Transcript: Peter B. Kaufman’s speech

This is the full text of a speech made by documentary film producer Peter B. Kaufman, Intelligent Television, at the Creative Archive Licence Group launch seminar on Wednesday 13th of April, as part of the event’s second workshop.

Enabling creativity: the user experience

I would like to thank the Creative Archive‘s Paul Gerhardt (BBC) and Richard Paterson (British Film Institute) for their kindness and hospitality, and salute all of the work that they and all of you do to bring the world of television to its rightful place as both an intelligent and popular medium, in a world where television very much deserves a place at the table with museums, libraries, archives, and the academy, with radio, literature, and theater, in being able to show us something, teach us something, about the world we inhabit and maybe how to make it better.

I have four introductory points to make, then four production models to discuss, then give you one metaphor and make two recommendations in my 15 minutes. I also have a good, even appropriate, joke to tell at the end, if there’s time.

A note about my background
Let me first say a word about my own tortured path to this podium. I am a documentary film producer at Intelligent Television, producing mainly long-form historical series for our new company, and those mainly for public television, but all in close association with museum, library, archive, and university partners. Our work is funded by foundations, corporations, and government agencies. Prior to this direct road to penury, I worked for three years in digital media, dealing mainly with text and images and mainly with XML at the world’s largest digitization company, which has 9,000 employees worldwide. Prior to that I was in publishing, working with producers like Mark Burnett, Lorne Michaels, to whom I sold my last company, CBS, NBC, PBS, Fox, BBC, Channel Four, and many independents here like Brook Lapping and Darlow Smithson to publish companion books to television documentaries. Prior to that I used to be a political scientist, working in nonprofit think tanks to understand the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, where, it may be relevant to note, a dozen people died in Bucharest, Vilnius, and Moscow at the foot of the state television towers during the so-called bloodless revolutions of 1989 and 1991, crushed by tanks and shot by police who were intent on keeping them from controlling access to the distribution and production of the material we are here to discuss.

Some opening points about business
My first introductory point is that almost all of us here are all in the business of nonfiction, and in that light it is important to know that if you are an independent producer or maybe a commissioning editor in television who has a particular passion about a subject—Russia in World War II, say; the roots of rock and roll; the Allied invasion of Normandy; the history of gold; the history of Mexican cinema; or the history of fertility—you are actually part of the same guild as Richard Overy, the bestselling historian here who writes about Russia in war; Paul Allen, who has built a museum to house artifacts from the history of rock; Bono, who sings, records, and produces music with an eye toward new media and the legacy that has preceded him; or the Imperial War Museum, which has extraordinary collections about D-Day, some of which I will reference in a minute. Our ability to recognize ourselves not as separated by profession—producer versus curator versus archivist versus performer versus professor—but as together workers in the education and information industries may be of great benefit for all of us in many ways. And not to give away my business secrets, the matchmaking that one is able to do here and at subsequent meetings like this will make us much more powerful.

II. Broadening this is my second point, which is that the stakeholders in information and education are more numerous even than this. Because of new economic and financial opportunities presented by the Internet, the commercial sector, as many of you know, and as some of you represent, is devoting increasing attention to cultural heritage resources, educational material, and open content. There is a growing recognition that libraries and museums and archives are the equivalent of unexplored gas and oil fields when it comes to content that might be discovered, converted, repurposed, and marketed.

Furthermore, and quite apart from the content therein, commercial firms in publishing, music, film, television, gaming, software, and hardware are increasingly understanding that much of the most exciting media work in the world today is being sponsored under the aegis, or facilitated by the creative wisdom of, information or library science. Indeed, the recognition is rising that library and information scientists occupy a vital place not only in the record-keeping of our society, which most people understand as historical in nature, but in the development of media, which is forward-looking. Joining Google and Microsoft, companies such Apple, Electronic Arts, IBM, Pixar, Sony, Sun, Universal, and Yahoo have begun to invest in the human resources and know-how of the library and museum world. In the digital age, anybody—any company, any enterprise, any venture fund—with a screen to fill, an engine to search, a pipe to send bytes down, or a chip to sell is a current or potential stakeholder in the production, publication, and digitization, broadly defined, of scholarship and culture and educational materials. In short, of nonfiction.

