over his soldiers’ personal letters and diaries. They were like the diaries and letters of our boys. German occupation of Normandy was relatively benign. The French who lived through the occupation and liberation, said German soldiers were much more respectful and polite than the invading American and English troops.
I had the rare experience of being taken over by the material I was absorbing. By the end it was as if the soldiers and civilians whose lives I entered were speaking directly though me, dictating what we had to show. I insisted on shooting on the beachheads on the same day and at the same hour as the invasion. We stood and photographed from every ridge, every stream crossing, every orchard where a significant battle had taken place. The Normans are conservative people and remarkably little had changed since 1944.
There were stories I didn’t tell. Of U.S. soldiers shooting 16-year-old French girls out of apple trees, where they had strapped themselves in as snipers to kill the invaders and protect their German boyfriends.
The head of the Hitler Jugend Association wrote me after he saw the show. He said I had treated his division very fairly except in two regards: 1) I had included scenes of the Hollocaust against Jews which had nothing to do with his division and 2) I had featured a scene of German soldiers summarily executing Canadian prisoners while I knew full well that Germans executed fewer prisoners than Allied forces. I had to show the Holocaust to dramatize the stakes involved in winning or losing the battle. He was right about prisoners, however, and I still feel conflicted about my decision. The Allies committed more summary executions than the Germans who could send their prisoners back to Germany while the Allies only had a beachhead.
Normandy: The Great Crusade premiered at the Air Space Museum, introduced by the Secretary of Defense with a full honor guard from every branch of the military, attended by more than two hundred members of Congress. Normandy did not glamorize war. There were no heroes. It was unsparing in showing war’s terrible consequences on the men who fought and, on the towns, villages and fields they fought over.
Normandy was also the end of an era. In Discovery’s early days, the staff was so small that our programs went on the air with no supervision. Tim Cowling would screen the fine cut, but never had any changes. By the time Normandy was finished, Discovery’s middle management had grown. Working in programming was the plum, so mid-level executives from promotion and publicity or finance were getting appointed as Executive Producers of programs. They didn’t have a clue about story telling, but they had power over creative people.
We had bitter, exhausting arguments with the young woman attached to Normandy. The worst was over our final scenes. We briefly recapped the moment of victory in London, Paris, Berlin, and New York. It was, of course, a bittersweet moment of victory and a reminder of war’s terrible cost. The last words of the film are by a young American girl. “I miss my daddy. I want my daddy back. Please, I want my daddy back.” Our young EP insisted I take out those lines. Good television, she explained, must end with one emotion on the screen and that should be triumph unsullied by sadness.
I mention this because the stupendous stupidity of this view turned out to be typical of many of the executives we continued to work with in the future. Our creativity flourished in neglect, and we won all our awards for shows that middle managers never touched.
Normandy: The Great Crusade has disappeared on Discovery, but it was broadcast internationally, distributed on home video and in a CD-ROM version, and was the winner of the 1994 George Foster Peabody Award. You can access it on my website.
Tim Cowling was gone shortly after Normandy. Discovery received a $200 million investment in programming from John Malone, who believed that Discover could make a great deal more money if it went down market, created more popular programming for a mass audience. High quality programming for a reasonable income was not enough. Discovery, like so much of American culture, was taken over by maximizing profit, greed.
Discovery took away our Invention contract and turned the show over to an Australian production company. They never explained why. Our ratings were still exceptional. We offered to lower our price and meet the Australians’ bid. The show was selling internationally, and our host, Lucky Severson, was becoming famous. When he introduced himself to his Japanese hosts on a field shoot, they replied, “No need. You are the Invention man!”
A top Discovery executive came to our office to deliver the news. I thought of him as friend and rose to welcome him when he arrived until he said, “You might not feel that way after you hear what I have to say. We’re not renewing your contract for Invention.” I was at first disbelieving, but as it sank in, I was overwhelmed by blind rage. I pushed my chair back, stood up and started to vault across my desk, but thankfully wife and partner stopped me.
