-American community that becomes very important given the history of the images that were laid on us. Which tended to be-I mean, if women thought they came off, White women, think they came off badly, at least they had Barbara Stanwyck and a number of other people. We had Butterfly McQueen. And so, it was very important not to-to throw off that sense of being submissive and ignorant. And, and what helped us, of course, was the movement and that's mentioned in the narration. The movement, Malcolm X, and also the African independence movements, I mean, it was very important. The only way that we could begin to connect with Africa and the sense of Africa within us, was to know that there were people like Nkrumah, that it was not just oogah-boogah Tarzan. And so that's what coming out in the early 60s, too. That's why you can see, for example, in, in Malcolm's piece, women as they were at this, at the beginning, in African dress, in traditional African dress. That's when we begin to do that, when we begin to see that there are wonderful things happening on the continent of Africa. So, I think that's mainly what we were trying to do with that show. So, that's for five. The other question is whether there were other-the other question was whether there are other ideas central to your films in addition to the ones we've just talked about and maybe you can begin.

Well, I mean, you know the idea, there're a lot of ideas. Well, yeah, no, I mean, you know, that, there, there are a number of, there's a lot of content in these films as you can, as you can, as you can discern. But they're all content as Paul was saying contained within and driven by the story of certain characters. And, basically, we're v-you know, despite the content we were dealing with, we were basically pretty selfish about it in the sense that we wanted to configure three parts to a total hour's film that hung together that related to, to, to one another and that made movies. I mean, I mean, really because we figured that, we knew that the content was also driven by the kind, the amount of footage that we had. So we were loose on footage. If you remember 201 in Lowndes County. So we told the best part of the story that we possibly could as much as that we could without, without footage and then we went on to the Meredith March. And, but the i-but there, there were a number of other central ideas but it, it all sort of key-keyed off of the-and were, were particular to individual films. The, the show number eight, "Back to the Movement", I, I had-one of the ideas I had was essentially that I wanted to say something that resonated contempor-contemporarily to young people about the danger they face, the ever-present danger they face in this society. I wanted to say something about how it's still, as much as we've progressed and the things that happen, it's still possible for a Black man, any Black man, to be walking down any street in America and get offed. And so we picked up a story that took place in Miami that set off the Miami riots in 1980. And it was a story, it was a everyman story. It was about anybody. And, and, and this man happened to have been killed after a late-night motorcycle ride, his name was McDuffie. And they still talk about him in Miami today because that set the tone for a lot of what happened in Miami in the '80s. But the one central idea that we had, as Paul was talking about, was in terms of focusing in on character-driven stories, out of the context of all of this content, was that we didn't necessarily-we, we strove for a higher ground. The idea that we were making these characters sympathetic wa-was not really operative. Because anybody can make somebody sympathetic. You can say that that person is likeable. But when you get to a point where you're reaching for the high ground of making all of our characters, and the audience's reaction to those characters empathetic which means that you're saying that the characters are like me then you're really, then, then, then, then as a central idea, you're really trying to fashion a film that, as we say, works. And works means that it's an, it's a satisfying emotional and intellectual experience but basically an emotional experience that moves and changes you in some fashion or form.

Were there other, were there other central ideas that you wanted to get across?

Well, I think, I think one of the powers of the Eyes series is, is in its use to being able to understand how America as a system, works; and not only negatively. I remember when I saw the first series and that, perhaps you all remember the fourth program in the first series that dealt with King's quasi-failure in Albany, Georgia, and the triumph in Birmingham, and then the March on Washington ending with the tragedy of the deaths of the, of the four small girls in Birmingham. And besides the fact that I thought it was a wonderful-wonderfully made film, it was also wonderful and explained how American politics works. And I think if you, because essentially, they are looking for a triumph. They're looking for someplace to attract news media and if you're gonna get your heads beaten in, you might as well get it done on TV. This is a, a important part of the way American politics and interest groups work in the United States. So, you're not only dealing with the civil rights movement, you're dealing with how change happens in America. And I think for all of us, when we did our films, we were thinking about not only the individual characters but also specifically, what do our shows have to say about different aspects of the country? For the K-the show about King, I mean, you know, implicit in the beginning of the show is exactly how far can you push the political debate in the country before people accuse you of being a traitor, before they accuse of being a communist? Before your own movement, the people that are funding you decide that you're not mainstream anymore and that you're not a good bet. For the second show that I worked on with Jackie Shearer on affirmative action, you're dealing with a very important debate which is not resolved in American today with very strong sides. I mean, what's going on in that debate? We're dealing with a situation in schools in Boston. A very difficult film to make because it's not resolved now. But it's still important enough to be able to deal with. So, you're dealing with real life issues but those issues, again, have something to do informing us about how, how we approach change. How we approach issues and just what's legitimate in American society. How things actually work. And I think Eyes, used that way, takes on another, another order of power. But just finishing up, and a trick I used to-I didn't think it was a trick at the time-but when I used to teach American politics, my courses revolved around the American civil rights movement. Initially, for a class of mostly White middle class kids, they didn't understand what was going on. But all the changes that work in politics in terms of how people make demands, how change happens through legislation and protest, how laws are made, can all be found with the civil rights movement. And I think in looking at the examples that we gave in _Eyes on the Prize_, you can make the same argument for almost all aspects of American society but in a different, different way, so that it makes the series resonate in even a broader sense of it.

Yeah, Paul is absolutely right and let me support what he's saying by saying, you know, all, from my standpoint, and I keep talking about story-telling. But, anyway, from my standpoint the principle, one of the principles of good story-telling is that you want the viewer to understand that things are not always as they appear to be, you know. And so that went all the way through the film like a rocket. From the-from, Malcom X all the way through the sixth show, the seventh show, and Attica, things aren't what they appear to be. And what we tried to do in all of our shows is lay out the text, let you see the subtext of what went on. Because now we've had some di-some distance from the history so we understand the subtext. And when he talks about how American politics works you know there's a lot of betrayal, deceit, all of the raw stuff of human drama and conflict, and all of that other stuff going down in this film. So, you know, and death, and, and murder, and all that other stuff, yeah. And that's life. And that's life. We gave it this kind of form, you know, because that's our responsibility to our history, to, to the viewers, everything else. But it's the stuff of life. That's what this is.