III. My third point is that the economics of this new Creative Archive, when they get fully unfurled, will enable us to consider sharing production costs and sharing in fundraising, which, when you tabulate these costs, is an exercise that is worthwhile. Count the separate costs of producing an hour of television, organizing a museum exhibit, digitizing an archive, and study the budget lines in detail. You will find that allowing for joint and coordinated efforts—inter- and intra-institutional efforts—on specific themes and subjects makes a lot of sense.

IV. My fourth and final opening point is another economic point, and it’s about the profoundly counterintuitive human act—if you’re a Hobbesian, or a businessman, or a New Yorker—of giving something away. Funded by the Hewlett Foundation in California, Intelligent Television is launching this May a year-long study on the economics of open content. I will be able to say more in a few months, and this may not be the forum right here right now anyway for debating this particular point—Lord Puttnam addressed our “lazy dogma” earlier—but I would like to toss down the gauntlet and say that in publishing, music, television, film, art, software, technology, there are business cases—simple business cases, and sophisticated business cases—that support the economic wisdom of providing certain sectors of society, and sometimes the public as a whole, with materials, intellectual property, knowledge, and know-how for free. It is not for nothing that Universal Music, the world’s largest online music company, hired Sean Fanning, the founder of Napster, to design its new business plan moving forward.

The Creative Archive: the potential for future TV productions
Now, the Creative Archive is one of the most exciting things happening in media today. And it is not surprising to me that the UK has taken the lead in establishing this. We Americans have looked to you for leadership in music, theater, literature, film, and (“Survivor” and “Big Brother” and “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” to one side) television, and models of new media use, and it’s only appropriate that in public service broadcasting, we look to you once again.

The only comparable endeavour, which is not strictly speaking a television endeavour but a library one, is the National Audio Visual Conservation Center being established at the U.S. Library of Congress, where I keep a small office. The result of about 10 years of planning, almost $200 million of private philanthropy and public funds, and the largest peacetime archival transfer that mankind has ever known, the new NAVCC outside of Washington DC will open in 2007 and house the world’s largest archive of audiovisual materials—as of March 2005, 3 million recorded sound items and 1 million moving image items. It too is in the business of marketing our audiovisual legacy to our country and the wider world.

All that said, to me the most exciting thing about the potential for populating this Creative Archive is what can be done with future productions. Not just what has been produced before (canonical and magisterial though that creative output is—please don’t get me started praising the BBC’s legendary programmes: we’ll never get out of here on time)but what is and can be produced today. Building, in short, a publicly accessible archive out of new projects, with the Creative Archive licence.

Intelligent Television, my new company, has embarked on creating a new kind of television studio—a nonfiction documentary studio that is producing dozens and soon hundreds of hours of television and radio programming together with museums, libraries, archives, universities, and other partners who also are in the business of producing nonfiction. The work of Intelligent Television is supported by the Mellon Foundation, the Hewlett Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, major corporate underwriters, corporate and individual investors, and U.S. and international government agencies. I’d like to run through a few projects that we are doing and a couple that we’d like to do here in the U.K.

The importance of independent producers
First, though, it is important to underscore why independent productions are so important. Much of the finest television programming on U.S. or U.K. public television every year comes from independent producers. That’s because independent producers, like independent scholars or musicians, have the vision. They have the passion. And, importantly, they have the creativity and also the day-to-day control over storylines and clearance procedures. Very important. The BBC has formally recognized this strength, or course, and it’s demonstrably present in the annual output of Channel 4. They know how to work with new media. David Fanning, the Executive Producer of WGBH’s magisterial strand FRONTLINE, used to call his television show but the executive summary of his web site. And indeed, the most important and depraved memoranda of Paul Wolfowitz’s regarding the American entry into Iraq are available not at our National Archive, or even the nonprofit National Security Archive, but online at www.frontline.org, uncovered and annotated by…an independent TV producer.

Our productions partner with educational and cultural institutions not only in developing new content but in taking advantage of the knowledge-industry information science applications being developed at these institutions. The legal and business models for these are worth discussing in detail in Q and A, but suffice it to say that all of the materials get created and produced with the goal of clearing rights for all educational uses and most public uses, everywhere, forever. Current and potential stakeholders in our productions have the right and wherewithal to use our material as we develop these documentaries and their production assets.

We call these initiatives Open Production Initiatives. We have a six part history of the American South in the 20th century for PBS. This show, for one example, is not only working with—and contributing to!—the primary documents in the Documenting the American South digital text and image collection at the University of North Carolina and the digitized video archives of civil-rights-era newscasts at the University of Virginia, but it takes Mr. Fanning’s idea a little deeper, because it involves a different relationship between the television programme and the primary document, where the primary document, far from being a revelation, is often primarily false.

