Last year, at the annual MIPCOM television trade show in Cannes, France, Malibu documentary filmmaker Tom Jennings met with National Geographic International president Hamish Mykura. Jennings went to MIPCOM in the hopes of lining up work for his documentary film company 1895 Films.
“Europe’s more receptive than U.S. cable companies to the kinds of documentaries I do,” Jennings said.
Out of that meeting came an assignment to produce “The Fidel Castro Tapes: The Story of the Cuban Dictator’s Turbulent Leadership.” The documentary aired in September on PBS and will screen Sunday evening at Live at the Lounge in Hermosa Beach, followed by questions and answers with Jennings and Elka Worner.
Worner is a West Coast producer for Fox Business Network. Jennings enlisted the Hermosa Beach resident for help on the documentary because she is fluent in Spanish (as well as German, French and Turkish) and had developed close ties with Cubavision, the state run television network. Worner learned Spanish in Argentina, where the Mira Costa alumna spent her junior year as an American Field Service exchange student.
Jennings and Worner met in 1994 when both were covering what the press, in its self deprecating way, called the “OJ Simpson circus.”
At the time, Jennings was a reporter for the Santa Monica Evening Outlook and had written for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and the Associated Press.
He was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in investigative reporting for a series about fraud in the California State Disability Insurance office. The series led to changes that would save California taxpayers tens of millions of dollars.
But the Simpson trial convinced him print was turning away from serious journalism.
“The trial didn’t warrant the coverage it received. But then, I was an idealist from Cleveland,” Jennings said.
So he quit the Evening Outlook and began making documentaries on serious subjects, with some success
His “The Lost JFK Tapes: The Assassination” for the National Geographic Channel led to an assignment from the Smithsonian Channel to make “MLK: The Assassination Tapes,” which won the 2013 Peabody Award.
His “9/11: The Heartland Tapes,” was praised by New York Times critic Neil Grenzlinger as “an intensely gripping assemblage of reactions and responses that have rarely been reported on…”
But despite the Peabody award and the proliferation of cable channels, Jennings found it difficult to line up work that interested him in the U.S. Cable channel programing had begun to resemble the circus he had hoped to escape when he quit newspapers. This week’s schedule for The History Channel, formerly an education channel, includes “Pawn Stars,” “ American [trash] Pickers” and “Ancient Aliens.”
No talking heads
Mykura encouraged Jennings to make the Castro documentary in the signature style of his Martin Luther King and JFK documentaries.
“Mykura thought the time was right because Castro was getting up in years,” Jennings said. “But I didn’t think I could do it the way I’d done my other documentaries.”
Jenning’s stripped-away style, as described by the New York Times’ Grenzlinger, used “no narration, no interviews, only clips from radio and television reports…”
“It’s like watching a newscast for the first time, as it happens,” Jennings explained. “I use local station footage, not Cronkite, but faces and voices the viewer has never seen before. Viewers are watching an event they think they know all about, but evidently, they don’t because they are seeing footage that has never been aired before.”
“I joke that viewers spend the first three minutes of my documentaries waiting for a narrator to come in and lead them by the hand. But the narrator never shows up. So viewers are forced into following the story. It becomes more interactive.”
Jennings traced his primary source storytelling back to the first documentary he made after leaving the Evening Outlook.
“I was hired to do a documentary for a Discovery Channel show called ‘Rivals.’ My ‘rivals’ were Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby. No one wanted to do it because how do you do a documentary about two rivals who never met each other.
“I asked an old producer and he said use archival footage. There’s a museum on the sixth floor of the Dallas School Depository. Its curator is a former TV reporter named Gary Mack. He found out that the local TV affiliates were going to dump their JFK assassination footage, except for the highlights that aired. At the time, no one foresaw the arrival of cable and the value those tapes might have. He offered to preserve the tapes if the stations would sign over the rights to him.
“I asked him how much tape he had and he said 250 hours. A young TV cameraman would fill up a 30 minute tape and then send it back to the station where an editor would pull out a minute 30 seconds for broadcast. The rest would never be seen.