Later I recalled an incident from my early twenties. I led a tenant strike against a landlord who refused to rent to African Americans. It ended up in court where our attorney screwed us over. I don’t remember the details, but I remember feeling like a mark in a rigged poker game. The more I tried to recover my losses the more I lost. I later bumped into the lawyer and confronted him, more in wonder than anger. How could you screw us that way? You were our lawyer. He looked me in the eye and without any noticeable expression simply said, “Chris, not everybody’s a good guy. They paid me a lot more than you afford.” and walked away.
Cable television was a ruthless business. Invention had lasted five seasons under our guidance, broadcasting 59 half hour programs and a one-hour special on Leonard da Vinci. The Australians apparently hoped to make the show even more popular by taking it down market, with pieces like, How Does Foam Get on Your Beer. They replaced Lucky Severson with an older host. Ratings plummeted, and the Australian version was cancelled after one season. We never heard a word from Discovery. After five years of producing their signature shows, we had ceased to be useful to their new vision. We kept pitching ideas, but one exasperated Discovery Executive told me as a friend, “Chris, you just don’t get it. Our audience are trailer trash.”
We laid off a staff of 24 and closed our offices. From that point on we struggled to survive, at least at the level we had carved out for ourselves, like so many of our fellow Americans.
End of the Century
I drifted through the Reagan/Bush years, and after a flurry of hope, drifted away again under the neoliberal policies of Bill Clinton. What I think most of us failed to notice was the rapidly shifting media climate. Rush Limbaugh went on the air in 1984 and built a strong conservative following, but it seemed like other right-wing groups such as the John Birch Society, way out of the mainstream.
In 1987, Reagan’s FCC repealed the Fairness Doctrine, which required media outlets to show both sides of major stories. Limbaugh went national, and ideas that were once considered fringe such as racial resentment went mainstream. Then in 1996 FOX News launched with a right-wing agenda and a powerful profit motive. They make their fortunes by keeping viewers frightened, angry and uninformed, demonizing those who do not toe their line.
John Malone understood those attention-grabbing strategies, and he was proved correct. Discovery under his program philosophy, a mirror of FOX, has become one of the giants in media. It has acquired Warner Media and CNN and had over $10 billions of income in 2020. We began producing for Discovery when there total staff was 26.
We needed to find new clients, and in the Spring of 1995, Lewis Bogach, an Executive Producer at American Movie Classics, asked us to produce a documentary on the Hollywood Blacklist, when hundreds of top professionals were fired for refusing to cooperate with a Senate Committee trying to root Communists and progressives out of every thought making institution in America. Many of the participants were still alive, although it took some convincing to get those who cooperated with the Senate committee to appear.
One of the key lessons learned producing Normandy, was that you can tell the truth about history in a way you cannot tell the truth about contemporary events. No one would have allowed me to portray the Hitler Jugend Division at all sympathetically until a half-century had passed, and the same was true of the blacklisted Hollywood professionals.
Hosted by Alec Baldwin and featuring readings by Morgan Freeman, Rob Reiner, and Martin Sheen. Broadcast on American Movie Classics on February 27, 1996. Winner of a 1996 Rockie Award for Best Arts Documentary at the Banff Television Festival. Winner of the 1996 prime time Emmy Presidential Award and nominated for 2 other national Emmys.
Hodding and I joined forces again to produce an hour special for public television on the future of work. It was a timid show emphasizing the jobs to come with the Internet boom, but we notable ignored industrial workers. Jobs: Not What They Used to Be, was broadcast on public television in the spring of 1996 and in hindsight played into the Neoliberal agenda.
My love of wilderness led to an hour special for Audubon and Turner Original Productions. We took Native American actor Graham Greene to visit an international Arctic Park designed to span the Bering Sea and include parts of Russia and Alaska. It was called Arctic Adventure and was broadcast in April of 1997, on TBS.