Reality television
“Fiction in the archives? What else?” cries Yale University historian Glenda Gilmore in her extraordinary book, Gender and Jim Crow. Indeed, if you know your William Faulkner, your Robert Penn Warren, or more broadly know the history of our country, when you start examining the history and historiography of such central issues in the American South as slavery—our great shame—and memory, you’ll find that identity and collective memory, and the documentary evidence of both, are time and again being subject to reinvention, renegotiation, revision, reinterpretation—even correction. You’ll get into definitions of Southern history as a “darkness”; a “puzzle” (with “missing pieces”); a “grand hall of mirrors”; “a thicket of myth and fantasy”; “illusion”; “rumor,” “legend,” “parable”; a “shadow”; a “twilight zone between living memory and written history”; a dream or daydream; the absurd; “the big myth we live”; an “affair of construction”; and a patchwork of “silences.” You’ll stumble across historiographical concepts such as “countermemories” and “counternarratives.” Even more nefarious, in the history of the South, rise the concepts of the “hidden transcript” of history and truly “private” discourse. It’s very important—the setting of the whole story.

How well can television and libraries or television and museums fit together? Well, digital initiatives being developed in humanities computing at University of Virginia Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities and the Virginia Center for Digital History, which we have partnered with, can support multidimensional broadcasting projects, including one as ambitious as this one about such profound and complex subjects in America—what our best novelists and playwrights write about—as memory and race.

IATH library science applications permitting in-depth “annotation” and comparison allow one to take a look at a manuscript from Herman Melville’s great novel Typee in a digital facsimile, online; study Melville’s own revisions, transcribed from his handwriting; and review extensive annotations from modern commentators—all at the same time. Such commentary and glosses have profound applications for contextualizing the archival documents presented in our series on “The South”. Or, one can delve deep into the world of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and run clips of contemporary films made from the book—clips of different films, same scenes, simultaneously on screen for comparison and contrast.

This searching and syncing technology can help match disparate interviews, songs, and films referring to the same event and link oral and written documents about the same topic—critical for Understanding Southern history. Current print dimensions of new Southern scholarship are also recognizing the potential of digital media to present certain and countervailing evidence at one and the same time. Now, obviously, television and interactive television facilitate this potential, with the material now deliverable in high-definition (HD), via video-on-demand (VOD), customized for personal video recorders (PVRs), and distributed via digital channels and broadband. So technology and media and library-based information science may well be able to empower viewers, online users, and readers across the country to become, to paraphrase the great historian Carl Becker, each his own historian.

Virtual reality television
Or take Hitler’s lost museum (please). Financed and administered by Martin Bormann, envied (at times sabotaged) by Hermann Goring, stocked by Alfred Rosenberg, Hans Posse, Hermann Voss and the Sonderauftraug, or “Special Commission,” of more than 20 of Hitler’s leading art specialists (curators of paintings, prints, armor, and coins, restorers, photographers, librarians, architects, and engineers)—the Furhermuseum was a diabolical vision of Hitler’s envisioned to become the Nazis’ Smithsonian Institution, a Louvre for the 1,000-Year Reich. A colossal art museum created to house the world’s greatest Aryan cultural achievements, this campus of buildings in Linz was planned by the German leader to hold works by all of the great masters of Europe that the Nazis bought and seized during the Nazi occupation of Europe. Special Commission agents stationed in France, Holland, Belgium, Italy, Czechoslovakia, and Poland, under Hitler’s direct command, systematically acquired more than 10,000 art objects, objects that, in turn, were shipped on to Germany and Austria for wartime storage in castles and deep underground mines that had been converted for the purpose. Such was Hitler’s attachment to the project that when he committed suicide in Berlin in April 1945, the scale model of the museum was there, underground in the bunker, next to him. You can read about this project on our website.