“I started watching it and realized I could tell the whole Oswald-Ruby rivalry story with just the footage. No narration.”
Raw footage
Jennings compared his process to putting together a jigsaw puzzle.
“My video editor David Tillman and I go over the footage. I give him a road map and I may say, ‘I love this shot, be sure to use it.’ A few days later we review what what he’s done. Then I may say, ‘Move this here or there,’ and then we go on to the next act.”
But editing isn’t the hardest part.
“I try to use the networks’ money. I don’t like my documentaries ending up at festivals. But it’s hard for network executives to get their heads around a film with no narration. I spent 10 years trying to sell the JFK documentary, edited from Mack’s archival footage,” Jennings said.
When it was finally completed, The National Geographic Channel was so impressed with it that he was asked to expand it from its planned one hour to two hours.
The Smithsonian Channel liked the JFK documentary so much they asked Jennings to do a similar one on Martin Luther King’s assassination.
Jennings started work on the Martin Luther King documentary at the National Civil Rights Museum in the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis, where King was killed.
“They didn’t have much, but suggested I talk to Ed Frank at the University of Memphis,” he recalled. “Like Mack, in Dallas, a group of professors had gathered tapes from the three local television affiliates and local radio stations. But theirs included tapes from before as well as after the assassination because King’s visit was to be Memphis’ chance to shine. King went there to support a sanitation workers’ strike. Then King was killed.
“People remember the three mile funeral procession and memorial service at Morehouse College in Atlanta. But some of our best and saddest video was from the memorial held the day following the assassination at the tiny R.S. Lewis Funeral Home in a poor part of town. King had been shot in the head. Three morticians spent the night, doing an amazing job, preparing him for the open casket viewing.
“We added in police dictabelts, home video and newspaper clippings so the viewer feels like what he is watching is happening now.”
There are no “talking heads” to analyze the shooting.
Friends in Havana
Jennings’ no narration approach works well for documenting a single moment in time, but it didn’t work for the five-decade span of the Castro documentary.
“I gave it a shot, but there were too many corners to turn, so we ended up using some narration, mostly at the beginning and the end,” he said.
To make the narration and archival footage sound seamless, Jennings enlisted Phil Crowley, currently the announcer for the ABC series “Shark Tank.” Crowley’s deep, monotone delivery has provided unintrusive narrations for hundreds of National Geographic and Discovery Channel documentaries.
For archival footage on Castro, Jennings knew he could go to the ICAIC (Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry).
“But I’d been there before and the researcher assigned to us could not have cared less. Plus Cubavision would have more of what we wanted and Elka knew people there,” Jennings said.
Worner had developed relationships at Cubavision during her half dozen trips to Cuba for Fox, covering events ranging from the anniversary of Castro’s revolution to North Dakota farmers delivering beans.
Jennings, his wife and executive producer Ellen Farmer, Worner and her daughter Micah, a sixth grader at American Martyrs School, went to Cuba last December.
“Micah was out of school for Christmas vacation, so I had to take her,” her mother said.
The bright, blond, self-assured 11-year-old melted away any resistance Cubavision’s researchers might have had.
“They loved having her around,” Worner said. “If we showed up at the station without her, they’d ask, ‘Where’s Micah?’”
During the visit, Micah met the 13-year-old grandson of one of her mother’s friends. The boy told Micah that Cuban school children are issued just two pencils a month. Upon her return Micah chose collecting pencils as her American Martyrs school service project.
“We’d have lunch with our Cubavision contact and tell her we wanted footage on the Cuban Missile Crisis and she’d go back to the station and bring out these big tapes that we’d go through, identifying the parts we wanted by their time codes. The next day they’d have a master tape for us,” Jennings said.
“We brought home 12 hours for what was to be a 45-minute documentary. We know they only showed us what they wanted us to see, so I’m sure there is more great stuff buried in their archives.”
“The footage fees were very low, but we had to pay cash because Cuba doesn’t have a banking relationship with the U.S.,” Jennings said
Jennings also returned from the one week visit to Havana with a thumb drive of never before published photos by Roberto Salas, Castro’s personal photographer, dating back to the start of the revolution.
