Host Lisa Kiefer interviews documentary film producer Joe Inderhees about his "Bay Area Revelations" series that examines the brave, brilliant, and eccentric visionaries of the Bay Area. By focusing on a particular movement, theme, or event that transformed the Bay Area into one of the most vital and innovative regions in the country, these ten one-hour documentaries tell the untold stories of the people, places, and moments that have shaped the Bay Area into the unique region it is today.
TRANSCRIPT
Speaker 1:Method to the madness is next.
Speaker 2:You're listening to method to the madness at biweekly public affairs show k a l x Berkeley celebrating the bay area innovators. I'm your host, Lisa Kiefer. And today I'm interviewing documentary producer Joe Inder. He's the executive producer and co-writer behind the popular bay area revelations series. [00:00:30] Welcome Joe. You're the executive
Speaker 1:producer and co-writer of bay area revelations. And these are one hour episodes narrated by Peter Coyote that tell the untold stories of the people, places and moments that help make the bay area such a special and unique place. You are not from here, you're from Cincinnati, Ohio. What was your first experience here?
Speaker 3:My first bay area experience was running Beta breakers and right. [00:01:00] So I didn't realize all that it entailed, but now you've got, you know, a guy in a gorilla suit and then next to naked guy. Well we don't, we don't have that in Ohio. And you know, you start running and you'll see everything that's going on and then you hit golden gate park and I mean that park is remarkable. There's a waterfall in it and then you look over and there's bison in the park. And literally I stopped and I thought to myself, totally, you ain't in Kansas anymore here son. This is a really [00:01:30] cool place. And from that point forward, I have just fallen in love with the bay area and [inaudible]
Speaker 1:I'm from Illinois originally and I had the same experience here when I moved out it was, it was rev Latori sure. So good name.
Speaker 3:Sure. And, and so when we decided to come up with some content, who's we? The station. So here's, here's kind of the, the genesis of how it, well, how, how it happened. We were in a room probably a little bit bigger than this studio [00:02:00] and there were a group of four or five, six station thought leaders. Okay. The general manager, the news director, I'm the brand director, those kinds of folks. And the idea was put on the table, what content could we do that no one else is doing? That could be an original proposition. And as with most things in the bay area, you start throwing out ideas and it's just pop. And Papa, Papa, Papa, Papa, Papa, papa, silly potty, right? Like that's how things happen [00:02:30] here. And so that's Kinda how it happened here. Well, I don't know if it's just here, but I know that it feels like it's here more frequently and with greater passion.
Speaker 3:And then I think what really happens here that is unique is not only do you use then say silly potty, but then you go do it. I think in a lot of places they have the big idea, but then somewhere along the way the execution falls off. Um, either people [00:03:00] run out of time, run out of money, run out of support, um, run out of the runway to fail. May Be afraid. Exactly. Yeah. Um, obstacles get put up in place and I think in the bay area, those obstacles are taken down more than they're put up. So we, we come up with this idea of doing a documentary series and they say, ah, so how many episodes do you think you can do? They, so how about six in the first year, six hour long documentaries in the first year I say, oh, [00:03:30] okay. It's pretty ambitious.
Speaker 3:And pretty ambitious. And the goal is, our goal for this is Ken Burns meets 30 for 30, which is the ESPN series. And if you are not watching that you can, you can dislike sports. It's just great storytelling. I watched the one on the OJ Simpson. They did a great job. Remarkable. You'll look at the credits at the end of those shows and they go on for days and bay area revelations. It's, you know, it's a very spartan crew. [00:04:00] Um, but we do try to hit that, hit that mark. And um, we developed a couple of different show ideas. Um, you know, big themes. We had the first one kind of land in our lap. And what was that? That the first one was the super, the super seven and this was on the seven Superbowl winning teams. NBC had the Super Bowl that year, so it was natural, right?
