Pod Insights Here's The Thing with Alec Baldwin Judith Vecchione - Summer Staff Picks About this episode Our summer tradition at Here’s the Thing continues, as staff members choose their favorite conversations from the archives for our Summer Staff Pick series. This week in our Summer Staff Pick series, we revisit Alec’s interview with Judith Vecchione, Emmy- and Peabody-winning producer of the landmark PBS series Vietnam: A Television History, which premiered 40 years ago. Vecchione discusses the immense responsibility of telling the story of the Vietnam War through a 13-part documentary, the behind-the-scenes process of crafting such a comprehensive project, and how the experience shaped her decades-long career at WGBH. She also speaks with Alec about her work on Eyes on the Prize, the stories that drive her, and how she’s mentoring the next generation of documentary storytellers.
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Transcript 7,508 words · 17 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:32 Alec Baldwin? This is Alec Baldwin, and you're listening to Here's the Thing from iHeart Radio. It's summer, and that means it's time for our tradition at Here's the Thing, where the staff share their favorite episodes from our archives in our Summer Staff Picks series. My pick is Judith Vecchione. Enjoy.
1:56 Alec Baldwin? In the 1960s, which was a convulsive period in American history, one major story seemed to play on and on with no end in sight: the war in Vietnam. When that war officially ended in 1975, journalists, artists, and public broadcasting began to conduct the autopsy. The result produced films like 1978's Coming Home, 1979's Apocalypse Now, and a PBS series, first broadcast in 1983, Vietnam: A Television History. Over the course of 13 hours, the program dug deep into the background, cost, and toll taken
2:41 Alec Baldwin? on the principal figures involved in the war.
2:45 Speaker 05 Thirty years after the first American died in Vietnam, the last Americans were leaving, waiting on the US Embassy roof to be flown to safety. The long war was ending in the defeat of the South Vietnamese state that America had supported for two decades. What kind of peace finally was at hand? What would be the meaning of peace?
3:10 Alec Baldwin? My guest today is Judith Vecchione, an Emmy and Peabody-winning producer of that series. Vecchione has worked in documentary programming with Boston-based PBS station WGBH since the 70s and has been an executive producer there for 23 years. Her career has encompassed programs like Frontline and American Experience, documentary films like Blood Sugar Rising, and the Peabody-winning doc series Eyes on the Prize. I wanted to know what Vecchione's upbringing was like and how her home environment influenced her career path.
3:51 Speaker 06 I grew up in a politically very aware household. My father read the newspaper from cover to cover, the New York Times from cover to cover, every day. And we talked about what was going on. And so the big issues of the day, civil rights, the Vietnam War, were live topics in my family. My parents worked with civil rights organizations, making sure our community was not dismantling the housing discrimination in our suburban community.
4:21 Alec Baldwin? But what area was this in?
4:22 Speaker 06 South shore of Long Island.
4:24 Alec Baldwin? Where, what town? I'm from the south, I'm from Massapequa.
4:27 Speaker 06 I'm from Merrick.
4:28 Alec Baldwin? So you were in the south shore of the island. Was your dad, was he a writer?
4:33 Speaker 06 He should have been, but he did not end up doing that. He should have been, he should have been an academic, actually. I think the politics of the day for people who were very progressive made that hard. And my mother was a teacher, was a high school math teacher, who I had for math, actually. Luckily, it's a, it's a subject where you get the answers right or you get them wrong. And so there's no favoritism. Nobody ever got worried about whether mom was being nice to me. And half the class called her mom anyway.
5:05 Alec Baldwin? So when you leave, you go off to Yale.
5:09 Speaker 06 Yep.
5:09 Alec Baldwin? And as you head off to New Haven, was there a plan? Was there something you wanted to study? And what was that?
5:15 Speaker 06 Well, the first thing is that I'm in the first class of women at Yale, the first matriculating class. So I don't know that I knew what I was going to study at that time. I was interested in languages, I was interested in history. And I, I ended up being a linguistics major, which probably wasn't the most useful thing to study. But it's such a rich environment, you know, in these big universities, you, you get great education. I'm not sure I took full advantage of it. It was the middle of the Vietnam War, there was a lot going on, and Yale was very unprepared for us, for the women.