Today, at long last, the full story of the Linz Museum can be told. Key documents seized by the Soviet Red Army in its sweep through Austria and Germany in 1945 and 1946—documents about the Museum’s operational details and acquisitions previously thought to have disappeared—have been located in Russia and the former East bloc. Together with other materials that only recently have come to light—photos, over 10,000 of them, for the catalogs and albums of the Museum, now located in Dresden; German secret police interviews with members of the Special Commission, now open and on file in Berlin; interviews with German military officials by the OSS Art Looting Investigation Unit, in the National Archives in Washington; supplementary material from the German Bundesarchive in Koblenz; Hitler’s private library, seized intact by our G.I.’s at the end of the war and now in the Library of Congress; and the odd bits of evidence, miscellany, and memorabilia from the city of Linz itself—the total picture of this Museum is becoming clear. Well, not only is some of the content available in archives—these interviews with the Sonderauftraug, for example, as well as some of the artworks themselves—but we can recreate, or create, online, this extraordinary and maniacal human vision using virtual reality techniques and technologies honed by library and computer scientists at the University of California and elsewhere to build digital replicas of the Coliseum and Roman Forum, as shown here.

Collaborative projects with museums and archives
Our new history project on Suez and the diplomatic crisis there 50 years ago is also critically important. This is a story, imagine, about the foreign policy of our countries in the Middle East (not irrelevant today); 2) the Middle East and the presence of foreigners in it (also); and, perhaps most engaging, the role of broadcasting vis-a-vis state policy in time of war. Indeed, the BBC's Greg Dyke, a force behind our meeting today, after all, said the following in 2003:

Now the BBC's absolute commitment to independence and impartiality is a relatively recent phenomenon. It was the Suez crisis of 1956 which helped establish these principles. The Prime Minister of the day, Sir Anthony Eden, asked the BBC for time on radio and television to explain why the French and British had invaded Egypt and taken control of the Suez Canal. The following day the leader of the opposition, Hugh Gaitskell, asked for airtime to explain why he was against the war and was given it. Today we view this even-handed approach as standard practice. But back then it brought the accusation from Eden that the BBC was betraying the nation at a time of crisis. In fact there are suggestions that Eden even considered talking control of the BBC, as legally the Prime Minister still can, to prevent Gaitskell broadcasting. As far as I know this was the first time government and the BBC seriously clashed over war, but it was certainly not the last.

The project will include loads of materials that JISC and the Egyptian library of Alexandria have digitized and most of the British public has never seen before, including amazing ITN films and Nasser’s personal archive.

So in the same way that there are new open archives being created, in the same way that there are open courseware and open knowledge initiatives proliferating in our community, what if we all developed, as Intelligent Television is developing, Open Production Initiatives—what we, at my company, call “living television”? Where we amass and produce in digital form the core material for a documentary, but keep it in an open repository so that students can play and learn with it, that teachers can teach with it, and that anyone can access it for educational purposes?

It’s like Larry Lessig’s remix culture, except…it’s not remix culture. It’s mix. It’s the original creation.

It’s the equivalent of a band laying down its tracks in a studio and letting 2 million listeners put the songs together.

Open production initiatives
“Suez” is one of our projects that defines a new model for cultural institutions and organizations, both public and private, to collaborate in the collection, production, and distribution of historical materials that will provide richer, multi-faceted content for end-users. This content will be providing new and differing perspectives, historical and current, on events that impacted many parts of the world, available across international borders. While the anchor for “Suez” is a public television documentary, the project is also explicitly conceived to produce as many parallel products as possible, covering as wide a range of media as possible and available through multiples channels and locations. For cultural institutions who are content holders, a prime objective of the project is to develop an easier, more deliberative means of re-purposing content for multiple uses—and as a consequence, strengthening the case of investment in the digitization of historical content.

The educational and media projects that will be developed and produced about the Suez Crisis of 1956-1957 numerous, fascinating, and of enduring value. These media include television series in various countries; DVDs, CDs, and books; websites and online archives with more detailed, curated content; museum exhibitions (using multimedia material, plus artifacts); virtual museum exhibits (including virtual versions of the above); lectures by leading historians/commentators; webcasts of the above; and teaching resources that are nation-, age- and curriculum-specific. We have established a so-called Cultural Institution Steering Group for this project, encouraging institutions many of which you know to participate in the following:

1) content provision: the provision of historical and current content related to the theme of the project, the Suez Crisis, for use by all participating organizations. Appropriate rights arrangement will be established by the organization providing the content, covering all foreseen uses and formats; and

2) content use: the use of the content provided, in as many ways and means as can be conceived by the participating organizations.