And I think with 20-with the fifth hour, the other piece is what we do with Muhammad Ali. Because everybody thinks of him only as the sports hero, you know. Some people may about the Vietnam piece, but to show what it is to be in the position that he's in and take the positions that he takes and the costs. I mean, it's what we were talking about earlier, which is, what kind of courage do you have to have to essentially risk all which is really what Muhammad Ali does. He knows that he is the world champion but when he takes that first of all, first, well, when he joins the Nation of Islam, which is very threatening to the, the boxing promoters and everyone else, the sports writers, and then to change his name, and demand that they call him by his name. And what that means to him to say, You will call me by my name, the one that I have chosen. And then secondly, when he comes out against the war and what that means to him in terms of his popularity, in terms of the purses that he's able to obtain. At the end of the Manhat-Muhammad Ali segment, you see that he has, it has cost him a great deal both monetarily and in terms of his, his popularity but that he was willing to pay that price. And I guess what I would hope is that a young viewer, no matter, no matter what their race or ethnic heritage, what they would get from that is the sense of what you have to do to stand up for what you believe. What does it mean to be an outsider, in whatever context that is, and still stand up for what you believe? And that's what, that's what Mahammalata-Muhammad Ali was able to do. And at the end of that segment, it was real important that even though you show what he lost, that you see him standing up before a larger group saying, I would not have given it up. I would not have done anything differently. And I think that's what, that's that carry-through, again, it's also what we were talking about is, what is movement? And how do you begin to see Malcolm X and what King is doing and what Muhammad Ali is doing, and the Panthers in that sense of the continuity of the movement? So I guess that's the other thing we were trying to talk about. The third question. And then I think I'm gonna open it up. Is, what...in the best of all possible worlds, what else would you have put in your films, interviews, footage, a point of view, whatever, that is not there now?

Well, we couldn't get anybody to say on camera what people were talking about within the movement about King in 1967. I mean, it, it, it's pretty obvious that not everybody looked up to King especially among movement activists. But since King has become an icon since his death, it's very difficult to have somebody say, specifically, their criticisms of him twenty, twenty-three years later. And that would've been nice for the tension at the beginning of the film because he's not only reacting because the Johnson Administration has cut him off, and he's not only reacting because his own very mainstream, fairly conservative funders are beginning to cut him off, but also I think fairly clearly in '67, he's feeling he's being left behind by, by some parts of the movement. So that when Judy interviewed Kwame Toure, he, he was...he gave us very nice stuff [laughs] but he didn't give us the whole story in terms of what he was thinking back then, though he did a good job. And that was a very nice sound bite at the very beginning of the film about his attitudes for and against King. But it wasn't as strong as it might have been. Any filmmaker would like more time. I keep thinking about, we had to cut this, you know. It would've been great to have, you know, this wonderful speech by Hosea Williams where King speaks in the middle where he, he gives the speech and in the middle of the speech, he begins singing. And it's a beautiful, I mean, it's an incredibly beautiful moment. For those of you that are from Boston, we only were able to do half an hour in Boston in the seventh show. I think we could've done two hours on Boston. Now, the flip side is I don't know if it would've been a better show but it would've been a longer show.

It would've had more things. When I did my first film, I edited it to an hour and forty minutes and I thought it was perfect. And I didn't think I could cut it at all and I brought a couple of very close friends in and I said, listen to it, look at it and don't tell me anything until the end of it. And I played the whole thing and at the end of it they said, Paul, it's an hour and forty minutes long. Cut any forty minutes out.

And they were right. Any forty minutes would've made it better. So, we were forced to be this length, but I think it worked pretty well at the length that it is.

Davis?

I think we needed much, much more footage of Malcolm X. We know that there are some people in this country who have squirreled away a lot of footage of Malcolm X. We know that. And we couldn't find them. And we know that people have made some mistakes over the years in the footage that they have had on Malcolm X. Gordon Parks being one. Nice guy. Gordon shot about seven or eight hours of black and white footage of Malcolm X and it's lost. Nobody knows where it is. The David Susskind estate has about six or seven hours of Malcolm X on one of his shows, won't let it go. There are lot...so we, we needed much, much, much more footage of Malcolm X than we had. And then that would've made, that would've made, that probably would've forced us to want to make the film longer but it would've fleshed it out in ways in which it isn't. Even so, a lot of people who see this basically say they see more of Malcolm than they've ever seen before. Which is, which given the other films that I know about, really isn't true. They really see more of Malcolm in some of the other films. It's just the way we put this together, you know, that makes the difference and, and gives you the feeling that you're getting a fullness out of it. I think we would've wanted to, I would've wanted to interview Percy Sutton whom you can see on the dais on a couple of those, on a couple of those speeches. He's very close to Malcolm and he was his lawyer. And I would have-but he refused to be interviewed. I, I think I would've wanted to interview Amina Rahman who was a, a close associate of Malcolm. And we have nobody from the Nation and we don't have really any women talking about Malcolm X except for one small, well, not really. We don't even have Betty Shabazz anymore. We have Sonia Sanchez, right. Judy got that interview for us. So, I mean, you know, there, there were a number of other people just to give us the options of being able to heighten...and the structure of this tale basically remained the same pretty much for about seven, eight months while we were working on it. Structure. Basic structure. We just kept finding footage and replacing other footage, and finding footage and replacing other footage and just heightened, you know, the effect of the structure to the point where it works as best it possibly can. I think, I think we would've wanted more footage of Loundes County some of the footage of what was, you know, the, the campaign there and what, you know, the Black-and what was going on. I think, I think we had pretty good coverage and footage of the Meredith March but the Loundes County Freedom Democratic Party and there-and its activities, I think we would've needed a lot more footage of that and that could've been better. But basically there's a compilation documentary and given the so-called Eyes style and approach which is just basic storytelling, I. I think we had just about enough to do the best job. We had a funny story happen to us, a funny experience. We had been struggling with this up until September of last year and lo and behold, there was a film sitting on the shelf that we hadn't seen before which somehow or another got borrowed by somebody else or misplaced by one of the producers or something, maybe even us. And we threw it up and you could, you could see us all reach for the yellow pads at once to start taking notes on it and it made this thing work. It really did. All that of Lewis Michaux, the guy from the NAACP, the African dancers, all of that other stuff we made...it made, it made the film work and it's from a film done in 19-I think it was '63 or 2, called _The Harlem Temper_. And it was amazing. We were sitting there looking at the film and they're showing scenes of Harlem 125th Street and Apollo Theater and they were talking about what's happening in Harlem and how this was about the different voices on the street and all of that. And I said, My God, this is a CBS documentary. And then you heard Aaron Cope-Cap-Copeland, Dom, dom, dom-dom, dadadadada. I said, Oh, shit!