Speaker 3:We're going to air the Superbowl and then we're going to air the super seven. And so that was very natural. And then the other thing that, that came right to the [00:04:30] top was political and social movements. When you think about the things that the bay area exports, political and social consciousness is at the top of that list. And again, these were things that being an outsider, you just becomes obvious. It becomes obvious. It's like as, as these are not so much about the people but about the movements. Well th they're the people behind the movements, but one of the best parts about the first one was everybody knows the score of the Games, right? Everybody knows how the game [00:05:00] played out. But Jerry Rice told this story of before his first Superbowl, he fell asleep on a training table. He was in that space. He was that prepared.
Speaker 3:And that was the point that we were trying to make was that if you're prepared for something, if you're readied for it, if you've been training your whole life to be there, then yeah, you're scared cause it means something to you. And that's exactly what Jerry said, but there's this calm that can wash over you. And I think that that was illuminating. [00:05:30] The ones I watched, what I liked about it was, it's not the obvious people all the time. You get these, the smaller, I call them smaller, they're not small people, but people I hadn't heard of. Right. It's how do you find them there? There's some things that obviously immediately come to mind there. Some people that obviously immediately come to mind when we did the political and social movements piece, but you've got to go after him. So we went and you go out and get these people or do you have a team?
Speaker 3:Researchers? So not me. It's you. It's me [00:06:00] and, and um, my editor and photographer, Alex [inaudible] and my co-writer and co-producer, Jim Gaughran that it's the three of us. And you're the one that goes out and gets the people. Yeah, I am the chief fishermen. So that requires a lot of research to get to the bottom of things, you know, research and then really some salesmanship. You have to get people to give of their time. We don't obviously pay for interviews. It helps when you're selling something to believe in the product, I believe in the product. How did you get Peter Coyote? Which [00:06:30] in and of itself to me was impressive. Well, first of all, anything that you write that then Peter Coyote reads sounds 10 times better than it is. Literally. I agree 100% he's from here and he's like the west coast distributor of involved in the bay area.
Speaker 3:There is nothing that the guy hasn't experienced or isn't it somehow some way connected to, so he's our first audience. He was the first outside person to read the script and one of our goals [00:07:00] is to, while he's reading the script, say something along the lines of, I was there for that and I didn't know that to surprise him to, to have him learn something because he was so involved. So he read your script and immediately said, well, I want to be a part of know. In the beginning we didn't have anything. We had nothing. We had an idea, we have an idea and a promise that the thing was going to be good. And I contacted his agent, who's a great guy by the name of Jeff Dannis, uh, down in southern California. And I pitched him [00:07:30] the idea and I just kept selling it.
Speaker 3:What turned Peter on originally was the fact that it was locally produced content about the bay area. And that's unusual, isn't that there aren't that many locally produced documentaries from a network television network perspective or a network television perspective. I don't see anybody else doing it in this market, so I can say no, no one else was doing it in this market. There was independent filmmakers, what network television [00:08:00] or what television that work invests an executive producer and a world-class photographer and editor and a world-class writer to this sort of product that isn't on television every day. Now. It's not an everyday newscast, which is our core business. NBC Bay area decided that they would invest, that it would invest serious resources to bring this project to bear. And that included Peter Coyote on the head. He actually was part of many of the movements. Yeah, so he, he [00:08:30] loves it here and he knows what he's talking about.
Speaker 3:So that's how we got Peter. We can, I was able to watch half of these and I want to talk more about those, but how do you watch this? If you don't have cable or you don't pay for cable? Let's say you're a student at cal and you hear about this, how would, how would I watch it? Can you watch past episodes somewhere? We're trying to get them up on demand, but you'd have to have cable for that. They don't live online. And here's why. [00:09:00] The rights fees for photos and music, the licensing go through the roof. As soon as you start putting them online. At this point we're not going to see them. They're going to be on demand on infinity, on come on Comcast. Exactly that going to happen. We're in the process of figuring that out as we speak. Okay. So hopefully soon the shows have shelf life. So even the food episode, right? The culinary journey episode. Every year our bay area restaurants are awarded [00:09:30] the beard award and you know, a new restaurant opens by Michael Mina or Alice Waters gets honored by the president or some such thing. Well these people were all in our episode. Yeah, that was a good one. So it would be great for us to be able to post on Facebook, hey look at this thing that happened and if you want to learn more about that person, watch this episode on demand search bay area revelations.