5:54 Alec Baldwin? How so?
5:55 Speaker 06 Well, they...
5:58 Speaker 06 Fifty years later, this is like five years ago, they invited the first women back. So that's my class plus the two transferred classes. And they admitted that they just did it in a hurry to beat Princeton to co-education. And I felt a lot better once they said, you know, we really didn't think about anything except we'll wa- we'll paint some bathrooms for you or something. But there were no, you have to think about when you arrive in an environment like that, a university, you expect the upper-class people to guide you, to help you. You expect the teachers to know where to draw. They didn't know what to, nobody knew what to do. All the upper-class women were as new as we were.
6:41 Speaker 06 It was a real pioneering experience.
6:44 Alec Baldwin? This is sixty-nine.
6:45 Speaker 06 I, we arrived in sixty-nine, yeah.
6:47 Alec Baldwin? And that, and that class were you as incoming freshmen and people who had transferred, who were upper-class people as well.
6:53 Speaker 06 Right.
6:53 Alec Baldwin? Who transferred as well.
6:55 Speaker 06 So graduating classes of seventy-three, mine seventy-two and seventy-one. And, but they came from, you know, Vassar and from NYU and wherever. They didn't know Yale. They didn't know the professors. Nobody could say to you those key things of, don't take this class, take that one. You know, the, this, if you got a choice of teaching assistants, go with this one. It was, as I say, a tremendously rich environment. There was more than enough for anybody. But I know that the later classes had it easier than we did.
7:28 Alec Baldwin? When you leave Yale with a linguistics degree, what's the plan then? Was, you, you had never, no filmmaking. Had you done a minor in film?
7:38 Speaker 06 No. By that point, I did have a plan though. Okay. Which is my last semester, I got out in seven semesters instead of eight semesters, in part because I always had siblings in school. It was in college. So it was, was expensive for my family, even with scholarships and things. And my last semester, I discovered I had extra credits that nobody had mentioned to me and I could take something fun instead of all my major classes. And I said, I think I'll take this class in video. What the heck? In the art and architecture building. And you got there and they had cameras the size of refrigerators.
8:18 Alec Baldwin? Right.
8:19 Speaker 06 Giant cameras. It was two inch videotape that you were recording on, so you basically couldn't edit. And we took pictures of each other that that first day, you know, videos of each other. And I had two enormous light bulb moments, light bulb over the head moments where I said, I need to do this. This is what I should be doing. I had been doing radio, rock and roll, news, radio, that sort of thing at W Y B C, the G B H community station. I'd covered the Panther trials and then the riots around that.
8:53 Alec Baldwin? Where were those?
8:54 Speaker 06 In New Haven. New Haven had a Black Panther trial. Yeah. There was an event and they came and then there was a trial after that event. On May Day, there was an event.
9:04 Alec Baldwin? But what about it? Did you have the light bulb moment? Meaning when you're there, well, you used to have a joke. We did a TV show where the guy in the period was period television and he's drunk or he's hallucinating or something. And he turns to the producers and producer and says, why are those people pointing those ovens at me? Meaning the cameras, they were so gigantic. But what inside, when you're inside that environment, because you go on to go ahead and have this obviously amazing career. What was the light bulb moment? What do, what was attractive?
9:32 Speaker 06 I think it was telling stories that were real and that mattered to people. That these were important things that were happening around us. And there were ways of telling those stories that had impact and that were creatively satisfying. I mean, I had done art before, painting and so forth. And it just, it fed those same brain cells for me that I did. And it had impact. It had reason. So reasons to do it that were not just entertainment or selling toothpaste, which is why, of course, I went for public television, not to commercial television.
10:10 Alec Baldwin? So that was the beachhead was public television itself? That's where you started?