I spent several weeks five hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle in Norway with underwater cameramen to capture never-before-seen images of Killer Whales as they mated, mourned their dead, and herded thousands of herring in a feeding frenzy. It was for National Geographic Explorer and was called Killer Whales of Tysfjord, broadcast in the Spring 1997. In 1998 I trekked 45 miles through the Guatemalan rain forest to discover an ancient, lost Mayan city first observed from 22 miles in space. Called Sky Archeology it was broadcast in August of 1998.
Turner Broadcasting asked to produce a one-hour special on global over-population and wealthy nations over consumption in connection with the World Population Conference held in Cairo in September 1994. The conclusions were surprising at the time, and later rebroadcast on PBS. The special remains relevant today, as it warned of a planet about to be overwhelmed in visits key cities around the world. Alfre Woodard narrated People Count: The Facts to of Life.
My wife and partner took the lead on City at Peace, which from first audition to opening night, chronicled the making of an original musical based on the lives of sixty Washington, DC teenagers. During the year, this cross section of American youth overcome difference of race and class to discover a common humanity. Premiered at the1998 Los Angeles Independent Film Festival. Broadcast premier on HBO on May 1st, 1998. Susan Koch was the Director and Barbra Streisand and Cis Corman were Executive Producers.
American Movie Classics brought us back to honor early women in the film business. Reel Models: The First Women of Film was executive produced and hosted by Barbra Streisand. Shirley MacLaine, Susan Sarandon, Hilary Swank, and Minnie Driver also hosted profiles of early women filmmakers. Premiered on American Movie Classics on May 19, 2000 and was the winner of a 2001 EMMY Award.
Later that year, I was offered what I believed would be the culmination of everything I believed in broadcasting, an opportunity to produce an eight-hour series fully funded by Ted Turner on the state of safety in the world.
Armageddon: How It Began
Around the turn of the century, sometime in 2000, Ted Turner decided to fund a series of television programs that would warn Americans about ongoing threats to world peace. He thought people had become complacent after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989. Everyone assumed that they could now go on with their lives without worrying about dying in a nuclear holocaust.
Ted knew most people were wrong. The collapse of Soviet Union had made the world more dangerous. The crumbling Soviet empire left vast quantities of weapons of mass destruction virtually unsupervised, and large numbers of under-employed weapons designers looking for work. Rogue governments and terrorists could acquire the weapons, or the raw material and designers to build them, and strike anywhere in the world. They had the motives and the means to kill thousands … maybe hundreds of thousands of people.
Experts in academia and think tanks knew this and more. They had written about the unsecured weapons and a new generation of terrorists who might use them. The articles appeared in all kinds of academic journals, but most had been ignored by the mainstream media. All any series would have to do was interview the experts and cover their remarks with “B roll” … appropriate pictures … and the television series would shock and hopefully arouse people. Osama bin Laden was on our original list of people to interview.
Ted chose public television as his vehicle and talked about a series of 20 programs. The head of PBS at the time, Pat Mitchell, talked him down to 8 programs with a budget of about $600,000 for each episode.
Many public television producers wanted Ted Turner’s $5 million project. Several independent producers bid on it. Bill Moyers talked about it. WGBH must have thought about it. Ted Turner’s top programing executive, Robert Wussler, gave the project to Alexandria Productions, a small production house in Alexandria Virginia, run by Joel Westbrook and his wife Lyne. It was an unlikely choice, but Joel had worked for Wussler at Turner Broadcasting in Atlanta and Wussler owed him a large favor to make up for past grievances.
As an independent, Joel had produced Ancient Civilizations for Time/Life Books, but he had fallen on difficult times. He had dozens of slick proposals circulating, but the cable broadcasters thought his productions were too expensive. His partners left him under bitter circumstances and he was near bankruptcy when Wussler gave him the contract. I had done programs for Turner Broadcasting in the past and Joel hired me as his Senior Producer.