They're gonna do it to us now. We reached for the yellow page because when you hear that music. In those days CBS Report and that CBS Reports starts coming at you. I said, They gonna kick...and they did. It was...if you ever get a chance to get a copy of this film which you can get from CBS, I think. It's one of the most fascinating documents of the time. Harry Reasoner, young Harry Reasoner with hair or whatever. It's just wonderful. So.

Yeah. So, I'll tell you what. Let me just mention one thing. We, on the, on 20-on the fifth show, we almost lost the Howard piece and we lostit , we almost lost it, and this was through rough cut almost, to fine cut which would usually be the final poi-point because we didn't have enough footage for Howard. And it's something to keep in mind. What happens...and all of us, all the producers and associate producers, had to deal with the fact that a lot of the networks threw away their film. When they went from video-from film to video in around 1970 or so, they just threw out, for storage reasons, a lot of film. So, when I'm-

-Warner Brothers.

One of the big companies.

Yeah, right.

I was wondering, did you have access to that film?

Yes, we did. And we looked at it and it was, oh, I...some of the pieces that they used in that commercial film actually had come from other sources of, and so, and, a couple of those pieces we used, but there was-

-there was no testimony in there. There were no interviews in there, so we couldn't use any of those from the period and it wasn't, I think it was called _The Autobiography of Malcolm X_ and it wasn't very good. Same producer, you might wanna know, is with the, with the aid and help of the family is attempting to do a feature film called _The Autobiography of Malcolm X_ and Denzel Washington is sitting around hunkering to, hankering to, to play the lead role, and Charles Fuller who did _A Soldier's Story_ is set to write the script, and Norman Jewison who directed _In the Heat of the Night_ is set to direct the film. And that should happen within the next year and a half or so.

I, I, I can appreciate where you're coming from with the Malcolm X stuff. I produced Jerry Williams' talk show on radio for many years. And Jerry talked to Malcolm like once a week just about and is literally sitting on hours and hours and hours of tape on the talk show where he would have interviews with Malcolm and then he'd, you know, open up to the phone lines, and people would be talking to Malcolm over and over. But I was curious as to, if you know, why, why didn't Percy Sutton want to talk to you?

Oh, he said he was busy. And, and, I don't, I don't mean, I don't mean to denigrate Percy in public because he's one of my heroes but he pissed me off.

You know, because there's no reason why he couldn't have been interviewed for this film. He was very important. But, you know, people have different reasons, they get scared, I mean, you know, it's like, you know, and this is a part of his life maybe he doesn't want, I don't know. I really don't. And but he just, he just didn't wanna be interviewed. Everybody else was great. Ossie Davis was just wonderful.

Oh, Alex Haley

Alex Haley was wonderful. I didn't interview Alex, Carol Blue did it, but it was, everybody else was just fantastic. And I think that speaks well to the whole series. I mean, really. I mean, you know.

I might mention by the way on that, 'cause it has to do with what the first series did as well. And just to give credit where credit's due. When we wanted to interview Muhammad Ali and that didn't work out. But when we wanted to interview him, we kept getting this thing, No, he didn't have time. No, da-da, duh, da. And they were about to do six hours, which they are now finally in production on, on his life. And so we kept sa-we kept getting back via other spokespeople for him, No, we won't give the interview because they're about to do six hours on him. And we have exclusive contract with him. Finally, we sent the first series to his wife. And she called back and she said, I don't care what else happens. I don't what contracts have been signed. He will do this interview. He's been sitting up watching the first series in the way he used to watch fight footage. She said, He's sitting up at five o'clock in the morning looking at this first series. And so, it really bought us because of the respect he had for the first series the interview that we needed for the second.

Yeah. Great.

Yeah. Yes?

I just wanted say I've listened to Davis on how he sounded so enthusiastic about filming with Malcolm X and I just hope that I can carry that back to my class with my students. I think I do but, you know, the way you presented it, it's just interesting, just observing how you felt when you were putting all that together.

Well, thank you. Yeah, thank you.

And to Paul. Paul made a statement about any filmmaker may like more time to tell their story. I think teachers feel like that a lot of times, too.

Yeah.

Would you repeat the observation?

Oh, you couldn't hear? Oh.

Oh. [laughs] He couldn't hear me?

You probably need to stand up, because they can't hear unless you stand up.

It wasn't that funny.

Anyway. I was saying that I hope that when I'm back in my classroom, I'm as enthusiastic as Davis, you know, presented himself here telling how he put his story together about Malcolm X. I think I'm that energetic now, and that enthusiastic as well. But I think I picked up a little bit more spunk. [laughs] And I was saying to Paul that the way he was saying about filmmakers, most filmmakers would like to have more time in telling their stories. I think teachers also feel that way sometimes.

In the back.

How would you express the point of both of these projects? What's the point? Why do it? What was the intent?

I think it was something that we talked about this morning. Which is to show the continuity of struggle within the history. And the second piece being the change agents that a lot of regular people are. I mean, I think that comes through in both the first and the second series. Miss Amalfitano who is sitting in our midst was a change agent within South Boston. You know, that you need to see regular people who look like you who were effecting change in this country and that that change even though it didn't go far enough perhaps was the beginning of something that you could build upon. Now, but you all talk about that too.

No, I think you said it best.

Oh, I'm sorry. Yes?

Yes.

Oh, you want, did you want to hear from us, too?

Yeah.

Go ahead.

Thank you, the reason I'm asking is that these projects cost a lot of money and gets a lot of attention. It's a wonderful project. And I'm just curious about what would drive somebody to take something like that on.