10:13 Speaker 06 Absolutely. I started at G B H and I, and I stayed there for almost my entire career. I mean, I left. Once or twice, but came back because public media is where you do documentaries. I mean, now there's HBO, but HBO does, what? Five, 10 documentaries a year? They're wonderful, but that's not what they really do. Whereas Frontline does 40 a year. And American Experience does another, you know, 10 or 15. I don't know what they do.
10:47 Alec Baldwin? Is POV still on?
10:48 Speaker 06 POV is still on. Independent Lens through GBH. I've worked with the POV people. I've worked with the Independent Lens people. So those are the independent filmmakers, which is where I am now mostly focused. But I've also worked with Frontline, Nova, American Experience, and all the background ones. And that brings in an enormous cadre of incredibly talented people that you get to learn from. I can't tell you the number of people who I've gone, oh, now I understand why we do these things this way. And I also have a, I'm old enough that my career spans from film to digital.
11:30 Speaker 06 So when we started, Vietnam was shot on film. My fire film was shot on film. And that's way later. So you're, you're kind of in the midst of, of really smart, dedicated people.
11:45 Alec Baldwin? Now, when you, when you arrive at GBH, the CPB is formed in 67. And before you have a government centralized funding mechanism for public broadcasting, and in this case, obviously, you have public TV, I'm wondering if they were like off on their own, doing their own thing and raising the money?
12:04 Speaker 06 I don't think so. I think the system was formulated after the Carnegie Commission report, that they said, we need to have.
12:12 Alec Baldwin? Minnow.
12:13 Speaker 06 That's right. We need to have a federally supported system that could be independent and could be.
12:22 Speaker 06 Therefore, able to cover topics that commercial stations needing to fill a bottom line and pay stockholders and so forth, that they couldn't do.
12:31 Alec Baldwin? So when you show up at GBH, and maybe everything is concretizing at the same time and congealing at the same time, what was the terrain like? You're a woman. Yes, you have a degree from Yale, so that's a good thing. Did you get in there and roll up your sleeves and start working? Or were you making coffee for a year? Or what happened?
12:49 Speaker 06 At first, I was a part-time vacation replacement secretary. And I worked in the design department, which, as I remember, was, you know, pretty self-contained and had a photographer and a photography studio. And this is pre-digital. There's not even three-quarter inch tapes. So, you know, it's mostly serving news and local.
13:17 Alec Baldwin? Very labor-intensive.
13:18 Speaker 06 Very labor-intensive. And I didn't have a lot to do except observe, learn, and watch the Watergate hearings. I had, it was a good summer to be employed there. And then I worked for the finance department. And then I saw some people, I continued to do these fill-in replacement stuff. And I saw these people in the cafeteria waving their fingers about. And I looked at them and I said, what are you doing? And they said, we're learning sign language because we're going to start the first captioning for the deaf. And we need to know how to speak to our deaf employees. And I said, languages, linguistics, I'm interested in this.
14:03 Speaker 06 And they said, well, you know, we meet when we can. And I said, you know, I'm a secretary in the finance department or something. They'll let me take lunch at three if that's when you do it. They don't care when I take lunch. And I went in and I learned to sign, not. Fluently, but enough. And when they had trouble recruiting someone for a deaf person, they intended to have a certain number of people, one of whom was deaf, doing this job. And it took them longer than anticipated to get the first deaf person to pay attention because it was untried captioning. So they hired me as the non-deaf replacement for the deaf people. And that was, again, an excellent learning process.
14:46 Speaker 06 It was writing, because you were writing, you were taking the ABC Evening News and writing it into caption language and putting it in. Computers, early computers, again, the size of refrigerators, extremely slow. And when things went wrong and the machines broke down, we had a sign language interpreter who'd show up in the little corner of the screen and do it.
15:10 Alec Baldwin? And between when you start these beginnings at GBH and when you become part of your first project, that you're on the crew, you're helping to write, you're helping to produce, whatever your contribution, and I'm assuming you didn't direct right out of the gate, right? So you get, what's the first filmed project? Or I guess it's all filmed back then. What's the first filmed project you work on? What year was that?
15:34 Speaker 06 I went over to NOVA from captioning. And I would say it would be like 76.
