This is Alec Baldwin, and you're listening to Here's the Thing from iHeart Radio. In the nineteen sixties, 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 nineteen seventy five, journalists, artists, and public broadcasting began to
conduct the autopsy. The result produced films like nineteen seventy Eight's Coming Home, nineteen seventy nine Apocalypse Now, and a PBS series first broadcast in nineteen eighty three, Vietnam a Television History. Over the course of thirteen hours, the program dug deep into the background, cost and toll taken on the principal figures involved in the war.
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?
My guest today is Judith Vecchioni, an Emmy and Peabody winning producer of that series. Vecchione has worked in documentary programming with Boston based PBS station WGBH since the seventies and has been an executive producer there for twenty three 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.
I grew up in a politically very aware household. My father read the newspaper from cover to cover, The New York Times 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. But what area of was this in south shore of Long Island? Where what town
from Massapequa. I'm from Merrick, so you were in the south shore of the Island.
Was your dad? Was your writer?
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, a school math teacher who I had for math actually, and luckily it's a subject where you get the answers right or you get them wrong,
and so there's no favoriteism. Nobody ever got worried about whether mom was being nice to me, and half the class called her mom anyway.
So when you leave, you go off to Yale, and as you head off to New Haven, was there a plan? Was there something you wanted to study? And what was that?
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 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 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. How so, well they 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 well, what 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. Nobody knew what to do. All the upper class women were as new as we were. It was a real pioneering experience.
Is sixty nine.
We arrived in six and.
That class were you as incoming freshmen and people who had transferred, who were upper class people as well, right transfer as well.
So graduating classes of seventy three, minds seventy two and seventy one. But they came from you know, Vasser 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 this. If you got a choice of teaching assistance, 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.
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? No?
By that point I did have a plan though, Okay, which is my last semester. I got out in seven semesters instead of eightsters in part because I always had siblings in school. It was in college, so it was it 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 it got there and they had cameras the size of refrigerators, giant cameras. It was two inch videotape that you were recording on, so basically couldn't edit. And we took pictures of each other 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 WYBC GBH community station. I covered the panther trials and then the riots around that before there were those 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, But.
What about it? Did you have the light bulb moment? Meaning when you're there? We 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 halluciny or something and he turns to the producers into producer and says, why are those people pointing those ovens at me? Meeting the camerace They were so gigantic, But what instide 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 was attractive?
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 reasons, 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.
So that was the beachhead was public television and stuff. That's where you started.
Absolutely. I started at GBH 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 ten documentaries a year. They're wonderful, but that's not what they really do, whereas Frontline does forty a year, right, and American Experience does another you know, ten or fifteen. I don't know what they do. 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. 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 really smart, dedicated people.
Now when you when you arrive at GBH. The CPB is formed in sixty seven, and before you have a government centralized funding mechanism for public broadcasting and in this case obviously a public TV. I'm wondering if they were off on their own, doing their own thing and raising the money.
I don't think so. I think the system was formulated after the Carnegie Commission report that they said.
We need to have MINO, that's right.
We need to have a federally supported system that could be independent and could be 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.
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 sieves and start working or are you making coffee for a year? Or what happened?
At first? I was a part time vacation replacement secretary, and I worked in the design department, which, as I remember, it was 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 very labor intensive, very labor intensive, and I didn't have a lot to do except observe, learn and watch the Watergate hearings. It's 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, 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 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. 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.
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. 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 so it's all filmed back then, what's the first filmed project you work on?
What year was that I went over to Nova from captioning and I would say would be like seventy six that I.
Now you think three years and you were Nova doing what 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, you putting it together, started producing promos. A very good learning experience if you got to tell people why they should watch this film on wolves in thirty 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 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 for ten year period.
So you're doing post and it seems like, and I don't want to be too you know, polite or whatever, but it seems like did you feel that everywhere you when 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. Right, what's the
first film you make? You go and shoot?
I was a PA 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 PA 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 and 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 were most of the people involved in that project and the early projects you became a part of after that, was it mostly men?
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, pla Apsel. 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 CEO 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 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 that it doesn't matter whether you're not really being downgraded.
Yes or No is the first film you make? Correct?
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 ruba.
What was the topic of Yes or No? What was it about?
This was in the period when Quebec was looking to secede from Canada. Yes, and Michael Rubau knew this impersonator, an impressionist named Jean Gui Moreau and Jeanie did impressions of rone Levec, the premiere of Quebeco was the great driver for secession. And Jeanque Morovo 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 Janqui. He's so well known, he's so wonderful and Seanki 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 Shunky's journey.
I've got to get a copy of that. That sounds amazing, documentary producer Judith Decioni. If you enjoy conversations with brilliant documentary filmmakers, be sure to check out my episode with director and producer Rory Kennedy.