OK. I think, I think what you have in a situation like this, I mean, all filmmakers like to work. OK? I mean, but that, that's a basic thing. But I think there's a difference in our projects and that, you know, Henry did a pretty good choice of choosing who to work on this series. I mean, in many ways, you know, as, as we're talking about it now, you know, we're positive, we're, we're, you know, we have a lot of energy or varied levels of energy. But the series was a pain in the ass to make. And it was, it was, it was very hard. There were a lot of different points of view. It's, it's very hard stuff to try to figure out how to make. And nobody had met each other before, or very few people knew each other beforehand. And if you've ever been involved in a film project, that's hard enough to begin with. So that what Henry did was he chose a lot of people that as far as I can figure were either committed to the subject. And there's very few people there I think that hadn't done a whole lot of thinking about it and been involved in something akin to this thing beforehand. And also a lot of people that had shown a lot of dedication to projects beforehand so they'd shown their mettle through stuff. I mean, he also wanted people that either produced good films or had the potential. He, I think he did a pretty good job of picking people that, that showed potential but hadn't done stuff on the level of Eyes. So, that for a lot of us this is just important stuff to do. I mean, I remember when Henry finally got around to choosing who's gonna do what film. We were at The Meeting House, God, what was that about two and a half years ago?

Mm-hmm.

You know, it happens real suddenly, it's like 7:30 in the morning, he called us in early, you know people were drinking coffee, and sort of in, in one ear as I'm half asleep, he goes, I'm gonna be part of the film that's gonna be Martin Luther King's last year, and I'm sittin' there going, God, I can't believe this. I mean, this is the film that I wanted to do. You know, it was important to me to paint a real picture of a real political leader in a real world so that not only when you're seeing small people do things but you're also seeing leaders acting like human beings. I mean, I love that thing that Andy Young does. I mean, this is-very much like every-most of the people that were interviewed in this thing, Andy Young, has a very busy schedule as Mayor of Atlanta. He totally broke the whole schedule for five hours. There were people lined up in the hall outside. He spends the whole first half an hour saying, I've been to Zimbabwe, and he talked about _Eyes on the Prize_ that was in Sweden, and they had it on TV and he just was going and going and going. And when he gave us something like that, you're not seeing somebody who was one of King's closest, if not closest, protégé. You're not seeing somebody who's famous. You're not seeing somebody who's the mayor of a city and maybe a governor. You're seeing somebody telling a very human story. And for a filmmaker, when you're sitting there, you're going, Wow, we really got this. We're doing something that's important. Because you're showing something that's real. And you can tell when-you can get good words from people, but you can tell when they're faking it. You know, when they've told the story before. Their eyes kind of do this, this funny thing that I can't describe.

Sinking into their head, when, when, when something's real. because they forget that you're there. I mean, the camera's always there. But when they're saying something they really, that they really care about, there's very few feelings about it in the world. So that, in itself, was great. Being able to make coherent if not good films out of this stuff is even better. And if you care about the subject, you know, everything is worth it.

I'd like to speak to your question a little bit, too. I, I'm both someone who came to this project late and early. I used to work here in Boston at WGBH and as an executive producer, I was a friend of Henry Hampton. And I left and went out to Los Angeles and worked in Hollywood for a while and I came back to New York City and I worked for a while there. And lo and behold, I got a call from Henry one day. And I'd known long and, for a long time that he'd been working on _Eyes on the Prize_ ever since '78. And this was like '82. And he said, Why don't you come up. He said, I need some help. He said, Why don't you come up and work with Steve Fayer and myself and we're gonna write a proposal for _Eyes on the Prize_. I'm gonna see if we can get the real funding that we need to do this on a first-class fashion. And he said, I'll even pay you. So, I said, Fine.

Since I didn't have a job that was a good thing. So I came up to, I came up to Boston and he put me up in his house and I surrounded myself with a library of books that Eyes had at that time of everything on the civil rights movement and I went eighteen hours a day. And I read everything I want. I was telling the young man, this gentleman here, where are you? Where did he go? Guy in the t-shirt. There he is! I was telling this gentleman earlier, you know right, he's right here, the gentleman, what's your name, sir?

John.

I was telling John earlier about how, you know, writers always talk about the problem with writer's block and people, people write whole articles, you know, chapters, and books on writing about. Writer's block is bullshit.

You have a writer's block when you don't know what you're writing about. If you know what you're writing about, the writing will come easy. It just go, it just, it just will flow. And whenever you, whenever you look at that blank page you just don't know what you're dealing with. You don't know what you're writing about and the best cure for writer's block is research. So, you go to the library. You go. I had this library and I had these books and every time I hit a block, I'd go into the book. And I'd sit there and I'd read all day long. And lo and behold if you, I, I, I mean, and I had, and the _New York Times_ would come and I, all of a sudden [snaps] it hit me, and I said I had two, two premises to come into mind that were operative for both series of Eyes which was that these were stories about people who found within themselves the courage to change their own conditions and lives; and two, that storytelling was the best way to change our lives. And the third thing that was premisorial was that I told a story about how there were a bunch of kids from Brooklyn and, and New York, who got on a church bus and went on Staten Island for a picnic in one of the big green parks over there and this was about 1981, '82, and the writer in _The New York Times_ as he was telling this story talked about how some White thugs around the periphery of the park started taunting and chasing the kids and they threw bricks and rocks at-it's 1981, '82-at the bus and they had, they were forced off the island and his final line was, "And so turns another generation on the issue of race," and I said [claps], That's it. So turns another generation on the issue of race. I said you play off of that in a proposal. I don't care if you're talking to the Rockefeller Foundation or you're talking to CPB, they've got to feel. So, it's the same thing. We made 'em feel at the beginning of the proposal and we got 'em into it. We told that story, and then we talked about storytelling. And this is filmmaking and films is the best way to interject ideas into our lives at this point in time. I'm lucky to be alive because this is my art and craft. I started out as a musician. And I gave that up because that wasn't satisfactory and I discovered that I had something of a facility with pic-with pictures and so I went, I went into this business. And this is the best way to introduce ideas and to change people's lives in realistic ways because if, if like Paul, and some of the other producers, of you're exta-you're extraordinarily skillful, you take a story and you set it in, and this is grand drama. These are archetypal kind of characters coursing through here. Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, yagghh, I mean, these are like bigger than life people. And when your youngsters sit down and look at this, given today's youngsters, they see these bigger than life people and all of the dynamics that we tried to weave into the story, that's all true, and all of a sudden, you, you, you know, you, you get the feeling that they start to understand how, too, they are somewhat similar to those characters. And I was saying before if you can get them to empathize with those characters as one kid, which was one of the best moments in this whole damn series, if you haven't seen it, you've got to see it, because it's one of my best films is the sixth film. And what happens in there is that they tell the story of Hampton/Clark in Chicago and how these two Black Panthers and you know and others were killed in a police raid on the Panther headquarters. And one priest whose name I've forgotten. What's his name?

