Story Frame 42 – A Wrangler in Born

...in New York City

I accepted the project, of course, even though I was scared to pieces to represent not only a multi-million-dollar film, but also the personal dream project of the General Manager of the biggest and most important PBS station in the country. A film with a lot of celebrities, including Jesus!

Jesus…

When Dr. Baker asked me to come up to New York City for a meeting to discuss everything he wanted me to do for the film, I decided to take the opportunity to bring Leif along with me and make a mini holiday out of it. Just ten years old, he’d never been to New York City, had never seen how very tall skyscrapers are, and I was curious to see his reactions to it all.

In order to do this as inexpensively as possible, we took the train instead of flying and stayed with my cousin Gail and her boyfriend at their apartment in midtown. Onboard the train, I gave Leif some money for lunch and suggested he check out the food car a few cars away from ours. He was delighted to go explore by himself. He returned fifteen minutes later with a soda, a huge piece of pizza in his hand, and an equally huge grin on his face.

Navigating New York City, he thought it was very cool that I could just put my hand out and a big yellow taxi would pull over and take us wherever we wanted to go. During our few days there, we took taxis to a great burger restaurant, an interactive science and technology museum I thought he’d enjoy, as well as to WNET.

“What a magical city!” he said. Or something to that effect.

“You know I have to pay those yellow cars, right?” I said, at the risk of bursting his happiness bubble, but it didn’t seem to dim his enthusiasm.

He was very into magic himself at the time. Gail took us out to lunch at a small restaurant she liked and laughed and applauded when Leif did his magic tricks at the table. That night, she asked him to do his tricks all over again for her boyfriend at his apartment, which he was only too happy to do.

In between the fun things, however, I did have to spend several hours at WNET for an organizational meeting about the project. Having nowhere else to put him, I brought Leif with me. I was a little worried about showing up for this important meeting with a kid in tow, but the staff there was very nice and set him up in a small room with a tall stack of VHS tapes to entertain himself. I thought he’d enjoy being the master of his own private screening room, but the tapes were all “boring PBS stuff,” he told me later. Oh well, at least he had the taxis and train rides.

Over the next four and a half months, I worked like crazy from my home to create a launch event at Radio City Music Hall with long-distance help from their staff.

My first task was to fill the seats of what was the largest indoor theater in the world for the “World Premiere” of Dr. Baker’s film.

There are 5,960 seats – and that is a lot of seats to fill. In order to accomplish that, I somehow needed to convince thousands of people to pay between $12 and $40 for a ticket to see a shortened version of the full 90 minutes they’d be able to see for free on PBS just ten days later.

Instead of trying to convince individual people, one by one, to buy a ticket, I came up with an idea to bring them in by the busloads. I designed a campaign to entice Catholic churches all over the state of New York to make it “an event,” and literally bus their congregants to the city for the evening. Fortunately, it worked, and between that and local publicity, we were able to fill about 75% of Radio City Music Hall.

My second task was to get 348 PBS stations all over the country to put The Face: Jesus in Art on the air during Easter Week. The key to asking a PBS program director to put your film on the air is simply to make sure that it is a great film and the right film for a particular moment. In this case, I was offering them a multi-million, star-studded film, produced by the #1 PBS station in the US about Jesus for Easter Week. There was no dogma, just an art extravaganza of images many viewers may never have seen, rendered with intriguing, state-of-the-art storytelling. Regardless of one’s personal belief, this was a beautiful and beautifully crafted film with which to dazzle viewers at Easter.

The airdates had to be confirmed station by station, market by market, by me. After mailing out hundreds of copies of screening VHS tapes, I did most of the follow-up work by telephone because you could do that back then. Things are different now, but in those days, it took hundreds of calls and conversations to encourage PBS station program directors to watch the film, then schedule it in a favorable broadcast slot.

My third task was to do the national press and the national religion press – a monumental responsibility knowing I was representing an expensive (in terms of public television productions) film for the biggest PBS station in the country, one with a lot of hopes and expectations around it. I also helped shape the graphics package, reaching out to Miguel Tejerina, a lovely guy from Argentina with whom I’d worked at the documentary workshop. Miguel created his own ‘face’ of Jesus composed of hundreds of tiny images digitized together. It was stunning and Bill Baker loved it. It was used for all of the film’s press materials.

Any one of these tasks would have been a full-time gig over a four-and-a-half month period. But I had been hired to do all of them simultaneously and, for the most part, on my own. It was a clown at the circus keeping plates spinning atop broom handles balancing act. In order to get press reviews for The Face, I had to first get it on the air. But there was only so much lead time, so the press effort for each market had to start the moment I had a confirmed airdate. Multiply this by two hundred or so markets across the country and, well, you get the idea.

Somehow, I pulled it off. I didn’t give myself time to think or get nervous. I just wanted to do a good job. And actually, not just a good job, I wanted to excel.

In the end, The Face: Jesus in Art did spectacularly well with airdates on nearly every PBS station across 98% of the US. Nationally and regionally, the press responded enthusiastically to the film. I had taken a chance and strategically pitted The Face against a Discovery Channel documentary that was releasing at the same time, What Did Jesus Look Like? Strangely, the final image of what Jesus may have looked like was actually included in their press materials. Talk about a spoiler alert! Why bother watching the entire film when they’ve given you the answer right up front? I made sure to include that observation in my pitches to the press, and it worked.