Speaker 1:Well it's good that you guys are going to do that because I know there are a lot of people like me in the bay area that don't necessarily watch TV. [00:10:00] Right. And so being able to watch that, I'm telling you I really enjoyed it and I want to talk specifically about two towers. Okay. Which just aired. Sure. And it is about the rivalry and friendship between Stanford and Berkeley. And in fact calyx is mentioned in that because the Oakland A's team owner, Charlie Finley made a deal with calyx way back in the day, 1978 to air their baseball games for a short while. But it was actually run out of Calex at by a couple [00:10:30] of students. And Larry Bear being one of them who was a junior at the time and he's featured in there. And the a couple of other guys back to the roots, Alex and Nikau, who were on our, our method to the madness show early on when they were just getting started. So let's talk about the genesis of that. What is the difference between Stanford and Berkeley?
Speaker 3:Here's how we framed the episode. Every time we would do another piece, we kept finding that things had roots at either Stanford or cow [00:11:00] or ucsF or San Francisco state or San Jose State. It happens in news stories. There's a huge news story. The president has a shortlist for Supreme Court nominees. There's three people on it and two of the three have some sort of bay area tie. It can be the most random stuff. Nobel prize winners. Some guy that did this incredible research project in Israel. Well he got his phd at Bay Area University name it, right? So we thought about this idea [00:11:30] of the bay area being an educational nirvana. And then inside of that, right beneath that was this idea that you have one of the top private institutions and the top of public institution in Stanford, in cal. So let's tell their stories. We named it the two towers because of the two iconic towers say their tower and Hoover Tower.
Speaker 3:What we did not want to do, what we avoided purposefully is this rivalry idea because it's not that the two universities [00:12:00] live in their own unique spaces and they are outstanding in and of themselves. And there's a lot of collaboration. Yeah. And, and, and you don't have to compare yourself or measure yourself against one another. You are outstanding on your own. And what I learned as we were writing the thing as we were researching, as we were digging into what do we want to talk about, I had this con, this idea from the minute you wake up and turn on [00:12:30] your, your smartphone and you look at Google news and then you look at the wais app to see how long it's going to take you to. Well, Google Stanford Ways app Berkeley from them. From that moment forward, all that you touch is informed in some way by one of the two universities.
Speaker 3:And that was the sense that we wanted to give the viewer. And you gave it a beautiful sort of connection too, by showing the organs that have played in each and I didn't know that you could slitter [00:13:00] that they can see each other and also what was inside. If you can talk about what was, what's inside each tower that was really interesting. Sure. At Hoover they have the, the library of war, revolution and peace. And these are, this is memorabilia. Ephemera was the word that we used, this collection of documents, propaganda related to war. We told the story of Herbert Hoover as a Quaker being so anti war that he wanted [00:13:30] to create a library that kept people from committing war. Please see the outcomes of not peace and aim for peace. And that's what's in the Hoover tower. In addition to their marvelous bells that are played by Timothy and um, who is a tremendous character and they've been played for generations back.
Speaker 3:And then in say their tower are these bones prehistoric tarpon from the labrea. Tarpits you know, you want [00:14:00] to talk about every diggers dream. There are all of these bones, saber tooth tigers and mastodons and you name it, the creatures that roamed California before man was walking upright, exist floors of them, dozens of them inside say their tower. So y'all walk by it every day and they have amazing organ concerts. Oh yeah. And, and those guys that [00:14:30] play those bells are something else, man. They're fantastic people. One of the things I noticed about the episodes I saw is that many of them started with the gold rush. And I wanna talk about that because that seems to be the starting point for a lot of innovation and ideas in your series. 1849 is kind of the, I mean that's the launching point of the state.
Speaker 3:People were coming out here, but not in the way that they did once they realized that there'd be gold in them there hills. So it was a natural [00:15:00] launching point and it brings that sort of gravity, if you will, that sort of gravitational movement brings so many different people. You've got, you know, the guy that's down on his luck and then you've got the, the wealthy prospector and then everybody in between. And a lot of diverse ethnic groups. Exactly. Which created the different food movements. It really did make me think a lot more about that as a, as a jump off point, right? It's its own social movement. And I will be, you [00:15:30] know, just just frank with you and pull the curtain back a little bit. It got a little formulaic, we got a little, I'm kind of stuck in that, that we would launch from there and each of these episodes and if somebody is going to watch the series one after the other and it's like, oh my God, we're starting at the goal by the third time.