Father Clemmons.

Right, Father Clemmons starts talking about how at a memorial service, you know, he gets up and he starts talking about Hampton/Clark and all of a sudden one kid gets up and says, "I'm Fred Hampton!" He says it and another kid says, "I'm Fred Hampton!" Da-na-na-nah! And Clemmons probably didn't know that it probably had a lot to do with his storytelling. But when you get a kid to say, I'm Malcolm X! and I'm Martin Luther King, then you've got some power stuff going for you. And you can, you can twist a life just like that. You can take drug dealer or you can take a kid who's just, I mean, from, and you can, boom [snaps], you can move a life and change a life. If you change a life, you've done a great thing for humanity. Really. I mean, so, why we did this? I've set some of the premises in motion with my colleagues, Henry Hampton, Steve Fayer. We did this because we honestly believed that you could change lives with your storytelling. And, yes, PBS and maybe not NBC, or what have you, but there a lot, millions of people watched this show. And if one or two or three or four or maybe 204 of the youngsters basically gets the idea that they can be, to themselves, to their race, to whatever, the kind of characters, a Stokely Carmichael, or something like that or an Andy Young, or whomever. If they get the idea,

Or Diane Nash.

Huh?

Or Diane Nash.

Or a Diane Nash. Or an Eleanor Holmes Norton or I, you know, what I'm-

Why not a Judy Richardson?

Hey, what, what, you know, you've done something. So, that's what we're trying to do.

Yeah. Go ahead.

I'd like to make the correlation between Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, and, and some rap artists. Like, Public Enemy and N.W.A. There's a certain irreverence that, that the kids now associate especially with Malcolm X because all the rap, the musicians that you might want to take, they steal, and sample Malcolm X's speeches in their music. And they say, and at the same time, Malcolm was saying things that people didn't want to hear, the rap artists now are really saying things that people just don't want to hear.

Well, yeah, I mean.

One other point? Mal-Muhammad Ali was talking about, "Call me by my name." The kids today want you to accept them for the way they are in their sweatsuits, in their T-shirts, in the big sneakers with no, no laces. They'll go to their job interviews, they'll come to their classes, and they'll go to all these things like this and they'll be getting hit with, Well, you can't dress like that, or, Well, you've gotta have this certain type of uniform in order to do this. And they will say to you, You gotta take me the way I am. At the same time they're booming that Malcolm stuff right on it. And you gotta look at it seriously because there's a whole generation of kids that are going to have to be accepted the way they're coming because as most of us know in the classroom, these are really good kids if you could get beyond the big T-shirt.

I agree with you, and I, I didn't mean to upstage you earlier and interrupt.

No, no, no, no, no.

I know, I knew exactly where you're coming from. I mean, it's what I, to myself, you know, I call it the Spike Lee syndrome. [attendees laugh] I mean, you know, my feeling is Spike distorts a lot because he doesn't understand. And it may be because he's too young to understand. I don't know why but the way Spike gets whatever Spike gets from Malcolm and to some degree Martin is it's, it's, it's, it's through his filters and what have you. But the kind of imagery and messages that some of these kids are passing onto other kids about, about Malcolm, Martin, and what have you is, is, is, they're sampling. They're trying and they're experimenting and I, I love it. I mean, it's wonderful because it's there and it's accessible and they're reaching for it and they're trying. But it's like, you know, Spike really doesn't know what _Do the Right Thing_ is just yet, you know. And he's gonna be great. The boy is a bad filmmaker. He's magnificent but _Do the Right Thing_ is a confusing kind of a notion among a lot of our youngsters. And I don't mean that with respect to, you know, being dressed for the job or interview appropriately or what have you. I mean that in terms of finding their identity and who they are and what, and what they're gonna do with their lives. That's why we tried to do this, this way, you know. So, that out of the context of our history and these stories maybe these are quote "role models" or maybe their stories are exemplamatic of ways of behavior or what have you, I don't know. If somebody takes something away with it and does something well, that's, that's, that's, that's good.

Can we do it, 'cause there was actually a que-oh. OK. I'm sorry, OK.

I have a question. I teach fourth grade now and I've taught second grade. And I was thinking of ways to use _Eyes on the Prize_ 1 and 2 in the classroom. And I was thinking what might be a sacrilegious thought about ways to cut it in, into smaller pieces to use with younger kids. And I was just-

Funny, you should mention that. Because we're thinking about doing that actually is to, to cut it down into small segments so that, for example, you could do Montgomery as a separate segment. And perhaps bookend it with some host who would give a little explanation kind of thing. So, yeah, we're, we're thinking, and you might want to do that yourself. I mean, just, just do Montgomery or do Emmett Till or, yeah.

Can, can I tell you a funny story? Just out of curiosity, I know I take up a lot of time. you know, I might keep running my mouth. But on the way out here, I'm fumbling with the map to get, you know, to get to Tufts and I've driven all the way from New York today. And lo and behold, I turned on NPR and there's _All Things Considered_, you know. And I'm listening to it and so I got a lot of things going on at once trying to find my way and all of a sudden up comes the story about a new book being written by some guy names Meyer and it's called _The Alexander Complex_. And what it is, is six stories actually biographies of, of accomplished entrepreneurs in America. Ted Turner, a host of, you know,

Donald Trump.

The guy who, right, the guy who did, the guy who did Apple Computer.

Jobs.

Jah, Jo, Jobs. Ah, then H. Ross Perot, and all this other stuff. I'm saying, Well, now this is interesting. And the guy goes on waxing poetic and really laudatory about how great these stories are and these people. And at the end of it he said, And especially wonderful was the story about H. Ross Perot and when you get to the end of this book, you really think that what the author is really telling the, the, the reader is about how these men really did the right thing. [attendees laugh] I said, Well. Another idea has entered our culture through, and this is, and I'm speaking positive of Spike in this respect, not negatively. I mean, cause _Do the Right Thing_ has gotten all kinds, well, "do the right thing" means a lot to different people. And there's a big debate among at least in the New York intelligencia and literati and the film world about whether Spike did the right thing at the end of his movie. But, you know, it's, it's, it's an idea that's taken hold and I just, I just had to crack up at that, you know.