Alexandria Production’s proposal was to interview writers, experts and government officials, travel around the world collecting pictures, buy stock footage and edit the whole thing together. It was exactly the correct strategy. So little was known about weapons of mass destruction, terrorists, leaking Soviet arsenals and the horrific dangers we faced in the future, that almost anything would have been a revelation to most viewers. The last thing Joel wanted was journalism. He repeated, like a mantra, “We will not commit journalism.”
Then came September 11th, 2001.
9/11/2001
At about 8:50 in the morning of September 11th, 2001, as I was putting my portable computer into a briefcase getting ready to head for work, word came over the radio that a plane had crashed into one of the two towers of the World Trade Center in New York. In a similar incident years before a small plane had crashed into the Empire States building. A bizarre accident. This must be another, I thought.
I was crossing the American Legion Bridge on the outer loop of the beltway when a second plane crashed into the second tower. I still didn’t believe it. I assumed that the news media were confused, perhaps hyping the whole thing like a bad weather report. But as the reporters became more and more serious, I realized that something terrible was unfolding in New York.
Millions of Americans were watching TV when the second plane crashed into the second tower. In Washington at that moment secret service agents burst into Vice President Cheney's White House office, picked him up and carried him under his arms down a flight of stairs into an underground bunker.
I had no idea of the dramas that were unfolding on two other transcontinental airlines, although one of them would affect me personally. On American flight 77, just minutes after the first plane crashed into the World Trade Center, the pilot radioed to his control tower and asked for permission to fly higher. Then the radio went dead. “American 77, Indy,” the air traffic controller said, over and over. “American 77, Indy, radio check. How do you read?” A few minutes later, Flight 77's transponder signal was turned off and ground control could no longer track the flight. On board the plane, one of the pilots announced to the passengers that they had been high jacked.
A passenger, conservative media broadcaster Barbara Olson, called her husband at the Justice Department on her cell phone from flight 77. Ted Olson was the Solicitor General and he was watching the attacks on television. Her telephone call is the only account we have of the events taking place on that flight. Four or five high jackers, armed with knives and box cutters, had herded the passengers and crew into the back of the plane and one of them had taken over the controls.
Olsen told his wife that two planes had hit the World Trade Center in terrorists’ attacks, so she knew what the high jacking was all about. "What shall I tell the pilot? What can I tell the pilot to do?" she asked her husband, and then she was cut off. A second call from Barbara Olsen was also cut off before she could say anything.
In their bunker below the White House, an aid told Vice President Cheney and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice that an airplane just 50 miles outside Washington was headed straight toward the White House. Minutes later Flight 77 crossed the Capitol Beltway at about 7,000 feet, made a gut wrenching, high-speed turn, and started dropping fast.
The Capitol Beltway curves around Alexandria, just a mile from the Pentagon, but I was unaware that Flight 77, now traveling more than 450 mph, was clipping the tops of streetlights. Fireman Alan Wallace, walking in front of the Pentagon, looked up and saw the plane coming straight at him about 25 feet off the ground, Wallace sprinted 30 feet and dove under a nearby van. Flight 77 plowed into the Pentagon at 9:38 am and clouds of smoke rose to my left.
My wife was due to land at National Airport in seven minutes, at 9:45 am on a flight from Miami. Panic struck with a familiar flow of adrenaline. My legs twitched and everything got too bright, the details too distinct. It’s an addictive feeling, but I didn’t like it on the morning of 9/11.
Smoke drifted across the beltway as I drove the last few miles to work. I wondered if I already had inhaled some fatal chemical or disease?
Only a few of us make it to the office that morning. Everyone in America was glued to a television, a radio or a cell phone. I tried to get hold of my children at school, but I couldn’t get through. I wanted to hear from my wife. Were more attacks coming? No one seemed to know anything. The radio announced that the Pentagon had been struck by American flight 77, out of Dulles bound for Los Angeles. To my immense relief it was not my wife’s plane.