15:40 Alec Baldwin? It's two or three years, I think, three years. And you were at NOVA doing what?
15:44 Speaker 06 I was a production assistant, mostly doing post. So learning how you mix in film and how you taking care of bringing in narrators and contracting and so forth. Yep, putting it together. Started producing promos. A very good learning experience. If you've got to tell people why they should watch this film on Wolves in 30 seconds, what are you going to put up there? I had very good mentors there, some of whom came over from the BBC because they had been doing the Horizon Science series, which was an inspiration for NOVA. NOVA was the first big national project that GBH did. And it was clear at that point
16:27 Speaker 06 that the person who was running national productions was Interested in expanding the National Series, the documentary series. And so Nova and then World, which was the predecessor to Frontline, and then American Experience, all came in under that five or 10-year period.
16:48 Alec Baldwin? So you're doing Post. And it seems like, and I don't want to be too polite or whatever, but it seems like, did you feel that everywhere you went, people saw that you had it in terms of the capacity to do this work? Because the business relies on mentoring. The business relies on someone who's in a more powerful position than you are, turning to you and going, "Let's go. You're going to come with us and we're going to go on the shoot together."
17:13 Speaker 06 Right.
17:14 Alec Baldwin? What's the first film you make? You go and shoot?
17:17 Speaker 06 I was a P A at Nova in post-production, and they would occasionally need somebody to go out in a field on a production for them. And there was a film that was done on very early genetic engineering. And I became the P A on that one. And I traveled with the two producers. This was, you know, back in the day when crews were bigger. You had generally a producer, an associate producer, and a production assistant, plus your three-person camera sound team going out. Nowadays, it would be maybe two people with the equipment that we have and the ability to do things remotely. So that was one of the early ones, the genetic engineering film.
18:02 Alec Baldwin? Were most of the people involved in that project and the early projects you became a part of after that, was it mostly men?
18:09 Speaker 06 Mostly, yes, mostly. But actually, on that film, there were co-producers, and it was a man and a woman. And the woman actually eventually became Nova's executive producer, Paula Absal. But GBH, I thought, was always pretty friendly to women. There weren't as many women at the very top levels for a while. Now there are. And in fact, GBH now has its first woman C E O as of last year. And I would say it's more women than men in production at GBH. I'm not sure that's true across the system for public broadcasting. And it's certainly, I don't think, I'm not part of the larger commercial world. It's not true. It's certainly true in the independent world
18:54 Speaker 06 that it doesn't matter whether you're not really being downgraded.
18:59 Alec Baldwin? Yes or No is the first film you make, correct?
19:04 Speaker 06 Yeah, that might have been, and that's for World, the predecessor for Frontline. And I did that one in Canada, and I'm the producer, I'm not the director on that. The director is Michael Rubo.
19:17 Alec Baldwin? What was the topic of Yes or No? What was it about?
19:19 Speaker 06 This was in the period when Quebec was looking to secede from Canada. And Michael Rubo knew this impersonator, impressionist, named Jean Guy Moreau. And Jean Guy did impressions of René Lavec, the premier of Quebec, who was the great driver for secession. And Jean Guy Moreau was so well-known in French Canada, this is not an experience I had had before. You'd walk through the streets of Montreal or wherever, and little girls would faint in front of you. Oh, my God, it's Jean Guy Moreau. He's so well-known, he's so wonderful.
20:01 Speaker 06 And Jean Guy decided he would take his show to Toronto to see if it would play there. So it was about the difference between French and English Canada, told through this story of Jean Guy's journey.
20:16 Alec Baldwin? I've got to get a copy of that, that sounds amazing.
20:22 Alec Baldwin? Documentary producer Judith Vecchione. If you enjoy conversations with brilliant documentary filmmakers, be sure to check out my episode with director and producer Rory Kennedy.
20:35 Speaker 07 I love Boeing and what Boeing stood for in this country, and we really celebrate that in the film because it's been an extraordinary company for decades. You know, it helped us get out of World War II, it helped get us to the moon with my Uncle Jack. And for many decades, Boeing did one thing, which was to say, we're going to prioritize excellence and safety. And the McDonnell Douglas people were put in charge, and they had a very different business model, which was very Wall Street focused.