Now. Yeah, oh. Did you still want? Go ahead.

I think you've answered the question.

OK. Yeah.

I'm interested in, in hearing from you, Judy, and you, Paul, about your experiences in defining the themes of the sections that you wrote. Were they, were they similar to, to Madison's, in involving a lot of research or exactly how did you define the themes that you talked about earlier?

[laughs] You notice we both look at each other. I guess part of it is to understand the process of making Eyes, which is that it was very much, even more so than filmmaking generally, a collaborative process. So, that whereas within there were teams of, there were four teams each of whom made two films, two hours. And so, there were two co-producers. There was an associate producer. There were the series people. There was Henry as the exec producer. So that there were a lot of people in, at play in all of this, so that as we're working out, for example, the second hour and the, the other, I was the series associate producer for the whole series but I was also assigned to two hours. And so that was the film that you saw just now, a segment of it, and also Detroit, the second hour which was-

-mainly because you don't want to expose your film to that kind of, that variety, and that-there's a danger in doing it that way. But the advantage is that you get, certainly scholars will tell you no, and it wasn't always factual, that maybe your interpretation was not correct. That the activist will say, Well, no, but that didn't happen then. You know, He didn't say that. You know, or, What so-and-so said, that didn't really happen. You get all of that, that influx of opinions and factional information so that it's really-

-a continuing process as you're building the film but it's not just resident within that particular team. It really does have to do with the scholars and the activists and everybody. Yeah. But.

It, it was a hard process. I mean, Blackside was a, was an explosion of democracy and the more democracy there is, the harder something is. But there's lots of different cooks. There's lots of different interpretations. But it was hard to begin with. I mean, picture, picture yourself, let's say, you're an expert on, on some aspect of American history. The depression or the civil rights movement or the space race, or World War II or World War I and somebody said you can do an eight-part series on it. And if you're an expert on something or you know something a lot about it, you have favorite stories. There's hundreds of stories. I mean, in the movements there were things going on in every city in the United States and, fortunately, unfortunately, when Henry decided how to divide the series, a lot of our films had a, you know, too many of these things in them. And we were sort of given, you know, three or four different things and said make a movie out of it. Now for the King film, it was easier because mostly what you had was King's life, but what we began off with was King's life, the 1968 presidential election, the Chicago Convention in '68, and a couple of other things which you sort of drop as time went on, as I began to figure out what the film was about. But a lot of that was spent with, with myself and the other co-producer arguing, or not even arguing, just sort of talking through how do you make a film out of this stuff. And what's the heart of the subject? And we worked very closely with the series writer, Steve Fayer, who also co-wrote the book with Henry, and he kept pushing us, Make it character-driven. I mean, what's the tension in this film? What's the specific concept in this film which is most important? And to make the film successful, you have to highlight that. I mean, this goes to, you know, a much more extreme lens than Hollywood when you drop all substance for, does he love her or not, or will she stay. In this, it was sort of the same thing in that the important part about the King film was King. And once you brought it down to it's basic, then you begin to tack on other things. What's going on in the country? What's going on in terms of the debate on how do you achieve economic, economic justice. Where does backlash come in? And for for our second film, it was real difficult. I mean, picture trying to make a film out of desegregation in Boston in the early '70s, Maynard Jackson getting elected in Atlanta in the middle '70s, and the Bakke case and affirmative action in the late '70s. I mean, first you've got to figure out what are these three doing together in the same film. And you would, you'd have epiphanies every now and then. Something would make sense. OK, Maynard Jackson is there because when you have a, a Black mayor and he comes into office, his hiring policies are a lot different than the person he usually procedes. He's much more open to different types of people coming into a government. And so make him the bridge. Boston is the, is the, is the hammer. Atlanta is what happens after things change. And Bakke is the backlash. OK. That sounds easy. Then when you try to make it work in fifty-two minutes or fifty-five minutes, it's hard. For King, I mean, I remember a particular point where we, we had to make the connection from what's going on nationally with King and the Poor People's Movement and what's going on in Memphis, Tennessee, I mean, why does King end up in Memphis? I mean, it's a wonderful story. I wish somebody could do an hour story on that. We have incredible footage on it. I had forgotten about how good it was, I didn't want to put it out of my mind it was so good. And one day we said, OK, national. OK, he's doing national strategy. There's also backlash and, and political atomization. You know, Johnson's falling apart, the Tet Offensive, Kennedy wants to become president, McCarthy, George Wallace, and it led to twenty seconds. A twenty-second thing of almost like MTV cutting. McCarthy, Kennedy, Wallace, the Tet Offensive, things are falling apart and in the midst of all this, nobody is paying attention to what's going on in Memphis, Tennessee, and you zoom into it. But that only came about with all the stuff that Judy was talking about. Discussing it, thinking about it, and having people look at it, and with so many people looking at it, you had to have some sort of a filter going on. But in general, we had really good scholars, really good audiences, with the rough-cut screenings, and I think it made all the films better. It's hard to, it's hard to be obstinate in the face of 130 people going to sleep sometimes in the film. So you, you learn something. It's better to see it then, than to have it on television.

How much room did you leave for the viewer to discern that story? How tightly do you control the viewer? Do you leave me any room as a viewer to make out of that the story that I want to make out of it, with my own filters?

With your own film?

With my own filters. My own perception.

With your own filters. Oh, yeah.

Could you repeat the question please?

