How to Make a Documentary from Home

Brad Brooks, Matt Tyrnauer

Nov 22, 2020

Welcome to the Quarantine Creatives newsletter, a companion to my podcast of the same name.

This week, I had two really interesting conversations. The first one with Brad Brooks looked at the power of music to make a political statement. Then later in the week, I discussed the remote production techniques that filmmaker Matt Tyrnauer used to film his incredible new 4-part docuseries for Showtime looking at the the political life and policies of Ronald and Nancy Reagan.

A Strange Thanksgiving

I mentioned this at the beginning of one of the shows this week, but if you missed it, I thought I would share my own Thanksgiving plans with you for this strange 2020. We will be cooking a small dinner for just my household. There will be a turkey plus some “greatest hits” of side dishes, including stuffing and mac and cheese, but we will not be doing a large feast and will not be socializing this year.

Thanksgiving has always been a special holiday for me. For many years, I would drive back to Ohio and spend it with my grandparents. Once they passed away, I began to spend it in New York with my wife’s family. Her aunt would host an all day affair where guests were constantly coming and going. It wouldn’t be uncommon to encounter 30-40 people over the course of the day.

Just a few weeks ago, we were contemplating a very small gathering with one other household of family members for this year. It would’ve been 7 of us in total. All activities would take place outdoors with masks on. Dinner would’ve been at tables by household, outdoors, with probably 15 feet or more of distancing, since masks would have to be removed to dine. We ultimately decided even that was too risky given the higher positivity rates of COVID right now.

Since the beginning of this crisis, I have tried not to cast judgement on anybody’s individual risk assessment or personal choices. Absent any clear messaging or guidance from the government, we are all left to make individual choices. However, the virus is way more prevalent now than it ever was in the spring, while our level of caution seems to be slipping. I hope that however you choose to spend this holiday, you take into account safe practices like limiting indoor gatherings, wearing masks, etc.

Episode 54: Brad Brooks

Brad Brooks is a Bay Area musician, whose new album God Save the City is an incredible rock/soul record that really packs a punch. Brad’s writing is incredibly personal, and this album began during a time of personal crisis:

“This record I started about five years ago when I went to the dentist and they discovered a lump in my neck. And it turned out to be cancer, stage four, and I had to have 86 lymph nodes taken out and 30 days of radiation. And so, I went in the studio before my operation to record as much as I could, it was maybe four songs. I wanted to get started because I didn’t know what I was going to have when I came out.”

The result is an album that not only reflects his personal turmoil, but takes a look at some of the larger political struggles of our time. As you’ll see in both interviews this week, I have been wrestling with my own urge to speak out about political issues in the world right now. On the one hand, I feel an obligation as a person with a platform to do what I can to help right social injustices. But I also recognize that getting too political can be alienating or cause people to tune out. This is how Brad sees politics in his music:

“I can only be as honest as I can about what I see and whether people agree with it or don’t want to listen to it because they voted a certain way, well, I’m sorry about that. I’m a new artist, so I don’t have this huge following where I’m gonna lose this huge amount of sales. I’m just gonna be who I am and if you don’t like it, then you don’t listen and you don’t want to buy it.”

Brad has described his writing style as OCD, and he has trouble moving on to a new song until the one in front of him is perfect. I asked him why he was so obsessive about his writing:

“It usually comes down to the words because I think the words are really the most important part of a song to me. If the words aren’t right, then I’m not going to sing it the way I need to. The most important part of a singer is that you’re believing what you’re hearing, and I think if I have anything that whatever I sing that I believe with my core and can hopefully emote that and for the listener to be able to pick up on that.”

Brad and I also discussed the importance of art and music during this time. Obviously, the most essential workers are health care workers, first responders, grocery store workers, etc, but I think that as the months have dragged on and live music and live theatre have suffered, we are collectively realizing that these art forms can also be essential to our culture. Here’s Brad’s thoughts on that:

“People need music. There’s a quote, and I don’t know exactly how it goes, but it’s a John Lennon quote, basically saying that music isn’t dessert, it’s food. It’s something that sustains, that fills you up, and that you have to have it. I feel that way about the arts and I think people are seeing that. I hope.”

Our conversation also went into our shared love of vinyl records and the different head space that comes from actively listening to an LP versus playing background music on your phone. It was a fun talk! If you’d like to learn more about Brad and discover his music, may I recommend the music video for God Save the City:

Episode 55: Matt Tyrnauer

Matt Tyrnauer has gained a reputation for high quality, thoughtful documentaries including Where’s My Roy Cohn, Studio 54, and Valentino: The Last Emperor. His latest project is the four-part docuseries The Reagans that is currently airing on Showtime. It takes a deep dive into the political lives and policies of Ronald and Nancy Reagan and provides a parable to our current political moment. Here’s the trailer:

I was able to view the whole series before speaking with Matt. It’s a mix of archival footage and present-day interviews with some of Reagan’s closest staff, confidants, and critics. I didn’t realize when viewing the series that a majority of the production had actually taken place this year, at the height of the pandemic. Matt explains where his team was in March when production was halted:

“We had less than 50% of our interviews done. Suddenly, all of the archival houses and institutions shut down. We had to scramble to figure out how to do interviews remotely and make it look like we were not in different cities because the whole aesthetic of the film was me sitting in front of the interviewee, though I’m not on camera. The eyeline and all of those things are of the highest importance when you’re doing things like this. We had to retool entirely half way through, and I am happy to say, thanks to the efforts of the team, we were able to do it.”

