AMERICAN ALOHA: Hula Beyond Hawai’i

More than 70 percent of ITVS programming features culturally diverse content, and almost half of all ITVS programs are produced by minority filmmakers, including new and emerging talents.

Who are these men and women that continue to fuel and reinvent public television? In the article that follows, film critic and journalist Michael Fox profiles three emerging filmmakers, exploring their collaboration with ITVS Productions and their relationship with public television.

Billy Luther’s MISS NAVAJO isn’t an earnest study of suffering Native Americans, but a fun, occasionally irreverent portrait of a tribal beauty pageant. Lisette Flannery’s NA KAMALEI: Men of Hula takes an equally unexpected and revelatory approach, focusing on Hawaii’s male dancers. Rodney Evans’s DAYDREAM blurs fact and fiction in its imaginative portrayal of jazz pioneers Billy Strayhorn and Buddy Bolden in turn-of-the-20th-century New Orleans.

These three films, by first- and second-time directors, herald a breakthrough of sorts. The perception that public television isn’t open to younger filmmakers is getting a makeover, thanks largely to ITVS. A new generation of filmmakers with fresh perspectives is being encouraged to bring their projects to PBS. And once they arrive, they’re getting unprecedented support and nurturing.

The first step, filmmakers are realizing, is to reawaken to the breadth of PBS’s viewership, even in an age of 500 channels and the Internet. “A lot of filmmakers that I know in New York see it as old school,” Flannery says. “They don’t see the reach of PBS. Three and a half million people tuned in when AMERICAN ALOHA: Hula Beyond Hawai’i was broadcast nationally in 2003. I can’t think of any other way to reach that many people with my work.”

Luther agrees. “The access to PBS was very important to me for my project,” he says. “On reservations, people have a limited number of channels, and PBS is one of them. I remember visiting my grandmother’s house on the reservation, and PBS was the only channel that came in clear.”

MISS NAVAJO

Luther is one of countless attendees of festival panels and other events where ITVS staff members encourage emerging filmmakers to submit funding applications. “There are a lot of younger filmmakers who have something to say that is socially relevant, and they have a voice, and they want it to be on public television,” says ITVS programming manager Kathryn Washington. “Our job is to first find them—people who don’t necessarily want to be on only MTV—and then support them.”

There is a learning curve with respect to working with public television, and that has contributed to reluctance on both sides. Younger filmmakers may be intimidated by the PBS bureaucracy or ill equipped to comply with the various requirements associated with a national broadcast. For stations that work with independent producers, as they do through the LINCS initiative, it’s more demanding to work with filmmakers who don’t know all the ropes and haven’t demonstrated their ability to meet deadlines, obtain releases, clear rights and return calls.

“When you talk about handholding, you’re talking about a huge amount of handholding,” says David C. Feingold, assistant general manager of content at NET Nebraska. Feingold developed a relationship with Bill Kubota, a Japanese American with a news production company in Detroit and a unique idea for a historical documentary, MOST HONORABLE SON, a program funded by ITVS’s LINCS initiative. “Bill’s just like anybody else, bewildered by the exotic and complicated nature of funding as well as getting through the door with PBS,” explains Feingold, whose station is actively engaged in developing independent filmmakers. “He realized that by working with a group like ours, that’s big on the history side, it would raise his game. We’re not in a market with a lot of independents to nurture. It makes us rethink some of the ways we do our work. It challenges us. We have to explain the system to somebody from the outside, and we have to link somebody from the outside into the system.”

Hillary Wells, senior producer at WGBH’s Boston Media Productions, concurs that dealing with a first- or second-time filmmaker is labor-intensive, but the upside is well worth it. “PBS is a very complicated system, so filmmakers come to us with a lot of questions—about fund-raising, rights, technology, their script, how best to approach their story arc. Each one of those areas is somewhat complicated. Those are all needs that filmmakers have coming in the door, and it’s really a matter of setting expectations appropriately from the beginning. We have to be careful about the resources issue on our end, because it can take a tremendous amount of resources and support for someone at the beginning of their career.”

From the filmmaker side, a lack of experience navigating the PBS framework can be addressed with some astute guidance. A few years ago ITVS initiated a mentor program that matches newbie filmmakers with peers who’ve been through the process. Flannery, who has been recruited as a mentor herself, testifies, “I wish [they] had had that when I was doing my first film. I could have really used it. It must be invaluable in terms of figuring out deliverables or how you should be thinking about your broadcast or outreach. I was so crazy just getting to the broadcast that I forgot about distribution.”

WGBH’s Wells points out that the upside of working with emerging filmmakers is the specific expertise they bring. “Having people who are young and bring new ideas and who have grown up with new technology, that’s something that we really relish because there are so many people here who are just learning how to use new technology,” she observes. Indeed, as the broadcast itself is increasingly seen as one prong of a multiplatform release that includes the Web, a study guide, podcasts and DVD, it’s important for filmmakers to be not only conversant with those modes of distribution, but also innovative. The marketing techniques that Hollywood studios use so effectively, such as Internet promotion and “making of” featurettes and segments, are just as applicable to ITVS films.

As ITVS’s Washington puts it, “There are 78 million Millennials, which is only about 1 million fewer than the Baby Boomer generation. Working with younger filmmakers and recognizing how they use and view new media is critical to our work. There is no way to separate this demographic from how they use technology. In the summer of 2006, at our yearly Diversity Retreat, we invited representatives from Current TV, UTH TV and Youth Outlook to talk with us about how they reach and support younger diverse audiences.”

This new generation of filmmakers is ideally suited to the changing technological landscape and has the potential to reestablish PBS as an outlet for unpredictable and groundbreaking work. At the same time, public television’s legacy and value remain constant. Evans, whose first ITVS project, BROTHER TO BROTHER, enjoyed a theatrical run in the top 15 markets, is uniquely qualified to assess the importance of a free-TV broadcast. “The art houses reached a real hardcore independent film-supporting audience, which is who I thought would embrace the film,” he says. “But throughout the making of the film, it became clear that other people needed to see it—in red states, the Bible Belt, the Midwest, where people don’t encounter African American gay artists in their community, or aren’t aware of them. It moved beyond preaching to the choir.”

Leave it to another filmmaker to step back and see the big picture. Asserts Luther, “Public media is the opportunity to make films and statements outside the commercial mainstream and the restrictive demand of ratings. Not all topics are appropriate for a commercial environment, but that doesn’t make them any less important. Public media is one of the only ways to address those concerns and engage the American public.”

Find out more about the ITVS Diversity Development fund >>

Michael Fox is a San Francisco–based film critic and journalist.