Yeah, he's asking how much room do we, the filmmakers, permit and allow the viewer within the context of our films to, to bring their own filters to it and make their own story. There's a lot missing out of the Malcolm story, you know, or, or, or the Nation of Islam, Malcolm X, you know, that story. There, there, there's, and there are a lot of questions that a viewer would ask. A knowledgeable scholar or viewer, not even a scholar, just somebody who can sit down and-you look at the Malcolm story, and we didn't see it all the way here, and you can just ask a million and one questions that we didn't include information on. So, there's plenty of room within all of these films. Because, I mean, you know you compress a lot of material down into a structure that, you know, that is artificial, basically. It's artificial because its purpose is to do what it's supposed to do. It's supposed to get you interested, grab your attention, hold our interest, give you an emotional high, and send you away either with a smile or a frown on your face. I mean, a smile or a tear in your eye, or something like that. That's, that's, that's what we do. I mean, we, we, there's no mystical, mysticism, or magic to what we do. Basically, we're craftsmen and artists at the business of taking your emotions and playing with them. We're, we got a lot of integrity, and we're honest, and we're dealing with information and content that we really care about a lot. As you can hear from Paul and Judy, and I hope, me. But the point is that we're filmmakers. So, there's not a real big difference between us and Steven Spielberg or anybody else in Hollywood, clearly. There's no difference between us. We work within the same sort of, we have the same sort of tools. And the idea of this series was to leave a lot of space for youngsters and for teachers and for, viewers or anybody to ask questions and say, Well, now, wait a minute, you know. And go back and pick up a book or see another film or do that, this and the other and answer questions that don't get answered here. And, and really bring their own story to it in a way, angles to the story, that's what you're talking, bring their own angles to the story that we, we just couldn't deal with. Yeah.

Now, I'm interested in, in, in a lot of the film that, that didn't get put on, and what happens to that and very specifically more of the Boston story. And I think there's a lot of concern because, you know, people read _Common Ground_ and think that's the whole history and those of us that were in the middle of it know that it isn't. And I think it is important, if for nothing else but for Boston's history, if there's some way to capture a lot of the footage that, you know, didn't get on the final-

Oh, yeah. Let me just mention that there is, we will be setting up an archives and what will be really a larger resource center so that people will have access to all of that footage, much of which did not get in the films just because of lack of time. So, it's not like it'll go somewhere and stay in somebody's warehouse. That will be, once we get it set up, in an institution, be available for people to look at. Because I might mention that we got the last interview with Huey P. Newton, for example, that Al Raby, who was so central to the Chicago campaign that [unintelligible] Dr. King is going in. He died three weeks after we interviewed him. We've gotten interviews with people who are now dead. Some of whom didn't even get to see themselves on screen. So, there are a lot of, there's a lot of good stuff there. And we understand that we have a responsi-in a way that the networks, for example, don't, that we have responsibility to these people and to the movement that this be accessible. Yeah.

When you say it's going into an archive-?

I'm gonna talk about it.

Oh, OK. I'm sorry. Let me go back. Yeah.

This, this is going to be the subject of what I talk to you about. Whatever day it is.

Thursday, I think.

Thursday.

I-

Yeah, I think she may have a question though, and follow up. Yeah.

Well, what I was going to say. Since you said this was going into the archives, like, say for example, I mean today we asked you whether or not there was going to be an Eyes 3. [laughs]

I almost fainted, didn't I, yes.

But suppose another group of new filmmakers want to do something and want to use some of that footage to do something, would that be possible?

Yeah. Jack is right. We are going to have a broader discussion on this but, yes. In some ways that'll be possible. The, the only difference is that we don't own any of the archival footage. So that it will only be interviews. Yeah.

But the archive in this is researched. You'll be able to know where those archival pieces are.

Yes. That's right.

One of the, one of the nice things about working on this series and one of the precious things about it is that, for me at any rate, the thing I feel the best about is that I was able to contribute to the archive. I don't think of any ethnic minority in America, aside from probably Jews, there's this kind of history on film that exists and we know where some of this stuff is, where a lot of this stuff is. And other than these interviews that didn't get featured at length in the series, some of them are absolutely precious and wonderful. And I hope to see ten years hence, or maybe sooner, another set of filmmakers who are fortunate enough to come up with the cash in equal amounts or similar times of terms and go out and do their version of _Eyes on the Prize_ because we came at this with certain angles approached. And they can come at it differently and it's all about skill and style and taste and integrity. And I hope that happens.

You know, I would hope that somebody would do a longer film on Boston. There's footage there.

Great footage.

And our, our way of doing it is not the only way of doing it. I mean, our, our, the Eyes style, you know, is very much based for a very large audience. And that's not the only way of doing these sorts of things. You can come at it with a much stronger point of view. You can come at it through an individual, specifically. You can come at it in many forms which in some ways may work in a different way and perhaps could work in a better way. The Memphis footage that we discovered, and again, you can go to the f-the archives. I'm not sure what Jack's going to tell you on Thursday but there are going to be places where you can find this stuff. The Memphis footage is out of this world. I mean, when I saw it, I couldn't believe it. And it didn't cost very much. Somebody should do an hour film on Memphis, specifically. You know, about the movement there and what happened afterwards, because our series is really based, you know, in the, in the time that it happened in. In 1968 or 1965 and another film form could take it from that time period and bring it through in one city up to the present time. So that a lot of the questions you might want to know, I mean, what happens in Atlanta after Maynard Jackson becomes the mayor. What happens in Memphis after King dies? What happens in Miami after the, the violence in 1980? What happens in Chicago after Harold Washington? And those are important subjects. They couldn't fit in our particular documentary but there's no reason why a different form could use this footage and go through time with it.

Exactly. This guy there.

Yes. This is David [sic] and Paul to pick up on something that Judy gave us information-wise this morning that the production teams were made up of co-producers, one Black, one White. And dealing with, Paul, your feelings of democracy, this is one of the better and maybe interesting processes of democracy your production in. And yours, David [sic] in terms of trying to put in a story, or highlight in those stories, the heroic aspects and qualities, and hoping that they become, if you will, instruments for, for change within the viewers who see them, the young as well as the old.

Right.

How did that kind of pairing, being very clearly that the American experience, the civil rights being the other, are seen definitely between two sets of blinders because there is one who is, the one being, one is the perpetrator and one, more you, the antagonist? The antagonist and protagonist terminology. OK. I'm not identifying who's what. I'm just saying,

What did that bring to what your final [unintelligible] were, and your respective thesis and the same question in the series Eyes II, different than Eyes I? I know it's loaded but-

Well, yeah. I-

That's a wonderful question, Napoleon.

And if you don't do it all, take whatever you want.