Speaker 3:Like if they're starting at the gold rush again, um, you know, come on guys, come up with something different and we felt that and you don't as a, as a creator, you know this, right? As a creator, you don't want to fall into just a formula. You want to keep [00:16:00] pushing yourself, even if it's working. You kinda want to try to break it. Yeah, it did work for the ones I saw actually because you drew a line from that point and a very clear line. And so that that worked. I watched passion to preserve, which is about the environmental environmental movements here. That was great because you didn't talk about all the big names. Well John Muir you talked about, but you talked about people I didn't know. Who did you like? I really liked the Monterey Aquarium people. I had [00:16:30] no idea how that got started.
Speaker 3:Maybe you can talk about that a little bit. What I wanted and what we wanted was the thing that is accessible to folks. So one of the things that you do when you moved to the bay area new is you hear, Oh, you got to do this, you gotta do that. You gotta go here, you gotta go there, and then all of a sudden your weekends for the next six months are full of all this stuff you got to do. The Monterey Bay aquarium is one of those things that everybody tells you to go do. I remember going there the first time with my mom and [00:17:00] my wife and just being blown away by the thing like this is super cool. So when the idea for an environmental show comes up, I thought we got to tell the story of the aquarium. Everybody from here goes there and you take your kids and then they take their kids and it's this generational thing at this point that was the idea was to give people something to give the viewer something that they could access in their own personal life.
Speaker 3:Relate to that. There is a bay area connection and you talk about, absolutely. Steve Webster was our interview subject and he was one of the cofounders. [00:17:30] He's a character. Yeah, he's a great guy. But he said about Kelp. Oh yeah. I've got to think like a calc was saying, how did you design this? He said, you've got to think like you gotta learn. And he got that from wheeler north who was a scientist that they collaborated with. The story goes that Steve Webster and a couple of his classmates were sitting outside of the, their classroom, their, uh, the Stanford annex down there at Monterey Bay and they're looking across at this defunct cannery [00:18:00] and they think to themselves, well, it'd be nice to turn that into a little aquarium, maybe put some fish tanks in there and that'd be cool. And they're having a couple beers on a Friday night and one thing turns to the next.
Speaker 3:And one of Steven's buddies happened to be dating Nancy Packard and Nancy was a marine biologist and they start chit chatting and then all of a sudden, Nancy's dad, David gets involved and says, well, you know, if you're going to go, go big, all of a sudden they had means. [00:18:30] So now they had a dream and now they had means. And the two things came together and the Monterey Bay aquarium was the result and it was by magnitudes larger than their greatest estimate. They funded a study, you know, research project to see how many folks would come through there. And it blew the doors off of that estimate and has been going strong ever since. And it's a real jewel. Yeah it is. You're from Cincinnati, Ohio. Do you think being a, so to speak, outsider [00:19:00] has helped you to see these icons, movements people a little easier than someone who's grown up here?
Speaker 3:I think that the things that maybe someone who was from here takes for granted, you know, as just always being there. Someone from the outside looks and goes, well I wonder how that got there. How'd that happen? I wish, I wish my hometown had that. The real thing that being an outsider has and I definitely am one. The thing that that has allowed me to do is be ignorant. It [00:19:30] has given me license to ask very simplistic questions about origin, about start, about inspiration. And I talked to the interview subject and you know, I'll say, you know, I'm not, I'm not from here. So I may ask you a question that may be just you would think is so apparent, but if I ask one of those, just know, please go, go with me. And what ends up happening is they're more relaxed. They don't feel like they need to prove something to me.