21:07 Alec Baldwin? To hear more of my conversation with Rory Kennedy, go to hereisthething.org. After the break, Judith Vecchione shares the weight of responsibility she felt bringing the series Vietnam: A Television History to the American public.
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22:40 Speaker 10 My first ever In the World show was when I was 10 and I sang at a pub called The Georgian Devonshire. I was so nervous. I was 10, so they let me in only to sing my song and then they kicked me out right after. And then I remember I wrote, I've been writing since I was 10, so I wrote this song called "Lady in the Mirror", made this little track with it. But I just like pressed it and I remember I sang this song and there was like five people in there. And I remember how myself I felt and I felt like I understood myself and understood what I needed to do.
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23:55 Alec Baldwin? I'm Alec Baldwin, and you're listening to Here's the Thing. Documentary producer Judith Vecchione can spend years behind the scenes making a series before it sees the light of day. Vietnam: A Television History was no exception. It was an incredible undertaking with its 13 episodes being produced over six years.
24:17 Speaker 06 I think it was two years of fundraising and four years of production.
24:22 Alec Baldwin? My God.
24:23 Speaker 06 Yeah, and it was in part, it took so long because we were making up a format for America. Nobody had ever done this kind of large, late series.
24:33 Alec Baldwin? A multi-part.
24:34 Speaker 06 Right, where the stories fed to each other. You could watch them separately, but if you really wanted to understand it, you watched all of them in roughly the order that they were presented. So we were inventing that, and one of the reasons we had a British producer, Martin Smith. Martin Smith came because he had worked at World at War, and that was the only really big linked series that had been done before that. So he came over and was one of our producers and was tremendously helpful in talking about how do you divide up stories that are happening virtually simultaneously? How do you pick a way to do that?
25:14 Speaker 06 And things that we did for Vietnam, I brought with me when we went to Eyes on the Prize, not to jump too far ahead, and other people used for other linked series. An example is school. At the beginning of each of these projects, we sat down, all the production staff, and went to school together. We had lecturers, we watched films, we discussed the stories, we talked about what's a source and what's not a source. It was a combination of film school and journalism, and it meant that what we did was as unimpeachable as we could possibly make it.
25:53 Speaker 06 And for Vietnam, that was critical, since we were working within the decade of the fall of Saigon.
26:01 Alec Baldwin? Vietnam: A Television History, I saw that in its original production.
26:07 Alec Baldwin? How do you feel, and this goes throughout your career, eventually we get to Eyes on the Prize. I mean, you do two back-to-back, I mean, you climb with your compatriots, you climb big mountains that set the tone for public television for decades to come. I mean, we're going to get into Eyes on the Prize in a minute, but for me, when I watched Vietnam television history, I go, this is it. This is what happened. For you, did you sense, did you realize at the time, because you seem like such incredibly bright and thoughtful person, that you're sitting there going, you know, I'm carving history in stone here. Did you feel that sense of responsibility when you were doing this show?
26:49 Speaker 06 We did, and we didn't know how people would react. I know that every single person that we called up to interview, to bring on board, whether they were American or Vietnamese or whatever they were, every single person said, which side were you on? That was their first question. They wanted to know, were we going to say it was American imperialism? Were we going to say America was saving democracy? Where were we going to be? And we, we said, and I think we worked very, very hard, it's not just fair, but balanced, to say there are multiple sides to this story. There's the South Vietnamese, there's the
27:33 Speaker 06 North Vietnamese, there's the Viet Minh, Viet Cong, there's the Americans.
27:38 Alec Baldwin? Laotian, Cambodian.
27:40 Speaker 06 Yes, there's multiple. And so what we want to be doing is, over and over again, showcasing the complexity of the history with as much as possible, and it had to be very strong, backup. I'll tell you a story that we, in the...