Worner had learned about Salas from some Finnish journalists she met at a Christmas party in Silverlake just three days before the documentary team left for Havana.
“We went to Salas’ house in Havana and he brought out 50 11×14 prints,” she said.
The grainy, Kodak Tri X film prints offer a striking contrast to Castro’s boisterous public image.
One photo shows Castro cradling his brow in his left hand, with two watches on his wrist. Another shows Castro talking to Che Guevara, who is staring into the distance.
From diplomat to demagogue
“The Fidel Castro Tapes” begin with the 31-year-old, romantic revolutionary citing Patrick Henry’s “Give me liberty or give me death” motto. Castro and his fellow revolutionaries, some with weapons, some with guitars, are launching attacks from the Sierra Maestra Mountains against the U.S. backed military dictatorship of General Fulgencio Batista. When Castro rides triumphantly into Havana in January 1959, he embraced by the local populace, and the populace worldwide.
During a visit that year to New York, a newscaster reports, “It took him 24 minutes to cross the street to his hotel… pushing past security to hand out cigars. It’s the most enthusiastic reception for a visiting notable in quite a while,”
But despite the rock star greeting, the documentary shows how his effort to forge a relationship with the Eisenhower administration was poisoned by suspicions about his socialist leanings. Castro, despite visits to the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials, also harbored suspicions about the U.S.
In a January 1959 appearance on “Face the Nation,” he states, “You want I tell you the truth, Do you see those Sherman tanks, those airplanes, those big bombs, of 500 pounds, they were sold by the government of the U.S. to Batista.”
As the decades pass, the documentary shows Castro becoming less the political diplomat and more the demagogue.
“There were five hour speeches with words I didn’t recognize,” said Worner, who was the documentary’s translator. “So I’d call my Cuban friends for help and they’d say ‘Fidel just makes up words. They have no meaning.’
Compressing Castro’s five decades on the world stage, which the U.S. thrust him onto to his evident delight, underscores the wide swath he cut across the U.S.’s stumbling foreign policy.
Eisenhower’s 1960 sugar embargo drives Castro to nationalize U.S. owned sugar plantations and U.S. owned telephone, banking, oil and electrical companies.
Kennedy’s 1961 Bay of Pigs mistakenly anticipates a popular uprising against Castro and fails in 72 hours.
The naval blockade during the 1962 Missile Crisis, becomes a rallying point for the Cuban people when Castro declares, “No one can come in and inspect our country. We know how to defend our country, and our integrity.”
Castro turns discontent to his advantage in 1980 when he uses the Mariel Boatlift to release prisoners and mental patients, who join the 125,000 Cuban boat people the U.S. takes in before putting a stop to the exodus.
Castro even attempts to spin to his advantage the decades long U.S. embargo by telling an NBC reporter the embargo has forced his people to become self sufficient.
Jennings airs interviews of Castro by most of the era’s leading television personalities, including Barbara Walters, Roger Mudd, Connie Chung, Robert MacNeil and Mike Wallace. No matter how hostile their questions, Castro charms the seasoned reporters with a wave of his cigar, or in the case of Wallace, a baseball bat.
The “60 Minutes” anchor confronted Castro in a crowd of reporters at the United Nations in New York in 1995, where Castro had come to celebrate the UN’s 50th anniversary.
“I first interviewed you in 1960. What happened to democracy and free elections?” Wallace demands.
“We discovered other formulas of democracy, more honest formulas, formulas better than the Americans,’” Castro answers.
Then the fanatical baseball fan produces a wood bat that he rests on his shoulder as if waiting to hit the next question out of the park.
The reporters all laugh, including Wallace.
The Fidel Castro Tapes: The Story of the Cuban Dictator’s Turbulent Leadership will be shown Sunday, November 16 at Live at the Lounge (next door to Comedy and Magic Club), Doors open at 5 p.m. Screening at 6 p.m. Admission is free, but please RSVP by email to tickets@cmc1018.com or by calling (310) 372-1193. Promo code: Castro. 18 and over only. Live at the Lounge is at 1018 Hermosa Ave., Hermosa Beach.