Speaker 3:They're teaching, they're teaching me something [00:20:00] and then I get to be the curious student, which I am by nature. My Mom's an educator, she's taught English, her whole, her whole life and so she taught me to be, you know, really curious about things. I listened to the interviews back in order to transcribe them. You sounded like a boy, like a child. You, some of you know, 39 year old man and I sounded like there's this little boy, but that's usually the feedback out of that is where the, the untold story comes and openings occur. Yeah, exactly right. And you get people, [00:20:30] Lisa, out of their programmatic answers and into this more personal space. I've got an example of that. The story of, of how gay marriage came to be in San Francisco. So we're interviewing Kevin Newsome in the front part of the interview. Gavin is definitely the former mayor and the lieutenant governor and I'm getting programmatic.
Speaker 3:Gavin. And which of your programs was, this was in rebels and revolutions. Somehow something turned. You could just see it happen in [00:21:00] his appearance and his tone of voice. We started chit chatting a little bit about family and about membranous his of his grandfather, and then I asked him what was the spark for this idea? And he tells the story that Nancy Pelosi had an extra ticket to George W bushes, state of the Union address when Gavin had just been elected mayor. Mrs Pelosi Calls Gavin and says, Hey, I've got this extra ticket. Would you like to come? Absolutely, that sounds great. So when you go into the house, [00:21:30] you have to check your cell phones, much like a coat check. So get checks. A cell phone goes, watches the speech. President Bush gives in Gavin's words I half-hearted support of quote unquote traditional marriage speech finishes. Gavin gets in line to get his cell phone and behind him he hears these two women say the words.
Speaker 3:It's about time we did something with those homosexuals and Gavin looks at me and he says, for the first time in my life I didn't say anything. I just listened and I listened to the rest of their conversation. And [00:22:00] I thought to myself, this has to end, and I got my cell phone and I walked out the steps of the capitol. Pitch-Black cold, fairly lost, and I called Steve Cava, my chief of staff and said, I'm getting on a plane tomorrow we're going to land and we're going to do something about this. And that's what started it. To hear that story and then to hear the back and forth between Gavin and Steve Who's gay and Steve was against this idea, not only from a political perspective but from a personal one, and he tells the story. He says, to get in, the hardest thing I've [00:22:30] ever done is come out and now you're telling me I have to find a spouse and oh by the way, it not working out so great for you there brother.
Speaker 3:That story that doesn't get told that people don't know that the smallest thing that's the match strike. Right. Your next one coming up and it's going to air on August 4th is called the Olympians. In a nutshell, what is that gonna Cover? The Bay area. We're a country. In the last summer games, it would have placed in the top 10 in metal count in a word that's real. It's [00:23:00] really remarkable how many Olympians and then Olympic champions come out of the bay area. So we focus on a couple of them. We focus on some names that you know and remember very, very well. You know, Kristi Yamaguchi, uh, Brian Boitano, uh, Johnny Moseley, and then maybe some names that have gone a little bit forgotten like a Matt Biondi who went to cal, a guy by the name of James Gorin who played a water polo on the 56 Melbourne team [00:23:30] and went to Stanford and coached swimming at Stanford.
Speaker 3:And then of course we talked to Terry McKeever who is a coach because all these athletes, all these athletes need coaches. And the Olympic coach is really something else. And Her story is remarkable. Remarkable. Loses her dad at the age of four in a car crash ends up becoming, is a part of a, uh, her mom remarries and becomes the oldest of 10 kids. And a story that unfortunately just hit the cutting room floor yesterday is she gets her [00:24:00] first head coaching job at Fresno state and the head men's swimming coach is trying to tell her when you take your team out on the road, you know, these are the things that you need to do. Now she had 14 swimmers, she's the oldest of 10 she calls her mom and says, this is a piece of cake. This is a family out here. This is easy.
Speaker 3:She's remarkable. And then we interviewed Nathan, Adrian as well who's great and is on his way to Rio training out of cow. So that's what it's about. So in 2015 you did six, you have four slated for this year and [00:24:30] there's an episode coming up after the Olympians on Bay area music. And what are you going to be talking about? That's an excellent question. We are literally in right now the outlining stage of the music episode. So you have to talk about Calla. We are still, well, you know what we're talking about is we're talking about radio that will be discussed in the underground radio and campus radio plays such a huge role in that idea and getting new music out there to people. This is a continuing series. [00:25:00] The goal is for it to continue. Yes. You could almost do this in any major metropolitan area.