27:58 Speaker 06 The story of Dien Bien Phu, we had a story of North Vietnamese heroism, the legends they told about how hard that victory was for them. We also had in that section a story of heroism from the South Vietnamese and how they marched into the battles, singing the French national anthem because they didn't have their own anthem yet. They was too young a country. That kind of balancing, that constant balancing, and the research to find and verify these was enormous. I had a French-speaking production assistant to make sure that we
28:39 Speaker 06 were hitting the right records, not just the American records, but the French records for my French-based films.
28:48 Alec Baldwin? Now, I'm assuming that, you know, you might have worked on other things, but Vietnam Television History in its original release was in eighty-three, and you're working on Eyes on the Prize after that. In your career at this point, are you commissioned, are you assigned, or do you pitch? How does Judith Vecchione get on board, you know, one of the most seminal public television productions in history?
29:12 Speaker 06 Well, Vietnam, I pitched myself to be part of it, as I said to you. Associate producer, I'll do that. And then, as I'd worked on the first, I worked on episodes three and twelve as an associate producer, and it became clear that I should do the first two programs. And so, they just said, "You want to do them?" And I said, "Yes, I will." For Eyes, it was Henry Hampton's series. Henry Hampton was the visionary behind Eyes on the Prize, and he had been trying for years and years to get funding. He tried several times, got started, had to stop.
29:51 Speaker 06 And when he finally really got it together to do it, he came and looked around the Vietnam cadre to say, I need someone who has this experience of making linked films. And I know he talked to some of my colleagues and he said to me, do you want this? And I said exactly what I had said about Vietnam. Yes, this is my story. I want to be part of it. So I left GBH to do Eyes on the Prize. It was an independent production. And I said to my, my boss at the time, can I have a leave of absence? It'll be probably two years, three years, I don't know. And he said, we don't give long leaves of absence. I said, then I have to leave.
30:32 Alec Baldwin? And who produced, and who produced that? Because I'm assuming that like, I mean, in our podcast world, there's a number of places to go and, you know, look for funding. GBH itself, BEZ, where Ira is and so forth. But I'm assuming that at this point in the eighties, GBH is like the mothership for this kind of producing. Or were there other stations that were doing more of this kind of production as well?
30:56 Speaker 06 I think GBH was doing most of it. Other stations like WNET were doing some. They did the Adams Chronicles, what was that called? The, which was a fictionalization of John and Abigail Adams, but a long piece. But the documentaries were from GBH. But Henry Hampton, who was Black Lives Matter's founder and president, really wanted to do it independently. It was a black owned company. He, he wanted to staff it and run it. And he himself had been at Selma. So it was a very, very important story to him to tell.
31:33 Alec Baldwin? And he got the money from where, do you think?
31:35 Speaker 06 The NEH and CPB money, but directly. And we were running out of money all the way through it. And at a certain point, he got some company money from, I think Lotus Incorporated came in and gave him. And that was how we made payroll that week. We were not going to make payroll. The independent world, I always say, you think you're the poorest of the poor when you work for public television. And then you go independent for public television and you really know what poverty is.
32:07 Alec Baldwin? Documentary producer Judith Vecchione. If you're enjoying this conversation, tell a friend. And be sure to follow Here's the Thing on the iHeart Radio app, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. When we come back, Judith Vecchione shares her advice for the next class of documentary filmmakers.
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33:20 Speaker 12 Como un buen vecino, State Farm está allí.
33:24 Speaker 09 Hey, soy Nile Rodgers, invitado de Before the Moment, una serie original de Lincoln. Estoy conduciendo por el país, encontrando a algunos de los artistas más fascinantes de hoy. Estamos explorando las historias de antes de que todo cambiara. Esta semana, estoy acompañado de mi amigo, John Legend. ¿Qué te hace seguir sentado en el piano?
33:46 Speaker 13 Si te sentaste a las 9:00 AM y luego a la noche tenías una canción completa que grabaste y estabas poniendo tu micrófono de voz o grabaste en tu estudio, tú solo creaste algo nuevo que no existía cuando te despertaste. ¡Qué feeling es! Siempre estoy emocionado por escribir algo nuevo. He estado escribiendo para Broadway, lo cual ha sido un nuevo desafío, con nuevos colaboradores y estos increíbles actores que son triple amenazas, que pueden cantar, bailar y actuar y hacer todas estas cosas increíbles. Y quiero seguir sintiendo eso. Y eso significa no descansar en mis laurels, salir y continuar creando algo nuevo.