Matt and his team scrambled to come up with a mobile interview kit that would allow them to achieve the look of a highly produced interview while limiting the size of the crew on site. One of the goals was allowing Matt to direct remotely, which presented challenges for both the interview subject and the crew:

“We developed all sorts of contraptions that we could basically ship and then could be set up, and then the subject of the interview could sit there and watch the birdie as it were, which would be me. Eventually, we modified it and it got pared down. I became a presence virtually through a monitor and then we had to do a lot of steps to make sure the scene looked like I wanted it to. So basically, you’re directing over text in terms of the scene and the lighting and all of that. It is possible to do, it’s not ideal. Really most of this was done that way.”

From a safety standpoint, shooting interviews outdoors seemed to be the best choice, even though it required adapting the aesthetic goals of the project:

“I hate shooting interviews outside, and we were forced to. The whole creative concept of this was that people would be in grand rooms and the rooms would be lit a certain way to evoke a certain feeling. All of that was very carefully planned out. We had to switch footing and it doesn’t seem to disrupt the look of the project. Eventually, once we could send a camera crew that was local, they could do the lighting and things got a little more normal, but I did the whole thing from my living room.”

After discussing some of the technical challenges of making the film, Matt and I dove into the content. In particular, I was curious why he chose the Reagans as subjects. Matt explains why he thought a critical look back at the 1980s was important in 2020:

“I think that the turning point of how we got to now, in the era we know as the Trump Era, or the politics that we know as Trumpism, although I think he’s more symptomatic than anything, really were the 1980s. The late 70s and then specifically ‘80, when Reagan won the election. I thought this was where to look, and to have four parts to explore Reagan, Reaganism, the 80s, and what happened in this country in the 20th century really that led to an entertainer, a movie star, becoming president at the end of the 20th century I think is the precursor to a reality TV star and somebody with a bizarre flair for Twitter and social media becoming president twenty years into the 21st century.”

As somebody born during the Reagan administration, my memory on that period was fuzzy at best. I was really surprised by the way that Reagan used race as a wedge issue and was able to speak in coded racist terms that helped play on white suburbanites’ fears (sound familiar?). Matt had this to say on Reagan’s racial policies:

“Reagan’s record on race, and the way he used race to demagogue and to create an atmosphere of grievance politics and build on it, it’s always been there since the beginning of the nation. But Reagan was a big practitioner of this, in the way that he built a coalition in the Republican Party that depended upon racial grievance to win elections is the story of our time. And he is not tagged with that reputation, for many reasons, but he is very guilty of it. Saint Reagan is a narrative that’s instilled in a lot of us, it’s one that’s repeated often, and I don’t believe it’s the case.”

Later in the interview, Matt elaborated more on why many romanticize Ronald Reagan and his persona, while not taking a critical examination of his policies and the effect they had on minorities, the LGBT community, and the working class of this country:

“One thing that really got to me for years during the early decades of the twenty-first century, is that most mainstream Republicans engaged in open Ronald Reagan worship. That was their branding and their calling card. I don’t really understand how they were allowed to get away with that. So you mean that someone who practiced dogwhistle politics, and clearly had racist tendencies, and if he didn’t personally, he enacted policies that were absolutely detrimental to civil rights progress in this country. Someone who much destroyed the social safety net and the progressive politics of the New Deal and create the climate that led to the One Percent. Why were they allowed to use the Reagan brand and why did that work so well? And no one’s really been held to account for that.”

As I mentioned above, I have been wrestling with finding my own political voice and platform in this moment. Matt offered some reassuring thoughts about why it is important for all of us to be a little more political in this time:

“I think that everybody who has a platform now is absolutely obligated to engage in politics and make movies, or write books, or create podcasts, or whatever you do, that addresses the urgent moment that we’re facing in this republic.”

What’s Coming…

On Monday, I have an interview with legendary animator and director Glen Keane. Glen started at Disney in 1974, training alongside some of Walt’s original animators, before going on to create iconic characters like Ariel, Beast, Aladdin, Pocahontas, and Rapunzel. He now runs his own animation company and just directed his first animated feature, Over the Moon, for Netflix. He won an Oscar a few years ago for animating the Kobe Bryant short Dear Basketball. We have a really deep, moving conversation about animation, collaboration, life, and legacy. I hope you’ll take a listen!

I will not be uploading a new show on Thursday for Thanksgiving. I hope you all are able to find some joy that day despite the strangeness of this year.

If you have questions, comments, thoughts, ideas, or anything else that you’d like to share, please feel free to email me anytime: hracela@mac.com

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Heath