My cell phone rang. My brother’s voice was muffled with grief. His stepdaughter, Leslie, her husband Charlie and their two children were all on Flight 77. Once again, I went into denial. Maybe they missed the plane. Maybe there’s a mistake. “No,” my brother said, “They called just before they got on board to say goodbye. They were on that plane.”
Leslie Wittington was a professor at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. She was going on a sabbatical as a visiting fellow at the Australian National University in Sydney. She and her family were the largest American family lost on September 11th but they were not untypical of the idealistic currents that run deep American life. Leslie and her husband Charles Falkenberg met in high school, but didn’t start going out together until after their graduation. They married in 1984 as Leslie was finishing up a master's degree in economics at the University of Colorado.
Charlie was a software engineer who designed software for oceanographers, ecosystem, and space scientists. He was researching the long-term impact of the Exxon Valdez oil spill. After Leslie got her doctor’s degree in 1989, they moved to Maryland so Leslie could work at the Center on Population, Gender and Social Inequality at the University of Maryland in College Park. She was there for seven years.
She had recently published a series of papers on the "marriage tax" and studied the economic role and status of women. She taught a course entitled "Race, Gender and the Job Market" with 1984 Democratic vice-presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro. "Her humor, dynamism in the classroom and passion for teaching made her a favorite professor and a sought-after mentor," Liza Hetherington, a student at Georgetown University's Public Policy Institute, said at her memorial.
Seven other teachers were on American flight 77, several on a National Geographic tour. Four passengers were in health care, seven were children. Their deaths were a loss in the struggle for social justice that ordinary people are fighting everywhere.
The night before Leslie and Charlie, Noe and Dana got on American Flight 77, James Gekas and other neighbors threw a farewell dinner for them. It was a rare, perfect summer evening in Washington, cool and breezy in a town that swelters through the summer. They sat around the table laughing and talking, eating manicotti and salad and drinking iced tea. The kids couldn’t wait to see the kangaroos, koala bears, scorpions, and snakes.
Neither Leslie not Charlie used their cell phones from the highjacked plane. "They were such wonderful parents, I know they were just concerned about the girls," my brother’s wife Ruth said. Then she added, “Zoe means life. She was a source of delight, and Dana? She was still struggling with the idea of bad guys and good guys, and I don’t think she’d ever seen a bad guy in her life. Her fear for a while was the man who came to cut the lawn, because of the noise, you know.”
My brother asked me to attend an FBI reconstruction of the flight pattern that they held for relatives of the victims. It was painful to watch. As the plane headed back toward Washington, it might have been possible to believe that the high jackers would make demands and land, but as the plane suddenly dove toward the ground, everyone must have known what was going to happen.
It is now generally forgotten, but for a moment after 9/11 the whole world was on our side. “We are all Americans,” crowds chanted in countries across the world. What might we have accomplished if we had chosen a course of unity and healing? Instead, the Bush administration chose exclusion and war. “You are either with us or against us.”
My brother and his wife became plaintiffs in law suites against American Airlines and their security service. They charged them with criminal negligence. “Leslie was a fierce mother bear, and I know she would have demanded justice for what happened to her family,” Ruth said. They were convinced that diligence on the part of the FBI and CIA could have prevented the hijackings.
Armageddon: The Cast
The killings of Leslie, Charlie, Zoe and Dana made Avoiding Armageddon into a personal crusade. On rare occasions, when a project comes together, you find that you are a vehicle for forces larger than yourself. In Normandy: The Great Crusade, the veterans and casualties of that terrible twelve-week battle, both civilian and military, seemed to speak through me. I simply had opened myself up to their messages.
I felt the same intense personal connection with a need to understand the terrorists who threatened us and the weapons they might be able to use against us.