34:22 Speaker 09 Experiencia Before the Moment. A Lincoln original series on the iHeart Radio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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35:03 Alec Baldwin? I'm Alec Baldwin, and you're listening to Here's the Thing. In the 1980s, there were multiple high-profile resignations from the board of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, or CPB, which funds PBS. It was a time of public disputes and allegations of politicization attributed to the Reagan administration's multiple appointees. I wanted to know if Vecchione had any awareness of the tumult happening at the top of the CPB.
35:35 Speaker 06 I did not, and I think that's a testimony to the firewall between content and fundraising, that I wasn't doing the fundraising at that point. As a producer, as a senior producer, I wasn't doing any of that. Henry did it. Henry Hampton for Eyes and for Vietnam, Richard Ellison had done it. I wasn't a part of it. It was there. It was certainly an issue, but it wasn't something I saw. And GBH was very clear about, we have to keep a firewall going, or else we're a commercial station then. You know, we're just responding to different masters. I'm not saying it wasn't true. I'm just saying I wasn't at that level.
36:16 Alec Baldwin? So, I worked very heavily in the 90s on campaign finance reform. Arizona, Maine, events where we raised money for the Legal Defense Fund for those laws. And I worked with a group of people who we solemnly believed, without an ounce of hesitation, thought that campaign finance reform was the linchpin of all the problems in this country. You know, spending a speech, money a speech and campaigns. And we came up with all the cliches you hear now, which is, well, if money is speech, then the person with the most money speaks loudest. And I believe that every single person in the United States Congress, Democrat or Republican, they might as well wear decals on them and stickers on them like they're NASCAR race car drivers of who's promoting them and owning them. You can't run for office unless you get the money.
37:01 Alec Baldwin? Most of the people who win overwhelmingly, the overwhelming majority win, who have the most money. Campaign finance reform was really just the biggest problem. So we go see Bert Neuborn. He's from the Brennan Center, the think tank at NYU Law School. And Bert Neuborn said that when Brown versus the Board of Education comes, he says, they didn't wake up that morning and they had some new information. He said, they knew the country was ready. They knew the country was ready, that the country needed this. We had to go in this direction in order for the country to remain healthy. And eyes on the prize comes, and it's a huge success, huge. One of the most successful documentaries that I can recall.
37:43 Alec Baldwin? And did you feel the same thing, which was that it was timing, that people were just ready to start to really do the deep dive into the civil rights movement?
37:52 Speaker 06 That, and also the commitment to strong journalism, made the stories really forceful. I remember a screening that we had, we would have screenings of rough cuts with not just ourselves, the team, but with larger groups. And I remember, you know this, that when you're watching one of your films with a group, you don't watch the film, you watch the people watching it. And I remember the hairs rising on the back of my neck and saying, we got it. We have this. This was the Emmett Till story in episode one. It's Are we speaking to the audience? Are we driving new understanding?
38:36 Speaker 06 I am a firm believer that journalists need to not enter into political discussions. I know some journalists who don't vote because they don't believe they can do that and still remain impartial. I'm not that far along, but I am very, very careful about expressing my, let me admit, quite strong feelings because I don't see how I can be effective in my job.
39:08 Alec Baldwin? Now, with the time we have left, of course, your career spans many years. And now there are far more women working in the documentary film world. And I'm wondering, do you do any teaching? Do you teach?
39:22 Speaker 06 I do a lot of mentoring. I don't teach, but I do a lot of mentoring. For 12 years, I ran a project for PBS nationally called The Producers Workshop at WGBH, where for a week, we would bring in promising associate producers and local producers and run them through a very tough boot camp, like 10, 12-hour days, about how do you bring your projects up to the national level? And we looked very much for women, for people of color, for people from rural areas, to bring in new voices for public media.