Ultimately, I was able to present Bill with an impressive binder of press clips nearly two inches thick that included cover and feature stories, including one in the Washington Post.

And then came the premiere at Radio City Music Hall.

This time, it was Zoë’s turn to come with me to New York City. My mother came with us for the big night and my wonderful German Aunt Ruth, the former ballerina, came down from Westport, Connecticut to go to the premiere with us.

WNET paid for a suite at the New Yorker Hotel, also known as the “Grand Old Lady” for its iconic architecture. It was built with its own private power plant and included an underground tunnel to Penn Station. Nikola Tesla lived in the hotel until his death in early 1943. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, NBC broadcast live from the Terrace Room, where big band acts like Benny Goodman, Woody Herman, Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey performed. In 1948, The New Yorker installed television sets in 100 of its guest rooms, one of the first hotels in the US to do so, then marketing it as the hotel with “the greatest number of television sets under one roof.” Working in television, it seemed only appropriate we stayed there.

In 1959, Senator John F. Kennedy organized an airlift initiative that provided scholarships and expenses for Kenyan students in the US, including stays at The New Yorker. One of those students was a man named Barack Obama, Sr., and it was on this trip that he married Ann Dunham, the mother of President Barack Obama.

While I was checking us all in, the desk clerk told Zoë that Jennifer Lopez had recently stayed there, and that was of course more interesting to her. She took photographs of our rooms and the lobby of the hotel with the little instamatic camera I’d given her for the trip to show her friends when she got back home.

And then came the big night.

The film’s name was in lights on the iconic building’s wrap-around marquee, and the Music Hall, while not at capacity, was at least gratifyingly filled with people eager to see The Face: Jesus in Art.

With the theater’s Art Deco architectural style, its beautiful stepped arches designed to mimic the sunrise, its more than 5,000 house lights, it was stunning setting for a premiere. The night was a huge success, and I could finally breathe an enormous sigh of relief.

As a working mom, I treasured times like these when I could bring Zoë and Leif along with me. Zoë and I stayed in New York City after the premiere, just the two of us, so she, too, would have her own special adventures there, as Leif had.

She was into basketball and music at the time and so we went to Madame Tussauds to see Michael Jordan and Central Park to see the John Lennon “Imagine” Memorial. Having seen Sleepless in Seattle, she wanted nothing more than to see the top of the Empire State Building in person and see the exact place where Tom Hanks finally met up with Meg Ryan. I mentioned this to Bill, who immediately loaned me a pass he had which allowed us to queue jump the tourists and take the elevator straight to the top. Zoë thought this was brilliant, as it made her feel a little bit of a celebrity herself not having to wait in line. She wanted to know if we had a “Bill Pass” for anything else in the city.

I had to return the pass before leaving the city. Wandering through the halls of WNET on my way in and then out again, I got to pondering why Bill Baker, with a staff of well over 600 at WNET, had asked me to do this project for him? He could have chosen anyone from his teams. Perhaps they were all too busy to take this on. From his role as our Executive Producer for American Byzantine, he knew I loved art and loved it enough to fight for it. I think he also saw that working with films on the topic of religion didn’t scare me – rather, they fascinated me from the perspective of an outsider.

To be honest, though, it’s still a mystery to me. Stressful as they were, however, my experiences working on The Face ended up being like getting a quick master’s degree in broadcast marketing.

Many programs seen on PBS stations are decided by staff at the mothership, PBS corporate. But not everything you see on public television is distributed by PBS. Just as films have animal wranglers and child wranglers, documentary films (and other programs) often have publicists behind the scenes working to get those films (and other shows) on public television.

All sorts of nooks and crannies are left empty when PBS releases its primary schedule. And I had found a niche filling those empty spaces with the films I was hired to get on the air.

It’s sort of like what a literary agent does, only instead of finding one publisher for each book, I need to get the films I work with on several hundred stations PBS – and as simultaneously as possible in order to make them eligible for press coverage. In independent filmmaker terms, it’s like submitting your film to more than 150 film festivals simultaneously, which is a serious amount of work.

I would eventually come to call myself a “PBS station wrangler.”

It was the foundation from which I launched a two-and-a half-decades long career in public television. Bill Baker could not have given me a better gift than to trust me with a film that was so costly, so important, so emotional, and so close to his heart and faith.

If you’d like to see Chris Cundy’s stunning, state of the art opening morphing technique, here’s a link to the film’s opening sequence.

Now, imagine seeing this projected onto a screen over a stage the length of a New York City block!

What to read next … Story Frame 43 – Black Smoke on the Horizon

Kristin Fellows is a published artisan writer, a world traveler, and a well-seasoned documentary film consultant. This tale comes to you from a small farming village in Portugal, where she is still surprised to find herself living.

When not writing, Kristin can often be found listening to someone’s story or behind the lens of one of her cameras.

More about Kristin @ kristinfellowswriter.com