As you know, the topic remains controversial, with differing recollections and interpretations of the events of the time. By creating and enabling a myriad of different products, the project will allow each of these distinct perspectives to emerge and to be compared and contrasted without having necessarily to conform to a single overarching viewpoint. Each participating organization remains free to create and distribute its own unique content which is not required to conform to a common editorial or historical perspective. Indeed, as our project charter says, individual organizations are encouraged to present differing perspectives to foster debate and discussion both of the events themselves, and the role of various parties in those events, and of the nature of historical examination and presentation.

Living television
Our prospective history of Harlem, which we are now working on developing with Columbia University, will include, for example, crime scene photos and unredacted police reports from the assassination of the great black leader Malcolm X in the Audubon Ballroom, part of an effort led by a famous American professor Manning Marable to reexamine who killed Malcolm, and why.

That same professor has written at length about “living history.” As Professor Marable will tell you in his forthcoming book later this year:

The basic idea is that narratives constructed about past events can potentially reshape the public’s understanding of the present, and restructure future outcomes within civil society. By utilizing creatively the tools of archival documentation, oral history, and new media technologies, we can build digitally-based “knowledge centers” for entire communities, creating a dynamic archive of public memory and public experience. The “living historian” becomes not merely a collector and interpreter of documents and public records, but a “civic actor,” as new information drawn from the knowledge center informs the development of innovative educational programmes and even legislative reforms, designed to increase civic awareness and civic engagement.

Now…and I sigh…if we only could produce a history project which some of you are stakeholders in. Many of you may remember “Station X,” a series on the Enigma code-breakers of Bletchley Park. What if we could produce a project on the even larger connection between the British public and intelligence? Do you know that in the war the British Admiralty urged Britons to send in their holiday postcards and photographs of summer vacations in France? France was one of the most popular foreign destinations for British holiday makers. The Cabinet War Office decided to utilize this resource, and started a public appeal to civilians to provide the government with images that would offer vital clues for invasion and landing sites—the slope of a beach, say, or the density of the woodland along the coast. You British sent in 7 million postcards and holiday snapshots which were analyzed in minute detail by British and American intelligence and proved vital to the D-Day campaign. These are now all stored at the Imperial War Museum in Duxford. These private photographs proved to be a deadly weapon. “The angle, slope, consistency and rockiness of every beach could be confirmed by pictures of Baby paddling in a frilly sunhat, Mum shrimping, and Dad up to his neck out in the water.”

What a programme!

Forward thinking
In closing, the strategic priorities for producers today should be…something new. They should be inclusive, economically innovative, and developed with the modern digital age in mind. I would recommend that the Creative Archive 1) commission or co-produce economic studies that illustrate the impact on the intellectual property industries of open content, and 2) encourage international co-productions, including holding meetings similar to this one in the United States. Keeping the Creative Archive a U.K.-only affair will require genius and technology that even our friends the Chinese, who try to do the reverse, cannot muster.

I have a new metaphor for you. With all of the talk about piracy, a friend who used to work in the Foreign Office here reminded me of the concept of the “letter of marque,” which kings and queens used to give to pirates who they asked to perform acts otherwise and ordinarily considered illegal in the name of the crown. Captain Kidd, sometimes also called William Kidd or Robert Kidd, received just such a commission together from William the III in 1695 with a letter of reprisal against French merchant ships. Kidd sailed out of Plymouth in May 1696 on board the Adventure Galley with 30 guns and he had 80 crewmen. When he sailed into Boston in May 1699 the British colonial powers jailed him on suspicion of piracy. A vessel was sent from England to return him for trial which took place at the Old Bailey in May 1701. Captain Kidd was condemned and found guilty of piracy because he could not produce the commissions/papers which would prove that several of the vessels which he had captured were lawful prizes. These papers were discovered in the Public Record Office 200 years later. Kidd, however, was executed at Wapping on May 23rd, 1701. I found the reference and the image of the letter in Kidd’s papers. Online!

Thank you very much.

And the joke:
An old fellow is driving along.
His cell phone rings.
He answers it.
It’s his wife’s voice: "Irving?"
"Yeah?"
"You in the car?"
"Yeah."
"You driving?"
"Yeah."
"Irving, you on the freeway?"
"Yeah."
"Irving, be careful! I’m watching the news. There's a madman on the freeway right now, driving the wrong way!"
Pause. Irving looks around.
"Not just one, Rhoda. Hundreds! Hundreds!"

Peter B. Kaufman
Intelligent Television
E-mail: intelligenttv@aol.com

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