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 Two, it helped get us to the moon with my uncle Jack, and for many decades, Bowing did one thing, which was to say, we're going to prioritize excellence and safety. And the McDonald douglas people were put in charge and they had a very different business model, which was very Wall Street focused.
To hear more of my conversation with Rory Kennedy, go to Here's the Thing dot Org. After the break, Judith Vecchioni shares the weight of responsibility she felt bringing the series Vietnam A Television History to the American public. I'm Alec Baldwin, and you were listening to Here's the Thing documentary producer Judith VECCHIONI can spend years behind the scenes making a series before it sees the light of day.
Vietnam A Television History. He was no exception. It was an incredible undertaking, with its thirteen episodes being produced over six years.
I think it was two years of fundraising and four years of production. 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, multipart series right where the stories fed to each other. You could watch them separately, but if you really want to understand it, you watched all of them 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 away to do that? 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. And for Vietnam that was critical since we were working within the decade of the Fall of Saigon.
Vietnam and television history. I saw that in its original production. 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 gonna get into the eyes of the prize in a minute. But for me, when I watched Vietnama 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 an 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?
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 where we going to say it was American imperialism? Where were we going to say America was saving democracy? Where were we going to 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 North Vietnamese, there's the Viet Min viet Cong, there's the 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.
Back up, I'll tell you a story that we in the the story of d NBN Foo, 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. It 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 were hitting the right records, not just the American records, but the French records for my French based films.
Now I'm assuming that you know you might have worked on other things, but Vietnam of Television History in its original release was an 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 vic KENI get on board you know, one of the most seminal public television productions in.
History, Well, Vietnam. I pitched myself to be part of it, as I said, to you an 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, 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 Ice on the Prize was an independent production, and I said to 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 and who produce? 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 be easy 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.
I think GBH was doing most of it. Other stations like w NET were doing some. They did the Atoms Chronicles. What was that called the which was a fictionalization of John and Abigail Adams but a long piece. But the documentaries were from GVH. But Henry Hampton, who was black Side's founder and president, really wanted to do it independently. It was a black owned company. 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.
And he got the money from where.
Do you think a 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 he 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.
Documentary producer Judith A.
Koni.
If you're enjoying this conversation, tell a friend and be sure to follow Here's the Thing on the iHeartRadio app, Spotify or wherever you'll get your podcasts. When we come back, Judith Vecchioni shares her advice for the next class of documentary filmmakers. I'm Alec Baldwin, and you're listening to Here's the Thing. In the nineteen eighties, 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 CPP.
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 Ampton, 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 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.
So I worked very heavily in the nineties on campaign finance reform Arizona main events where we raised money for the Legal Defense Fund for those laws, and I worked with a group of people who we solemnly believe, I mean, without an ounce of hesitation, thought that the campaign finance reform was the lynch and 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 here now, which is well of money is speech
and the person with the most money speaks loudest. And I believe that every single person in the United States Congress Democratic Republican, they might as well wear decals on them and stickers on them like their NASCAR race car drivers of who's promoting them and owning them. You can't run for office unless you get the money. 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 Burt Newborn. He's from the Brennan Center, the think Taket NYU Law School, and Burt Newborn 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 that the country needed this. We had to go in this
direction order for the country. It has 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 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.
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 the Emmett Till story in episode one, it's are we speaking to the audience? Are we driving new understanding? 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 a lot, 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 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? You do you teach?
I do a lot of mentoring. I don't teach, but I do a lot of mentoring. For twelve years I ran a project for PBS nationally called the Producer's Workshop up 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 ten twelve hour days about how do you bring your projects up to the national level. And we've looked very much for women, for people of color, for people from rural areas to
bring in new voices for public media. 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 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 hyperlocal stories being told by the people within them. So that new voices is an important part of what I'm doing now.
Now, two quick things. I watched the diabetes blood sugar rising and I have type two. I went back and forth and had a pre diabetes 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?
I'm fascinated by stories that are at the the edges of society. They are very very important to the communities that face these issues, but not necessarily to everyone. And I realized that diabetes is a national emergency. If we hadn't just had COVID, we would be calling diabetes a pandemic that there were There 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 born 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 story that wasn't being told and that we needed to get out there. I have it in my family too, 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 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 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 says eighty eight grams of sugar in it. You know, the sugar content of food has taken over my life. Last question, your advice to newcomers, your advice to people who are coming.
In 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 for that you can learn and make mistakes on, and then make the one that really matters.
See you, interesting idea.
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. 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.
My thanks to Judith Vecchione. This episode was recorded at CDM Studios in New York City. We're produced by Kathleen Russo, Zach MacNeice, and Maureen Hoven. 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.