I, I'll let Judy deal with the answer from the standpoint of Eyes I. I, I, you know, Jim DeVinney, James DeVinney, the co-producer with whom I worked on, on these two films, it took us a short period of time to get to know one another. I've known Jim since 1972 or 3 or so, from being in public television, him being in public television, what have you. So, we knew each other as sort of working colleagues and acquaintances. But working together is a whole different situation. And we had to establish some sort of foundation upon which we were really going to proceed with our work and, and, and, be collaborative. And the filmmaking craft is the art and craft of collaboration. And the, the one foundation that we latched upon was, you know, we were at lunch one day and he was talking and then he said, and we both said almost at the same time, We're really gonna make a good movie here. That's all he needed to say. Once we reali-once I realized he was interested in making a movie and I was interested in making a movie, all the other questions were essentially moot. I mean, and you know, we had arguments but not big ones about, for example, in the McDuffie story in 208, there's a scene at the very end of the riot sequence. And we were sitting around one day and looking at a lot of Miami footage, most of it boring. Because the cameras really can't get into the midst of a riot, you know, they can't show you the really the people, you know? They stay on the periphery of what's happening and behind the police lines and what have you. And there were some aerial views of gru-bunches of kids and men and women running down the street, and da-da, da-da-da, and we couldn't use that because it looked like ants and what have you. We were looking at all this footage and I knew, and we both knew how we wanted to build up to the riot and we had made the whole, we, we structured the whole film so that it was a progress, so the progress was through pieces of music, too. All, from, from, from our history. I mean, we started out with a piece of music that's deep in the '50s and then we move up into the 60s and then we move up into the '70s, and then we move up into the '80s and by the time you get to the riot in 1980, '80, '81, I wanted, I wanted, I wanted a piece of rap music because knew rap was prevalent. I knew it was in the streets. It wasn't in the record stores a lot. And one of the things that we had to, you know, one of our rules was that people had to have heard this kind of music in order to, to fit it within that context, in order to use it in the film. And so you get to the riot thing and the music starts bom-bom, da-bom-bom, da-bom-bom da bom-da, all the words on the street daba boba da-da, and all this other stuff, right. I can't do this very well. And it builds, and it builds, and the narration builds, and it tells you about the riot, and it builds, and the last line before you go to this big piece of footage I'm talking about is, the last line is, and, and, so, and, of so and so many people arrested, many of them were never charged with anything or something like that, we go [claps] hard to a c-to a guy being arrested. And this is the metaphor for the whole film. And it's a big, Black guy with a black, with a blue sweatshirt on and there are three cops trying to subdue him. And he says, now listen to the structure of this, he says, What I did? What I did? What I did? I ain't did nothin'. You mean you gonna put me in jail for doin' nothin'? Cut. Cut back in voice and he says, Look at this Black boy. He's scared. And he laughs and then cut back again and he said, Let me get in of my free will. Let me get in of my free will. I'm telling you, let me get in of my free will, and he goes, Arrrgghh, and they can't subdue him. And finally, of his free will, he puts his hands behind his back. It's the whole film right there in thirty seconds. We argued about that for days.

We argued about that for days because from Jim's perspective, when he finally, and I'm not denigrating Jim or maligning Jim at all, because I mean we had to work this through. I said, That's the film. The whole film, the whole series basically comes down to this one image of this one defiant Black man saying, You will give me my will. I don't care if you're White, Black, blue, green, or indifferent, I will have my way in this life. I am a willful character and I will do for myself in this circumstance or any other circumstance whatever in the world I please. I am a free man, and da-da, da-da, da-da-da-da-da. That's the whole series. Eyes I, Eyes II, it boils down to a single thirty-second piece of film. And Jim, when he all of a sudden, we were sitting there one day, and he said [claps], You're absolutely right. And it wasn't phony. Because I know him, we know each other. It wasn't phony. He's saying, Shit, he said, Well, now, suppose we cut it this way and we did this, this, this, he wanted to help and he did help. And in fact, you know, most, or a lot of the decisions about structure were both, both of our parts in there to suggest as much as him in this film as much as there is of me. So you reach accommodations. YOu reach-we reached an accommodation at the very beginning of what we were working towards. We were working towards a movie. And we know, we knew we wanted our movies to be, have payoffs to them, final images, final ideas which in short, visual, hopefully, action-packed moment of film, we were very lucky to get this film w-video, encapsulates the whole film. And that's how we worked out our differences. But we didn't really have any political problems per se. Most of 'em started with the premise that we were making a movie, and let's examine the politics within the context of making it. Oh, I think there was one moment I had to say, Now, Jim, you must understand. This is Malcom motherfucking X.

You know, you must understand that this is Malcolm!

I gotta say, somebody was passing the edit room when they heard you say that. She came out, she said, Do you know what Davis just said? This is Malcolm m-

But he, let me tell you about Jim DeVinney, you know, and in the world of filmmaking, you know, we can have different political attitudes and be of different races and what have you, but, a first-class dude. He's a bad filmmaker. And he s-he did his first film working on _Eyes on the Prize_, too. The boy is a bad storyteller. I hope, I hope Jim learned as much from me as I learned from him, but I mean when we're in the editing room and we're cooking. I mean, we're cooking together. It's about what the film's about. It's not about race or racism or something like that. There are a few things that go down but, you know, it's no big deal.

You know the answer to you? [laughs] I spoke on this already.

OK. Very briefly. Obviously, obviously, you bring your own life experiences into the, into the editing room. As an example, the Boston story could've been told a lotta different ways. Jackie, my co-producer was from Boston. She grew up in Boston. She took the lead in that story and she decided very early on, it was the story of Black mothers. I mean, it could've been the story of a lot of different things. It could've been Judge Garrity's story. It could be, you know, the way _Common Ground_ treated it. It could've been a lot of different people who were looking for a reform of the Boston school system and she said, This is the story of Black mothers. And when you figure out what your focus is gonna to be, you figure out who you're gonna interview. Now, for me, you know, I came in from a very political point of view and I wanted to do, you know, politicians. I wanted to do an overview of stuff and, and I don't think I ever would've thought of that. You know, for, and again our points of view may not have been that different but again it depends on where we're coming from the story. And I think in making this different than _Common Ground_, and making it a movement story. I mean where does the Boston struggle come from? It was the correct choice. I think Henry's logic in putting different types of people together was to try to get that mix of point of view. And I think I would leave it to the other production teams to say how well that worked. The dynamics, you know, were very different in each production team. For us, we came at things very similarly and we were able to talk things out pretty easily. And I can't remember any interviews we ever disagreed on by the time we got to the interviews. But that's because, again, you're not only, you know, all film directors wanna be kings or queens of their own projects and you're learning something different but by having somebody else tell you something-