Speaker 3:I'm thinking of specifically New York City. I'm thinking of Boston, Cambridge, mass. You've got MIT, Harvard. Have you guys thought about expanding this series to other cities? Sure. Comcast NBC owns 13 stations across the United States and I've been in conversations with another market who's interested. Their newsroom is interested in doing a series like this there. You know? That's the fun part is when you get a call from a [00:25:30] colleague that you respect who says, hey, how did you guys do this? And then to get them excited about it and to tell them, you're going to come to this fork in the road, don't go left. We went left. It was terrible. Stay, stay right. They kind of guide them. As an aside, I watched the artists, which is all about the bay area art movement, but I was inspired and I just went to the Derosa museum because of what you talk about in your film and it's an amazing museum in Napa that is full [00:26:00] of s of the best northern California art in the nation, probably the world.
Speaker 3:It is such a beautiful place. First of all, thank you for that. And um, that means the world. It really does. To hear someone who's lived here for a long time say that they're learning something about their community. That's the goal. And in every episode that my question, my challenge to myself is what do I want the viewer to feel at the end of this? But I want them to feel it [00:26:30] at the beginning. What do I want them to learn in the middle and what do I want them to feel at the end? Your, for instance, passion to preserve the environmental one. My goal for what you would feel at the end is why in the hell did I just spend an hour inside television when I should be outside exploring and doing? I have to say after watching all of them, I felt almost, I'm not even from here originally, but I felt a pride.
Speaker 3:Yeah. You know like getting rid of plastic bags, which is another part of your environmental segment. The people who started that w [00:27:00] you know, they were just regular people and I just feel like there's so much of that here. I am glad I'm living here and I felt like everyone should see this, the power of a person with an an idea, you know, that's the real, the power of one is a real, is a theme that rolls through this series. We are invested in storytelling. Hopefully you enjoy, have schools approached you to use this as a curriculum aid? There's a lot of pressure on a lot of documentarians today to [00:27:30] have an action plan and funding is often tied to that. So that hasn't come up at all? No. Our funding comes from our company so we don't have to revisit something you might be interested in doing?
Speaker 3:Oh, absolutely, because I think that I thought that immediately when I watched them. David Talbott who we interviewed for the uh, second piece, rebels and revolutions, his book, seasons season of the witch, his book was I think used by San Francisco unified [00:28:00] as there, I think they give one book to the district to read for that school year and we thought that it would be a good companion to this point. We haven't been contacted by anybody, so I think that it would be, I think that it's a natural, you, like you say, once it's on demand, perhaps it will become more of a curriculum aid. Maybe you should talk about how you got started. I got my start out of Ohio University, which is a midsize liberal arts school. I'm in the southeast corner of Ohio, kind of its own [00:28:30] little Atlantis in the middle of Appalachia. I got a phone call from a, an alum who said that there was a sports gig opened in as TV station that was about a mile drive from campus.
Speaker 3:So I hopped in my car and I took my resume tape to do the TV station and handed it to the news director who said, well, this looks great. How about an audition? I said, yell whenever you would like to do it. She said, how about now? And so I hopped on the desk and got an audition and got a job before I graduated college, which was really [00:29:00] unique. I just kept saying yes. So that's my, my first piece of advice to people is just keep saying yes. When someone asks you to work a holiday, say yes. When someone asked you to work overtime, someone asks you to learn a new skill. Just keep saying yes and the doors will continue to open for you. You just gotta be passionate about it and not foe passion. I mean the kind of passion that allows you to wake up at six o'clock in the morning, go do a shoot, write your story, [00:29:30] Edit your story. See your story on television and then go bartend down the street in order to make ends meet because you're not making any money. I don't know that it's ever been more important to be good at what we do as journalists than it is right now. If somebody wants to communicate with you, email or otherwise, it's just Joseph Dot Inter. He's at NBC uni.com. All right, Joe. Well, thank you for coming on method to the madness.
Speaker 3:[00:30:00] You've been listening to [inaudible]
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