9/11 also changed the media environment in which the series would appear. Knowledge about terrorists and weapons of mass destruction had been damned up in universities and think tanks. Now it poured out in newspapers, magazines, and books. Much of it even found its way onto American radio and television. Our series had been co-opted. To be at all relevant, we would have to become journalists and “advance the story.” “What is the next step? Where is this story taking us?” as ATC story editor Dave Clark used to ask when I produced NPR’s All Things Considered.
Joel said the project was not funded nor staffed to function journalistically and he was right, but we had no choice. As we developed our stories, journalism seemed more and more inevitable. Joel continued to resist. In January 2002, Wussler fired Joel and asked me to Executive Produce the series. Wussler agreed that I could hire my own producers, but he refused to give me either final editorial control or control of my administrative team. I was sixty-five years old, and I’d been around the block a few times. I should have walked away, but I though could pull an Elsa Knight Thompson and sneak it through the system’s machinery.
Robert Wussler was a CBS whiz kid of days long gone, near the end of his career, still frustrated by not becoming Roone Arledge. A big man, always impeccably dressed in pale suits, with soft, white skin and the general bearing of a man with many health problems. Robert had a droll sense of humor, and he was a delightful companion over a glass of good, but not expensive, red wine. His management style was ruthless Mafia.
He once screamed at me over a speakerphone in language so foul that our African American bookkeeper stuck her head in from the office next to mine and said with a shocked look, “That man talks like a field hand.” The issue was hiring Ted Turner’s son as our principal cameraman. Rhett was a nice young man, but he had little documentary news experience, no foreign experience and was unwilling to go into the many dicey parts of the world where our producers would be gathering their footage. Robert made clear to me that Rhett would be our director of photography. You don’t win them all, and it was a nuisance but didn’t hurt the project.
Like many others, Robert used words for their effect rather than their meaning. I was with a group of WETA and PBS executives, standing in a hallway outside a hotel Grand Ballroom, waiting for a presentation before the Television Critic Association. Robert was telling everyone how much Ted Turner loved the shows he’d seen to date. Moments later, Coby Atlas, PBS President Pat Mitchell’s top programming assistant, walked up to the group. She hadn’t heard Robert’s comments, but she warned us to be careful during our presentation. The press was asking questions about funders buying their way onto the network. Pat had just announced that funders were forbidden from looking at programs before they aired. Without losing a beat, Wussler announced that Ted had never seen a frame of video.
Suzanne Arden was Wussler’s Vice-President. She came from New York City where she worked in the Time Warner publicity department. Suzanne like Robert always dressed carefully in demure business suites. Robert and Suzanne ran Turner Pictures out of Atlanta at the time. For most of our two-year production cycle, they were preoccupied with another loosing proposition, Turner’s 3 hour and 18 minutes Civil War drama, Gods and Generals. It had bombed with the critics and audiences after it opened on February 10th some $50 million dollars over budget.
Suzanne was ambitious, absolutely certain she knew how to produce a television series and frustrated that I stood in her way. “The first thing you have to do,” she lectured me, “is craft your message points.” She said the next step after message points was to establish the sub messages that would lead viewers to the main message. Then we should put these message points in a linear structure and go out and shoot the video and do the interviews that made these points. I patiently replied that this was like making a painting by coloring in the numbers.
My production coordinator was Sandy Udy. Sandy had worked for Hedrick Smith for years, and I got to know her when I spent 18 months working on a Smith series on the economy. I liked her and recommended her, but she did not work out well with the Armageddon team. Joel wanted to fire her but got fired himself. When I took over I discovered that I had no real way of knowing what I was spending. Sandy used such an idiosyncratic accounting method, that I was always running blind. She never let producers know what they had to spend. She was either incompetent or her obfuscation was a form of control.
I asked Wussler if I could fire Sandy at the beginning of the summer and bring in someone who could help me unify the staff, take hold of the details needed to complete the project and provide accurate, useful budget figures for the final push. He was in a law suit with Joel Westbrook at the time and didn’t want to give Joel any more ammunition. Sandy had to stay.