40:04 Speaker 06 A lot of those people have gone on and made wonderful, wonderful films. So that's been a very important part of my job. And I'm now working as Senior Editorial Advisor for World Channel, which, if viewers don't know, is part of the PBS ecosystem, the way PBS Kids is a part of it. This is documentaries, short form and long form, digital and broadcast, and bringing in new voices to the system. So we have a series called America Reframed, where the stories are...
40:44 Speaker 06 You haven't heard this that tells you something about the town of Orangeburg, the town of Chicago, the farming communities of wherever. We also have a series called Local USA, which looks at really hyper-local stories being told by the people within them. So that new voices is an important part of what I'm doing now.
41:10 Alec Baldwin? Now, two quick things. I watched the diabetes, blood sugar rising, and I have type 2. I went back and forth and had prediabetes for a long time. When I see this, and obviously there's no comparison in terms of content with the Vietnam thing, but what was the reason? Was this an assignment? Why did you do the diabetes stuff?
41:31 Speaker 06 I'm fascinated by stories that are at the edges of society. They're very, very important to the communities that face these issues, but not necessarily to everyone. And I realize that diabetes is a national emergency. If we hadn't just had COVID, we would be calling diabetes a pandemic. That there was, it was a moment when things were starting to shift. The first continuous glucose monitors were coming in. The first real fights over the cost of insulin were gearing up, and that's just borne fruit, you know, a week before we're talking with the cap on insulin costs. So it just seemed to me to be an important
42:15 Speaker 06 story that wasn't being told and that we needed to get out there. I have it in my family, too.
42:21 Alec Baldwin? Right. And some people have talked about, you know, putting warnings on candy, you know, that, you know, whatever that might be, but like excessive consumption of this product can lead to certain health issues. I don't know what to, you know, what the answer to that is, but I do realize it's like, when you live inside the minefield of diabetes, when you live inside the minefield of blood sugar issues, everywhere you go, you just can't believe it. I mean, I might have seen a beautiful woman years ago when I was younger. I might have said to myself, my God, look how beautiful that woman is. Now I hold up a drink in my hand in a deli and go, my God, this has 88 grams of sugar in it. You know,
43:03 Alec Baldwin? the sugar content of food has taken over my life. Last question, your advice to newcomers, your advice to people who are coming in?
43:13 Speaker 06 Well, this is a little bit like yours and a little bit different. When I talk to young makers who come to me with a brilliant idea, I say, this is a brilliant idea. It probably shouldn't be your first film. It should be your second film. Make something first that you can learn and make mistakes on, and then make the one that really matters to you.
43:39 Alec Baldwin? Interesting. What a great idea.
43:40 Speaker 06 I also say to people, don't reinvent the wheel. If you can work for someone, I worked for people like David Fanning, who started Frontline, and I worked for Paula Apsel, who ran Frontline. These are people who I learned from by watching, by making my mistakes in front of them instead of in front of an audience, and letting them say to me. I have an absolute memory of David saying to me at one point, if you moved that scene from here to there, what would happen? And I said, oh, my God, it opens up so many possibilities. If I just, I keep the scene, but I just move it a little later in the film.
44:25 Speaker 06 And he had that kind of knowledge that I could accumulate and not have to make my mistakes and put the film out wrong. So don't reinvent the wheel. Learn from the people around you and go forward.
44:43 Alec Baldwin? My thanks to Judith Vecchione. This episode was recorded at CDM Studios in New York City. We're produced by Kathleen Russo, Zach McNeese, and Maureen Hoban. Our engineer is Frank Imperial. Our social media manager is Danielle Gingrich. I'm Alec Baldwin. Here's the thing is brought to you by iHeart Radio.
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47:03 Speaker 09 Hey, I'm Niall Rogers. This fall, I'll be driving across the country, meeting some of today's coolest and most fascinating artists. We'll explore the stories before the moments that changed everything. Because every musician remembers the moment where it all began. Experience Before the Moment, a Lincoln Original Series on the iHeartRadio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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